I need a new word, something like ‘richness’

[N]ative speakers have on several occasions told me that ‘affluence’ is misleading to denote the upper tail of the material-possessions-distribution, since apparently those who have English as a mother tongue would regard many affluent as non-rich.

This is surprising to me. It seems to me that affluence is exactly the word you want.

“Richness” is a perfectly valid English word. The OED defines it as “the fact or condition of being wealthy”, which seems as close to what you’re looking for as anything is likely to be. There may not be any single word that has exactly the connotation you want.

wealthy?

“Richness” is a perfectly cromulent word in English . . .

Wealthiness?

“Wealthiest” seems to be the best way to apply to a limited amount of people.

Or you could give them an acronym. E.g. NINJA (No Income, No Jobs or Assets).

I think “superaffluence” is great. “Avaricious” suggests greed in the person with the money. There’s “moneyed” which is kind of clunky and suffers from the same problem as wealth, as everyone has a little, sometimes, if they’re lucky duckies.

“Rich” or “wealthy” as an adjective, or “the wealthy” (for the group of people who are rich) will work in English.

As a native English speaker, I would never use “richness” for the state of having a lot of money. “Richness” would be OK when talking about the ingredients of a cake recipe (see “rich fruit cake”), but would refer to the taste of it, not necessarily how much it cost to make.

“Affluence” has possibly the wrong associations (and could probably be used to refer to almost everyone in a Western consumer culture, except for the very poor).

I can’t think of an English word that will do what you want; changing the grammar of the sentence so you can use an adjective (“rich”) or a collective noun (“the rich”) is the best I can think of.

On-line Mirriam-Webster gives “affluence, opulence, richness, wealth, wealthiness” as antonyms for “poverty”. I vote for “wealth”; only philosophers and economists (and the fourth definition in MW) would call a personal stock comprising a two-pound coin “wealth”.

“…the state in which people who are rich find themselves.”

After playing around with it I agree with the earlier comment that affluent/affluence is probably the best word. Of course it can be used in a relative or ironic context, but outside of that I think most (US speakers anyway) would associate affluence with a state of having a considerable amount of money. Helping adverbs can send it home… “I suddenly found myself to be quite affluent”, “It was a town of extraordinary affluence…”

A £2 coin might, at a stretch, be said to represent your wealth, but it cannot possibly make you wealthy. I am affluent, in that I live very comfortably, I am not wealthy, in that my affluence would rapidly disappear if I were to lose my job.

So I think the people you want to talk about are wealthy, and that would be a good word to use. The problem, of course, it’s that it is an adjective, while poverty is an abstract noun – but it’s not impossible to draft around that.

And as another reference point, all this reminds me of the classifications in Mayhew’s poverty map of London:

BLACK: Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.
DARK BLUE: Very poor, casual. Chronic want.
LIGHT BLUE: Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family
PURPLE: Mixed. Some comfortable others poor
PINK: Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings.
RED: Middle class. Well-to-do.
YELLOW: Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy.

To the best of my knowledge, “richness” is an English word, as is “wealthiness.” :)

wealthy or obscenely wealthy

If I had to draw a distinction, I’d say an ‘affluent’ person has access to an abundance of useful (non-positional) goods, so any reasonable material desires they may have are more than satisfied, whereas a ‘rich’ person has a lot of money. It’s more a difference in connotation than in what they mean in practice, but of course there are many people who like the connotations of calling themselves ‘affluent’ but dislike the connotations of calling themselves ‘rich’, hence the perception that there are more ‘affluent’ people than ‘rich’ people.

I’ve only seen ‘richness’ when ‘rich’ refers to the intensity or complexity of something, e.g. ‘rich colour’, ‘rich flavour’, ‘rich metaphor’.

My vote goes to “superaffluence”.

I don’t think you can use “opulence”. People are not opulent, their possessions are.

“Plenitude.” I think it gives the sense of full-to-overflowingness that you want, and you get the bonus alliteration as well. Ah, the richness of it!

