[orthecreedence]

Fair points in regards to my response. However, I believe part of your argument is still predicated on endless resources. Agreed, there are vast many (ever-shrinking) resources we can use while the population is growing, however at some point we will reach an equilibrium where there is no more vacant land and the creation of new wealth (barring space exploration, at least for this argument) will cease.

In regards to your watchmaker: a pile of gears might be marginally useful to a few, but a working watch will be valuable to many. Has the watch created wealth? No, because the people who were not buying watches are now not buying something else in order to buy the watch. The creation of the watch did not add the dollar-value of exactly one watch to everyone's wealth, allowing them to spend money on the watch. The wealth was diverted! The creation and selling of the watch certainly did create societal value but it did not create wealth, it merely diverted wealth from some other purchase each watch-buying customer would have made and sent it to the watchmaker.

My point is that the overwhelming majority of transactions are diversions, not creations, of wealth.

To your very original point: "You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for"

I suppose my argument should be changed to: Perhaps amount of wealth is not currently fixed (as defined by the shrinking number of resources one could use to create wealth), but those who create wealth (and not just merely divert it) are generally already very wealthy and are generally the only ones who have the means to create this wealth due to extremely high barriers to entry.

So, I would say theoretically, you're correct: there is a growing pool of wealth. But practically, any normal, everyday person cannot go around creating new wealth...they can only hope it is diverted to them by someone who already has wealth.

[throwawaymsft]

Thanks for taking the time to clarify, I mostly agree with your updated version. Global wealth can grow but is not necessarily (or often) distributed, and not everyone is in a circumstance to grow it on their own.

You may enjoy the elephant curve: https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-wo...

The very rich and moderately poor have seen wealth increase while the top quintile (E.g. many Americans) have seen wealth stagnate. Globally we’re richer on average but not everyone participated. Clearly it’s best if we can lift all boats and not certain subsets.