Economics doesn't measure wealth, it measures money, which is a proxy for political power and social status. In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality.

Wealth in an anthropological sense means the extent to which a culture is increasing its collective intelligence - its ability to understand itself and the world, and to invent and create more interesting and open possibilities for humans to live in and explore.

It's assumed technology is the only way to do that, but that might not be true. Technology is a harsh medicine with spectacular benefits but terrible costs and side effects.

There might be other processes which get to the same ends in more subtle ways.

This culture certainly likes to believe it's the only possible game in town. But cultures tend to do that - until something changes and they discover it's not true.

> Economics doesn't measure wealth

Economics measures a lot of things, including wealth. It often uses monetary units as as the units of measure for both stocks like wealth and the numerator of flows like income, but even then its not actually measuring money, its using various techniques to convert things into money-equivalents to have common units.

> which is a proxy for political power and social status.

“Wealth”, “political power”, and “social status” are different ways of saying “the ability to get other people to do things you want them to do”. They are different lenses on the same thing.

> In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality.

No, in economics “externality” is the label given to a cost or benefit accruing as a result of a transaction to a party other than a direct participant in the rransaction. These are important because they explain one reason why even if rational choice theory did hold (which it doesn’t), markets could produce non-ideal results, because market decisions are based on (and optimize in aggregate, if the assumptions of rational choice theory hold), only those costs and benefits that are internal to the transactions (that is, accruing to direct, voluntary participants in the transaction.)