Stick with ‘richness’, I reckon. As others have said, it is a word, which Chambers defines as ‘the state of being rich’.

‘Wealthness’ is not a word, ‘affluence’ is weaker and ‘opulence’ means something different.

I’ve been advised by an English philosopher to drop the word ‘wealth’ [for the state of being rich] since we all have some wealth.

I’m not sure I follow this inference. Would the same philosopher advise not using the word ‘fat’ for the state of being overweight since we all have some fat?

I agree with those who say that ‘affluence’ has a connotation closer to mere comfort than the exact opposite of poverty.

Honestly, the issue I think is that American English, at least, doesn’t really admit of the state of being you’re trying to describe except in slangy terms like superrich or ultrawealth. The gatekeepers won’t admit of that sort of thing since, unlike you benighted Old Europeans, we don’t have class divisions.

Seriously, though, you’re in the realm of coinage – pick a term and make the usage stick through the strength of your argument, because the concept is desperately needed. It’s a bit like ‘the 1%’ vs. ‘the 99%’ – those didn’t exist before Occupy, but they will resonate at least as long as the current generation persists.

I think part of the problem is that “poverty” bundles together two conditions at once, low income and no (very few) assets. So one can be non-poor without being wealthy (as, for example) someone earning a comfortable upper-middle class income–say, $80,000 per year–but with little in the way of inherited or accumulated wealth). What we’re looking for here is, I think, a single term that bundles together the two conditions of having a high income *and* having a lot of assets. While generally people with a lot of assets will have a lot of income as well, it’s possible to have quite high incomes *without* a lot of assets. “Wealthy” comes as close as anything, I think. But I’m not sure it carries those the two connotations I think you’re looking for as well as “poverty” does at the other end of the spectrum.

It’s a bit archaic, but I’m kind of fond of “richesse” as a word. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite have the meaning you want: it refers to the stuff the possession of which makes you rich, rather than to the quality of being rich. “Wealth” could be either of those two meanings, and “richness” has moved too much towards alternative meanings of color and flavor, but “affluence” is purely the quality of being rich, so that’s the one I’d go with.

Richness seems fine — so does wealth. Engels’ query at #37 seems exactly right. But affluence is good too. But… I admit, I am not very sensitive to the desire to match up with regular english usage.

Vampirism? Theres a reason its such a popular trope in pop culture.

With reservations see also Peter Gran’s Rise of the Modern Rich

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Rich-Modern-History/dp/0815631715

I like wealthy. And not that anyone has violated it, the conversation brought to mind Bernstein’s Second Law from The Careful Writer: http://books.google.com/books?id=qYd35MUlSm4C&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=bernstein's+second+law&source=bl&ots=rW72yf752q&sig=GsF8H41bX4KBvdBSBtEXofu5zLE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mjssUZ7SGcXBqAGGg4GIAw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAQ

“Poor” admits degrees in somewhat the same way as “wealthy” though. House-poor, crushingly poor, although “moderately” poor sounds odd.

“Wealth” sounds increasingly like the word you are looking for. If you say “wealth as opposed to poverty, not wealth as in all of one’s assets” then it’s hard to imagine anyone being confused.

It sounds like I’m in the minority among native English speakers here (I am one), but for what it’s worth:

1. “Affluence” sounds exactly right to me for what you’re talking about, and it’s what I would use.

2. “Richness” is a little odd, as my first instinct, like other people’s is to think of the food-related meaning; but if you’re going to use it repeatedly, in unambiguous contexts, I think it wouldn’t be too much trouble.

3. “Wealth” is troublesome. The problem isn’t how wealthy you have to be to have it, but what it refers to. Wealth is usually the stuff you have, not the state of having lots of it. I suppose it can be used the other way, but it sounds very odd to me (honestly, I just keep thinking, “oh, you mean affluence”).

4. “Superaffluence” sounds wrong to me; if I read it, I would assume you were specifying some particular (very high) level of affluence, for which you needed to coin or dig up a word. Used to refer to the state of being rich more generally, I think it would lead to confusion.

