A lot of the people in Jane Austen novels seem to "have" an income. I don't quite understand this; they don't seem to have jobs, exactly, and my least bad guess is that they own estates that have much more regular cash flows than I would expect manorial estates to have. Let's suppose, though, that one "has" an income of $1 million per year, coming from such an estate. What is the "wealth" value[1] of the estate? Well, if comparably safe investments generally pay a 5% interest rate, a prospective buyer would be indifferent between paying $20 million for the estate versus investing that elsewhere, so the estate is worth $20 million. If interest rates were instead 4%, the estate would be worth $25 million.
One of the things I've been hearing lately is that many billionaires have "made" billions of more dollars since March 23, or (less incorrectly) that their wealth has gone up billions of more dollars since then. In a few cases, company profits (or prospect of future corporate profits) have gone up, but mostly they have not; since Feb 23, in fact, most company's prospects, especially in the near term, have gone down considerably. Interest rates, however, have also gone down. Mr. Darcy's income has gone down, but so has the income associated with any means of saving for the future, and indeed the latter has dropped sufficiently that, if Darcy were willing and able to sell his estate to someone else, he could get a higher price for it than before.
Does this mean he's richer than before? To reiterate, other forms of saving have gone down, too; he can't take the money and put it somewhere where it will allow him to spend more on an ongoing basis. If he has always wanted to blow all of his prospects on a bacchanal, followed by a life of penury after that, then his wealth has gone up, but if he was uninterested in selling before and is uninterested in selling now, as seems quite likely, his best allocation of his wealth over time results in a lower consumption path, not a higher one — it follows the income, not the capitalized wealth.
In what senses can we say that he is richer, or even more daringly turn the change in the capitalized value of his wealth into something like an income? Especially for this latter step, it seems most reasonable if Darcy has been, is now, and expects to continue to be a trader, timing the market, buying low and selling high. If he had a cash endowment at the beginning of the year, he would be better off having bought the estate in March than he would be buying it now. If the continued value of his trading prowess is unaffected by the drop in interest rates, his ability to consume may be higher than it was before. Conversely, it seems most obviously the case that his wealth has gone, not up, if his asset is entirely illiquid, he has no way of knowing what its capitalized value is, and he has simply been informed by his foreman that the income will be lower for the foreseeable future.
A lot of this is entailed[2] in the standard economic principle that the best measure of a person's wealth, in the long-run, is likely to be his or her level of consumption, or in any case that that's a better measure than that person's income or the total value we can assign to those of the person's tangible assets to which we can assign value. If the stream of value that you had expected to consume is no longer one you can afford, you have gotten poorer, not richer, regardless of how that's measured in today's dollars.
[1] We would often call this a "capitalized" value.
[2] Not in the real-estate sense of Jane Austen's world.
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