The history of wealth concept and ways to achieve it for sustainable development

The evolution of well-known philosophers and economists views on wealth is considered: Voltaire, Adam Smith, JeanJacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Georg von Wallwitz and others. Economics was initially studying ways and means of achieving wealth. The essence of wealth has changed dramatically in people''s minds after the first and the second industrial revolutions. The world today is on the verge of the third industrial revolution (according to Jeremy Rifkin), or, as it is called by many scientists, the new tenor of technology. In the history of any civilization comes the moment of a radical direction change for new prospects or endangered. Not all civilizations were able to transform in time. However, in the past, the effects of civilizations collapse were limited in time, space, and never addressed the species. Currently, the high probability of temperature and planet geochemistry changes as a result of climate change can lead to mass extinction of animals, plants, and people. Humanity has the ability to transit into a stable post-carbon era in the middle of the century and to prevent catastrophic climate change. Currently, sustainable development is the mechanism used to achieve the ultimate goal of any country, enterprise and human development, which is wealth. Under controlled sustainable development we understand the system unity of not only economic, social, environmental, but also resource, technological, institutional activities, as well as a permanent interaction between development and economic safety.