So, overall, my intuitive vote is for “affluence”; but based on other people’s reactions, I’d probably go for “richness”

I’ve been speaking and writing in English for the last 35+ years, have often been praised as a wordsmith of sorts, if being loquacious qualifies one as being a craftsman of language (said with a self-deprecating grin). Here is my opinion, for what it’s worth…

The strength of English is that it flexible and inclusive. Anytime we want to express an idea for which we currently do not have a word, we choose one of a few strategies: co-opt and existing word and used bold typeface to show ours is the only possible way to use or understand the term (shouting is also used for dramatic effect). For technical applications, we may construct a new word from old parts (nee etymology), stitched together with nuance and reason.

Failing either of these strategies, we have often resorted to borrowing words from other languages, thereby introducing a novel cultural construct into the English lexicon from a source where the concept is more familiar and vocabulary has already been defined. This has brought us Gurus, Ninjas, Czar (Latin Caesar morphed into Slavic Czar or Tsar), and many other wonderful verbs and nouns such as vis-a-vís and coup d’état.

So in summary, while I tend to agree with several others that “affluent” has sufficient nuance and cultural heritage, if you are looking to express a concept that another language has provided a more musical or aesthetic term for, I vote that you use that word. This also has the additional benefit of being a foreign word to English tongues, giving you the opportunity to explain the concept to your satisfaction for your readers or audience; a _tabula rasa_, if you will.

Richness is about food. Agreed. (I hear the word and think a chocolate cake or a cream and mushroom sauce.)

Affluence not only includes but refers chiefly to the upper middle class. (The truly rich are far more than “affluent.” The merely affluent have to ask how much the yacht costs.)

Anyway, wealth-words and the way different people here may use them aside, I find the unexamined term here to be “poverty.” This comes up in my teaching all the time. Latin “pauperitas” (or poetic “pauperies”) is not “poverty” as most of us probably use the word, but something more like “living paycheck to paycheck and worried about slipping into poverty, real destitution.” Despite the English derivative “pauper.”

The point I am raising: words (in use and usage) assume meaning in their relation to one another. Without examining “poverty,” you can’t productively choose among (or create a neologism for) the various words associated with wealth of some kind or degree.

I also like plenitude.

As a late additional candidate, how about ‘riches’?

‘She went from rags to riches’ is structurally similar to ‘He fell into poverty’, albeit more colourful. You can create usages which don’t jar too much, such as areas of poverty/gated communities of riches. It is slightly archaic, but it’s pretty clear that there is no perfect answer, and it does clearly contain ‘rich’ without the distracting connotations of ‘richness’.

Why does it have to be one word? “Being rich” seems reasonably descriptive.

It may be that the problem is that the condition is not well defined. It’s possible to have considerable income but modest assets or vice versa, and while either condition is preferable to having neither, both are somewhat insecure.

If it’s simply a matter of being on the higher side of the wealth or income distribution, “affluence” is adequate. If it’s a matter of denoting a condition of being beyond material concern, then even “yacht ownership” doesn’t capture it, because that turns out to be a matter of intense competition.

It actually helps to put numbers to it. There’s a difference between having a million-dollar house or a million in stocks and bonds, or between one and ten million, or between a million and a billion. It’s a matter of whether an unexpected expense is likely to be considered a threat, an unconscionable waste, an irritation, a detail, or unnoticeable, or whether a charitable donation is a sacrifice, heartfelt generosity, an advantageous deduction, or something the size of a small nation’s budget.

Wealthy is best. I’m affluent. Not wealthy. As folks describe above, most native English speakers immediately get the difference.

Excess.

My assumption is that the group you’re trying to describe are those for whom their stock of wealth means they are insulated from really ever having to worry about either income or wealth. Anything short of St. Petersburg in 1917 isn’t really going to change their lifestyle in any significant manner.

At which point I would say the important word is “comfortably”. Comfortably affluent, comfortably wealthy, comfortably rich.

