>Ego? How do you measure that "abstraction"? How long it takes you to fall off it. The longer the fall, the bigger the ego, and the more it hurts :) Some people starve to death before they hit the ground. >Your initial claim was that China values money over ego. Money represents energy, money is given in exchange for a good or service which required energy to manufacture or perform. Money is not energy, it is a representation of energy, an abstraction that represents energy. Same as gold, gold takes energy and effort to extract from the ground and purify it, it's also useful in and of itself. They call petroleum black gold, it takes energy to extract, and energy to process, and our entire world runs on this resource.