At the heart of this theory lies a provocation: wealth and genius do not inhabit the same ontological order. Wealth is an artifact of institutional systems---fungible, measurable, and socially constructed. Genius, by contrast, is ontologically anticipatory: it exists in a liminal space between present structures and unrealized futures. Wealth belongs to the economy of the present; genius belongs to the economy of possibility. To conflate the two, as most paradigms do, is to confuse stability with disruption, circulation with creation, and profit with truth.
Ontologically, then, genius is not a "factor of production" or an "input" into wealth. It is a temporal rupture, a force that introduces futures that current architectures cannot price. When Tesla dreamt of wireless global energy, he was not "irrational" or "impractical." He was operating in a future ontology inaccessible to the present's economic calculus. Wealth, in its ontological frame, is always now; genius is always not-yet. Their asymmetry is irreducible.
Epistemologically, the illusion persists because knowledge systems conspire with economic systems to erase this asymmetry. Universities, markets, and cultural narratives impose frameworks that naturalize the linkage between genius and wealth, even when evidence contradicts it. They reframe anomalies as personal failures, using explanatory myths to restore epistemic comfort. This is why textbooks still praise Edison as a model inventor while relegating Tesla to the margins, why art histories romanticize Van Gogh's suffering instead of indicting the blindness of his contemporaries, why motivational literature recycles the myth of the "wealth mindset" instead of admitting systemic indifference.
In other words, the illusion is both ontological and epistemological:
Ontological Blindness: treating wealth and genius as if they were commensurable, when they exist in separate orders of reality.
Epistemological Blindness: sustaining narratives that erase systemic failure by reframing it as individual tragedy or destiny.
The core of our theory is thus a radical inversion: the correlation between genius and wealth is not natural but illusory, not intrinsic but constructed, not empirical but ideological. Geniuses are poor not because they failed to adapt, but because the very structures that generate wealth are designed to exclude what genius introduces: futures that threaten the present.
This dual foundation allows us to move forward: from critique of paradigms to construction of a framework that explains why systemic blindness is not an anomaly but a necessity of existing architectures.
B. Key Concepts
1. Curiosity Capital
Curiosity is the primal engine of genius. It generates ideas, experiments, and theories that extend beyond present utility. Yet unlike financial capital, curiosity capital has no direct mechanism of accumulation or conversion into wealth. It is invested in exploration, not exploitation. Tesla's lifelong obsession with wireless energy exemplifies how curiosity capital creates immense intellectual value while remaining economically "unbankable." This exposes the ontological gap: curiosity capital produces futures, but markets monetize only the present.
2. Exploitation Leverage
Wealth does not flow from curiosity itself but from the capacity to exploit it. Edison possessed exploitation leverage: access to financiers, patents, publicity, and institutional networks. Genius without exploitation leverage yields intellectual breakthroughs but rarely monetary gain. This asymmetry explains why opportunists often become wealthy while visionaries remain poor---the system rewards those who control channels of appropriation, not those who generate disruptive insight.
3. Time Lag Paradox
Genius often arrives too early. Its insights become legible or profitable only after cultural, technological, or institutional structures catch up. Van Gogh's art, Ramanujan's theorems, and Turing's algorithms were recognized only posthumously or belatedly. The paradox is cruel: the greater the anticipatory scope of genius, the less likely contemporaneous recognition becomes. Markets cannot price what they cannot yet comprehend, so genius is penalized precisely for being ahead of its time.
4. Intellectual Waste
When systems fail to recognize or incorporate genius, their output decays into intellectual waste---discoveries, artworks, or theories ignored, suppressed, or destroyed. This waste is not trivial but civilizational. Lost manuscripts, unbuilt prototypes, and silenced voices represent opportunities annihilated by systemic blindness. The fact that entire branches of mathematics had to be "rediscovered" decades after Ramanujan illustrates how intellectual waste is not anomaly but structural inevitability.
5. Asymmetric Reward
Even when genius is eventually recognized, the reward rarely accrues to the originator. Instead, it is captured by institutions, opportunists, or posterity. The asymmetry is stark: Tesla dies in debt, Edison thrives in capital; Van Gogh starves, galleries profit; Turing is persecuted, the state survives because of him. The system does not fail to reward genius---it redirects the rewards elsewhere. Asymmetric reward is not a bug but a feature of architectures designed to stabilize present systems while exploiting future potential.
Synthesis
Together, these concepts construct the machinery of the Genius Wealth Illusion. Curiosity capital produces futures, but without exploitation leverage, it yields no wealth. The time lag paradox ensures that disruptive value is punished in the present, often generating intellectual waste. And when recognition does arrive, asymmetric reward ensures that wealth flows not to the genius but to structures that mediated---or delayed---recognition.
The illusion persists because paradigms collapse these distinctions into a single story: that genius and wealth are naturally aligned. Our framework reveals instead that they are structurally opposed.
C. Propositional Framework (P1--P5)