May not be much of a solution for you but most English English speakers would put someone described as “comfortably wealthy” into that group that I think you’re trying to identify.

I am not sure that ‘comfortably’ is doing quite the work Tim @69 wants it to. Its effect can be isolated in the perfectly good English English phrase ‘comfortably off’. That has a meaning much closer to ‘affluent’ in the way a number of commenters have been using it – enough not to have to worry on a day to day basis and to have a reasonable cushion against external shocks, but nowhere near enough not to have to think about spending decisions or for arbitrary luxury. I don’t have a strong native speaker intuition about how ‘comfortably’ works as a modifier, but in all of Tim’s example phrases something such as ‘rather’ would carry the equivalent meaning.

“Poverty” is not even quite the same thing as “being poor”; one can be poor temporarily without suffering any ill effects (even students from relatively affluent backgrounds are “poor” for the time they’re students, but they’re never in poverty). “No, I’m quite poor at the moment” would be a reasonable and unremarkable answer to the question “Want to go to the cinema on Thursday?” in a way that “No, I’m in poverty at the moment” wouldn’t be. Being in poverty isn’t just bad, it’s actively harmful and undermines one’s chances of escaping poverty.

On that basis, I’d vote against “affluent” as an antonym for “poverty”. I’d say that “affluent” would apply quite neatly to people who have a household income over $125,000, and maybe net wealth of $200,000+ (largely in the form of housing). But take away the income and those people stop being affluent very quickly. Affluence is, quite literally, about flows, not stocks – in fact, “affluent” is almost precisely the right word for someone who has temporary wealth. It could, therefore, be a good word when referring to people who have benefited from a sudden change in circumstances – Silicon Valley investors in 1999, say, or London bankers in 2006.

To me, “wealthy” is the right word for people who have a reliably large stock of assets and a stable income. It implies having enough wealth that a temporary loss of one’s income doesn’t matter much, an ability to take minor misfortune’s in one’s stride without difficulty. Of course, wealthy people can still have problems and can still lose out, but their biggest worries are about maintaining their wealth, not their income. To me, “the wealthy” are exactly the same people as “the rich”, but “wealthiness” is unambiguous, if clunky, whereas “richness” isn’t. In fact, you can probably avoid ever having to use “wealthiness” and just use “wealth” instead (“His wealth guaranteed him certain advantages in life..”, “Their wealth sets them apart from those members of society who suffer from the effects of contractionary monetary policy…” and so on).

The fact that affluence refers to “flow” also tends to lead one naturally to thinking of “out” flow as well as “in” flow – that being affluent is partly about spending the money as well as receiving it. I appreciate that the dictionary doesn’t say this precisely, but “superaffluence” feels to me like a near-synonym for “opulence”; if the affluent go to the opera, eat organic grass-fed beef and have paid childcare, the superaffluent have their own reserved seat at an internationally-famous opera, eat organic grass-fed buffalo that they shot themselves on a private safari, and have a full staff on hand to care for themselves as well as their children, and their child’s nanny has a PhD and speaks six languages. The term captures a difference in lifestyle, not the overall size of assets or income. To put it another way, Warren Buffett is wealthier than Larry Ellison, but Larry Ellison is more affluent.

I appreciate these are fine distinctions between categories of people who, whichever way you look at it, are definitely all very much more different from us than they are from each other. But, ultimately, I think it makes more sense to talk about the wealth of the wealthy than the superaffluence of the superaffluent.

“Superaffluence” is clearly the best option here. “Affluence”, to a native-speaker, does not imply the required level of wealth. “Richness” would be technically fine but not intuitive because it is more commonly used to refer to baked goods, and in any case it sounds clumsy and little bit hacked together.

For me it’s a no-brainer if what you want is to be immediately understood without ambiguity – though of course I am just one data point.

It describes a state in which only a small fraction of the amount of wealth an individual has would be enough to provide basic goods (food, water, shelter, clothing) for a billion impoverished individuals.

