There is a joke about two economists walking through a forest. They come across a heap of dung. The first says, “I’ll pay you a $100 to eat that.” A little later, they find another heap. This time, the second makes the same offer, and the first accepts.
They walk a little farther, and the first economist reflects, “We both just ate dung for nothing.” The second says, “That’s not true…We increased GDP by $200.”
I used this joke in a column some years ago, asking what wealth actually is and what it means for an economy to grow. The core argument was that the economy grows through the production of genuinely useful goods and services, not through the circular exchange of money, accompanied by a lot of noise. Breaking a window and paying someone to fix it does not make anyone richer. It only creates the illusion of growth.
That distinction matters more than it appears, especially given how many people in India approach investing.
A study by the Securities and Exchange Board of India () found that nine out of ten individual traders in the futures and options (F&O) segment lose money.
It is a structural reality of a zero-sum game. When someone wins, someone else loses by exactly that amount, minus the fees extracted by brokers and exchanges on every single transaction.
All that activity—the charts, the terminals, the WhatsApp tips, the YouTube gurus – produces nothing new. It merely redistributes money from the many to the few, while extracting fees along the way.
This is the dung economy of . There’s lots of activity but no net creation of wealth.
Now consider a very different picture. A journalist, Lane Brown, spent two months interviewing people of extreme wealth— self-made millionaires, founders of large companies, and inheritors—asking how money had changed their thinking. The results were surprising.
One former CEO worth tens of millions still spends time searching for cheap flights, drives a modest car, and wears inexpensive shoes. Others said they had never discussed the psychological dimension of wealth. They had accumulated extraordinary sums and yet had not paused to examine what, precisely, they had.
If even genuinely wealthy people struggle to articulate what their wealth means to them, it tells you something important: that the number itself—the portfolio value, the net worth figure—is not the point. Wealth is not a score; it is what that score represents in terms of real productive capacity.
Ratan Tata’s wealth was not a number on a screen but the businesses he built, the jobs he created, the capabilities he brought into existence. That is what real wealth looks like.
For the retail investor, this distinction is critical. The obsessive tracking of portfolios, the anxiety over short-term market movements, the urge to trade rather than hold—all of these confuse activity with progress. They mistake the scoreboard for the game.
Real wealth, for an ordinary investor, is accumulated not through frantic activity but through sustained, patient participation in the productive capacity of the economy. That means owning equity in well-run businesses through simple, transparent —and leaving it alone long enough for compounding to work.
Of course, this is not very exciting. It generates no adrenaline, no psychological rush and no stories to tell. But it actually creates wealth, rather than merely simulating the experience of pursuing it.
The alternative often resembles the economists’ walk: nothing to show except leaving the forest with the memory of a very unpleasant afternoon. Don’t make the same mistake.
Dhirendra Kumar is founder and chief executive officer of Value Research, an independent investment advisory firm