That sounds like a pretty useless definition because it’s only going to apply to about 8 or 9 people.

re: ‘plenitude’ – I’d prefer just plain ‘plenty’ – which goes nicely with ‘poverty’ – or even ‘abundance’. But these all have a rather agricultural feel to them (though I understand the earliest known roots for ‘poverty’/’poor’/’pauvre’/’pauper’ are also to do with infertile land, this is well-buried by now).

t e whalen’s point at 56 is important here: I liked “plenitude”, but I’m thinking now that maybe what you’re trying to capture is not necessarily “having a lot of stuff” but instead the “power to have a lot of stuff”. One could be rich and yet live simply. To be rich is to have “purchasing power”, not to have “purchases”. This kind of distinction doesn’t really apply so obviously to the very poor are concerned: in general, their hunger is down to lack both of a fishing rod and of regular donations of fish.

‘Abundance’, ‘plenitude’, ‘plenty’ also, connectedly, share the problem with ‘wealth’ and ‘riches’: that they don’t focus on the state of the person having it. MCJ’s ‘prosperity’ avoids this but does have the first drawback mentioned – understating the social context and evoking instead nature’s bounty. ‘Wealthiness’ and ‘affluence’ also avoid this but I agree the former is a tiny bit clunky and both are rather devalued, even euphemistic; in any case certainly not strong enough.

‘Pecuniosity’ or ‘pecuniousness’ may be too specifically concerned with money as the basis of the social aspects of being rich, and are also a bit cumbersome, as is ‘enrichedness’, which shares with ‘enrichment’ perhaps a bit too much of the passive verb as opposed to the steady state. ‘Privilege’ goes too far in being unspecific.

It might be useful to have a little more info about the direction the paper takes after introducing the term, but then perhaps reading ahead too much might look a bit like cheating, since I assume the idea is to try and start off with a term/concept that’s widely used and (thought to be) intuitive, reasonably basic, possibly even ‘natural’, and only then to get into analysis and possibly deconstruction, debunking etc.

Of those I’ve mentioned, ‘prosperity’ might be not-too-far-off, and ‘Poverty and Prosperity’ of course has a ring to it, but any choice will need to be glossed. I’d probably be inclined to go with ‘richness’, since the idea is to discuss the condition of being rich without euphemism, but to make a point of explaining why.

“parasitically engorged on the blood and toil of honest workers”.

FATWA: First Against The Wall Affluent

I like ‘rolling in it’, ‘minted’ and ‘stinking’ best but I don’t think they have abstract noun cognates.

You can use “Wealthy,” “Affluent,” or “Rich” as long as you specify the income/asset level that you mean. In numbers or quintiles/deciles/etc. Otherwise, none of these words will mean the same to any two people.

Nearly a hundred posts and nobody has brought up Chris Rock? Rich versus wealthy?

http://www.hiphopflix.com/video/0000001001-funny_shit_chris_rock_talks_about_the_difference_between_being_rich_being_wealthy.html

The gist: he bemoans the fact that black people seem able to become rich, but not wealthy.

With Rock’s analysis in mind, I’d have to advocate for ‘wealth’. Perhaps the trouble with it being its attendant prepostion or lack thereof. One is in poverty, but one has wealth.

Is it possible for one to be in pelf? That might work. Pelf’s a rare word, but has the good fortune of bad connotations.

My use of the term rich in the book the Rise of the Rich mentioned above was intended to be an alternative to the idea of the rise of the West and to mean people of influence and I specified that that too was a broad term, one not overlapping simply with money very well but with different kinds of power of the sort which would put them on the side of law and order and the growth of the market but not excluding the kinds of facilitators and middle men who were from another points of view perhaps even outcasts or criminal adventurers. More than a ruling class, I thought, its power in large measure a result of its collaboration. This is what confronts the modern mass populations. Peter Gran

Regardless of the term used I’m curious to see the paper itself and the conclusions it reaches about the condition of “richness,” “affluence” or “wealth.”

In my experience those that have such “richness” are as varied in how they flaunt it (or don’t) as those with far less. That said, I’m sure there is commonality in thought, mindset and subtle action which goes beyond the public perceptions and assumptions about wealth.

We’ve all seen a large brand new Mercedes roll by and thought – there goes a “rich” person. Our minds don’t leap to the same conclusion when a 7-year old Buick rolls by, even if they both come out of the same neighborhood and might both be owned by “rich” people.

It depends on what kind of wealth level you are talking about. But I strongly encourage the use of the word ‘superaffluence’ if you are referring to the top 1% or higher. Here is why: many of these words people have attached strong secondary meanings to, and they are all different. Rich, wealthy, affluent all have these problems. You want a word that you can use to talk about a concept that you are also willing to define pretty carefully and you just want to avoid irritating people who don’t like the word you choose. And the problem is that if you pick a word like wealthy, one person may think it’s the right word, others will think it is the exact wrong word. But nobody uses the word ‘superaffluence’, yet everyone can imagine it meaning exactly what you want it to! This makes it the perfect english word to me. Just be certain to define it carefully the first time you use it.

One way to mark that you are introducing a technical term would be to use “richesse”.

It’s not hard for English-speakers to pronounce, or to understand; it sounds a lot like “rich” and “richness”, but it avoids any confusions involving “richness” (e.g. food lingo).

Plane rich. That’s the dividing line between the wannabe’s and the have’s.

Moneyed?

Um… For what it is worth, it is “affluence” you want exactly. Anyone who describes someone a couple paychecks away from not being rich that way is misusing the word “affluence”. It so exactly is the word you want that I am just baffled by the conversation.

“Yachted” – absolutely perfect!

Webster’s suggests that the antonyms of poverty are: affluence, opulence, richness, wealth, wealthiness… so richness probably covers it.

I’m with Tim @ 101 on affluence, but apparently we’re atypical.

Affluence sounds like the right word to me but I think richness or wealthiness would be okay as long as you explain how you intend to use them. The only bit I’m not sure about is how far above the mean do you draw the line on the material-possessions-distribution for someone to be rich. If you are looking at the 1% then affluence wouldn’t do but for the wealthiest 30% it probably would.

“The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.” (Mark Twain)

Ingrid,

Native English speakers don’t really count for me when it comes to a question like this. One can have very good command of the English language even if
he (haha!) is not your native language. So a person with a good command of English is
who you are looking for. You have three potential approaches to solve this problem.

(1) The redefinition approach: If your requirement is that it should be a regular English word, then I believe that ‘affluence’ and ‘superaffluence’ are both fine – provided you co-opt the regular definition and define it in your paper in the sense that you want that word to refer to.

(2) The “coining a new word” approach: If you are looking for a new word to coin, ‘Richesse’ sounds cool. “Richitude” sounds very good to my ears too. It is even a portmanteau (“Rich” + “attitude”) and rhymes with “plenitude”. If you want go further down the Indo-European language tree, you might find Hindi and may want to consider the word ‘Amiri’ which, in Hindi, refers to the state of being rich. It sounds like a nice word for the English language to me.

(3) The constructed language approach : A somewhat different way to resolve the problem is to coin a new phrase. I w
ould suggest something like “(HI|W )” (pronounced perhaps like the name Hugh) which stands for “High Income or Wealthy” and “(HI&W)” (pronounced may be like “heaw”), but at this point, we are getting quite deep into ConLang territory.

I’ll vote for super affluence. It is clearly referring to the filthy rich. All the other words, as illustrated above, have meanings with enough variation that confusion on misunderstanding could easily arise.

Effluence?

I believe in America today, we refer to this demographic as “the one percent.”

Like someone noted above, “richness” seems more suited to a chocolate cake or a painting. “There’s a richness to the palette…” “There’s a richness to the flavor…”

Don’t know who the English philosopher was, but the idea that you need to drop the word “wealth” because we all have some “wealth” even if we own just a two-pound coin seems an odd idea. But philosophers tend to like to quibble over such things.

Americans have long been fascinated with the extremely wealthy. From “The Rich Boy,” a Fitzgerald short story (circa 1926): “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

Hemingway’s response – years later, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro “The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald [Julian, in today’s editions] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.”

In terms of language, one can live in poverty; one can live in affluence and wealth. One IS poor; another IS wealthy… Perhaps there is no easy answer to your question?

“Richness” has unwanted connotations, as in the richness of food, of experience, etc.
“Wealthiness” has a sharper meaning and seems to work in useful sentences (a crucial test):

“A life of wealthiness….”
“Their shared experience of wealthiness….”
“Wealthiness fosters attitudes….”

+1

You could use an acronym, e.g., RAS for ‘Rich As Shit’. It’s halfway to inventing a new word.

I would vote for retaining the Dutch/Flemish or German words with an attempt at an English explanation.

Even if the explanation would fail to fully encapsulate the meaning in the other language it perhaps more importantly succeeds in highlighting the interesting gap within the English language with regards conceptions of wealth and consequently poverty.

It raises a very interesting opportunity.

If it’s the state of being rich you want, superaffluence is your word. Wealth is the rich part, but not the state of being it. Richness is a better word, but as in 78 above it won’t be immediately understood to make your point.

Or you could try plutocratitude.

Using “plenitude” would be very confusing as Juliet Schor has a book out with this title, using it to mean, roughly, “being satisfied with what you have”

I’d favor a combination of “affluent” if you want to refer to the top quintile or decile and super-affluent if you want to refer to the top 1 per cent. But, given the political tangles surrounding words like “rich”, “wealthy” and “affluent”, it’s necessary to say up front how you are using these words.

I like gentry, and sometimes patron and patrician. also ‘landed’, like land ownership and ‘landed gentry’

What’s it with the GRE score bragging? As a non-native speaker who got full marks in the verbal section I much resent the idea that this lends me any special authority on the question, or comes even close to the insight that an interest in linguistics provides. Anyhoo. Ingrid, yeah, it’s always surprising to me to find, again and again, that even for relatively basic terms and closely related languages used for a largely shared area of discourse (economics of Western societies, as it would appear in an opinion piece, even), vocabulary doesn’t fully overlap.

In English, wealth does admit the sense you’re looking for. The most readily accessible dictionary I have lists “the state of being rich; material prosperity”, but at the level of terminological precision you’re operating at as an academic, you may even see a nuance between the two: The first part of this one definition refers to what I (German native speaker) would recognise as Reichtum in your sense (the being-in-a-state, with the connotations of how the subject in this state feels about it) while the second leans toward the state itself. Nonetheless, it would do, and I’m sure you’re finding examples for it. But the main reason wealth might not get across your sense so easily is the overtones of the other senses, such as (citing the s ame dictionary) “plentiful supplies of a particular resource […] of a desirable thing” (such as “a region’s mineral wealth”). Also, I imagine “prosperity” like “affluence” isn’t quite rich enough for your purposes.

To a adequately capture the polar opposite of poverty as a state people are in, in English, I’d probably apply the following strategies: a) use the adjective rich instead of the missing *richness when possible; b) find a good circumlocution (“living in a state of material abundance”, “extreme levels of affluence” … many good suggestions above). You’ll have to define anyhow how you delimit it from being merely affluent or prosperous.

but what does poverty mean ?
In contemporary American English, it has connotations of , among others, lack of education, out of wedlock children, being a minority,…..all of which relates to lack of choices, lack of power, lack of ability to do things..

I think affluent captures much of this:
poverty is going hungry when your boss fires you; affluence is taking a vacation
poverty is choosing between fixing the car and electric bills; affluence is buying a new car

A word that I haven’t seen so far is “loaded”.
I love “unconstrained” – makes a nice polite version of “fuck-you money” but it really depends on who you are trying to describe.

For example, there is a difference between:
“let’s go to Paris for the weekend”
and
“have someone buy that nice restaurant in Paris and send all the staff to our house in the Bahamas for the weekend party”

All of us know someone or have personally spent time in the first category; I have met maybe one person in my life in the second.