[untilHellbanned]

What's the tangible evidence that the world is a positive-sum game? The tangible evidence to me seems to suggest it's a zero-sum game. E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees.

[harryh]

The world is vastly richer today than it was in the past due to the development of new technologies and improved social systems.

[wwright]

Did billionaires accelerate that, or did they just profit from it disproportionately while slowing it down?

[rayiner]

Billionaires are a byproduct of the market mechanisms that produces that wealth. They don’t “profit from it disproportionately” enough to justify messing with the system. (In the US, billionaires make only about 1.5% of total annual income.)

[SahAssar]

> They don’t “profit from it disproportionately” enough to justify messing with the system. (In the US, billionaires make only about 1.5% of total annual income.)

What percentage does that equal on the lower end? You say it does not justify messing with the system, but what is that based on? What would you feel is an equitable distribution of wealth within a country?

[tux1968]

That's an interesting question, and I don't have an answer. But what you can not deny, is that the system that produced those billionaires, is the same one that produced such a rise in wealth and standard of living worldwide. We better be very careful about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[mistermann]

We should also consider being careful about how we divvy up the fruits of workers labour, lest they decide they're not happy with the current arrangement and the "wealth is not a zero sum game" style excuses, and proceed to throw out both the baby and the bathwater - or maybe something less dramatic, like elect a reality TV star to a second term as President, followed by who knows what after that.

[wwright]

I can’t deny that, but I can certainly point out that billionaires coinciding with the rise in quality does not mean that they were even produced by the same system, or that the presence of the billionaires was in any way necessary.

To reframe your point: maybe we should be careful to identify where the baby is and spend a little less attention on what billionaires want.

[tux1968]

It seems pretty clear that capitalism tends to produce concentrations of wealth. Billionaires are created by capitalism because of this tendency. The question is if you can stop the tendency of capitalism without killing the system altogether. We just have to keep in mind, for all its faults, it has a track record of provably doing more for the well-being and prosperity of masses of average people more than any other system.

[wizzwizz4]

That question isn't very useful. A better question would be: “does there exist a more effective system?” (“Does that system have billionaires?” is an interesting question, too.)

[vosper]

Or did they accelerate it AND profit disproportionately from it? There are more than two possibilities here.

[refurb]

Did Jeff Bezos accelerate or slow progress for online shopping?

[untilHellbanned]

Show me what that math looks like where there is a positive number to the left of the equal sign.

[harryh]

Here it is in graph form:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...

[untilHellbanned]

Comparing eras doesn't seem very useful. 90 years ago my grandma got one orange as a present once a year. Today people buy bags of oranges every day.

Day-by-day the world is zero sum.

[harryh]

In order to get from "one orange as a present once a year" to "bags of oranges every day" each day has to (on average) see a small amount of growth.

[StillBored]

Richer if you put more value on having an addictive piece of electronics in your back pocket rather than a few acres of land to be self sufficient on.

There are definite improvements (a fair amount of medical science), but I'm not sure on balance that the planetary destruction/extinctions/etc outweigh them. So, using made up GDP/capita numbers for justification that the world is "improving" is tenuous.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I do, as do most people. When you hear talk about subsistence farmers who live on less than a dollar a day and don't have running water, that's what the "few acres of land to be self sufficient on" lifestyle looks like in the absence of a strong market economy.

[StillBored]

Have you looked at the homeless in your city? Sure they might be fed with cheap food, but they are living under bridges. So, that is what a "strong market economy" gets you too.

So don't compare the worse case subsistence farmer, with what was middle class in the US a few decades ago, where suburban houses on a couple acres were affordable my the top 70% of the population. We have more trinkets, but the price of basic necessities are becoming more "expensive" every day.

[SpicyLemonZest]

These are the average case subsistence farmers. The worst case ones live even harder lives than an homeless person, very often dying of starvation after a bad harvest.

The middle class in the US a few decades ago lived pretty good lives, but were very much dependent on market economies and innovation for their standard of living.

[jerf]

You can easily have "a few acres of land to be self-sufficent on". Clearly you don't value that, so you don't have it. If you actually value it, go get it.

[leetcrew]

> E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees.

this is orthogonal to the economy being positive/negative/zero sum. if total real wealth increases over time, the world is positive sum, regardless of how that wealth is distributed.

positive sum doesn't imply that everyone gets wealthier over time, only that it's possible for people to get wealthier without it being directly at the expense of others.

[untilHellbanned]

So because a homeless person today has $1, can sleep under a bridge in a jacket they got from Goodwill rather than $0.05 like 50 years ago or sleeping under a tree possibly getting eaten by wolves, this means the world is positive sum?

Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game.

[leetcrew]

> So because a homeless person today has $1, can sleep under a bridge in a jacket they got from Goodwill rather than $0.05 like 50 years ago or sleeping under a tree possibly getting eaten by wolves, this means the world is positive sum?

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this question. the homeless person could even be worse off today than they were fifty years ago, and the economy could simultaneously be positive-sum. suppose you have an economy with two people that each start with $100k. if after 10 years, one person has $500k and the other has nothing, this is a positive-sum game because the total gains exceed the total losses. positive sum does not imply that everyone, or even most people, will become wealthier over time.

> Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game.

if you pick an infinitesimally small window of time where nothing can be produced, then sure, I guess you could say any changes in wealth would have to be zero-sum (assuming you could somehow transfer wealth instantly). I don't really think this is a useful analysis though. over the course of a whole day, the economy could be positive, negative, or zero sum. it depends on how much total wealth was created and destroyed on that day. even in an hour, I could create something of value that didn't exist before, or an explosion could go off in a port causing billions of dollars worth of damage.

[xoa]

>What's the tangible evidence that the world is a positive-sum game?

LEDs. To take one very specific, simple example, though feel free to substitute in everything from computers to engines. Fundamentally, we have both increased our average energy budget per person and we can accomplish far more of what we want to do for far less energy. Taking the basic general goal of "I wish to have visible photons available to me at a sufficient level for my eyes to work well at arbitrary times and places", compare the total costs and % of resources converted to the goal vs wasted as heat/losses/externalities of say torches to oil/gas lamps to electric arc to early incandescent to later incandescent to halogen to fluorescent to LEDs. We can now do with single watts for tens of thousands of hours and pennies of silicon/impurities what would once have taken dozens to hundreds of watts to kilowatts and lasting just hundreds of hours, tens of hours, or even mere minutes.

Increasing abundance and efficiency for human goals is the definition of increasing overall wealth. Even given imbalance in ultimate distribution, the pie has absolutely grown larger. Massively humongously wildly larger. Positive spirals thankfully abound, such as better nutrition and knowledge of infectious disease at young ages yielding better outcomes and life expectancies for the rest of their lives. None of this is to downplay the importance of keeping inequality from going too far, but to even suggest it's a zero-sum game, that world economics are actually the same right now as they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, is frankly ludicrous.

Edit:

>E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees.

That makes absolutely no sense as a standard or line of reasoning. The total sum has nothing inherently to do with how its divided, are you sure you're clear on definitions here? When something is zero-sum that means that for anyone to gain a larger percentage, someone else must necessarily lose a smaller percentage. But when the total sum itself is increasing then somebody could be gaining more and everyone else could also be gaining more, just not as much more as if it were equally split.

Also, what is "too large of a %" and how do you know? And if the product costs $X, but previously other competing products cost 7*$X, and as a result the company is many times the size it would be otherwise, and in turn the % the employees get is still an absolute amount far larger then it would have been anywhere else, now what? Rather then thinking about fuzzy "proper %" it seems better to investigate power imbalances, human limit edge cases, information asymmetry, cost externalization, etc., that affect the equilibrium of the system. Of which there are many!

[StavrosK]

The fact that we can bake another pie doesn't make pie-eating positive-sum. The more you eat, the less is available for others, and you can't keep baking pies for ever.

[xoa]

>The fact that we can bake another pie doesn't make pie-eating positive-sum.

The fact that we can "bake another pie" for 1/100 the resources is the definition of positive-sum. There is now more to go around. Even if previously the pie was perfectly divided but now of 100 pies 20% goes to whomever came up with the better way and another 50% goes to whomever financed the better way, the remaining 30% to the masses is still 30x the pie. I'm really not sure what you're confused by here, unless you're getting really lost in analogies.

Again: a basic definition of increasing wealth is increasing core abundance and efficiency. There can be more useful energy/resources to accomplish goals with, and there can be more efficient ways to achieve goals. Either or both combined mean there is genuinely more to go around. How best to distribute energy/resources remains very important, but does not change that having more and/or having it go farther means more wealth overall.

[jordan_curve]

I think you're focusing too much on the metaphor. The example the person above gave using LEDs is very good.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to stick to the United States. As the previous commenter explained, the introduction of LEDs (along with cheap methods of manufacturing them) lead to much cheaper and more effective lighting. Undoubtedly there were companies and individuals that stood to profit quite a bit from these inventions. I don't know whether it helped create any billionaires, but certainly there are similar examples which have. On the other hand, although it created more wealth for those individuals, it created wealth for the entire country. Now every American has more money to spend because they don't have to spend as much money replacing their light bulbs.

In this case, the fact that some people gained much more wealth from this series of inventions is not a bad thing because everyone also benefited. In fact, the reason that inventions like this even come into existence is precisely because there is high reward for the individuals or companies doing so.

There are absolutely certain markets where things are much messier, but overall it's certainly not zero-sum. The issue is that many Americans do not have high enough wages or benefits to meet their family's needs. We should be working towards addressing poverty, not towards some moral tirade against billionaires.

Edit: I honestly can't express these concepts nearly as eloquently as xoa has in their comments, so I'd suggest referring to those.

[wizzwizz4]

LEDs are the discovery that we didn't actually need as much firewood to bake those pies.

You can't bake pies forever, no. But the stars are vast and many. That's yet another semantic stop sign: a phrase you say when you don't want to think about things any more, just like "it's not zero-sum".

[xhkkffbf]

More capitalism creates more products.

If the world were just a bunch of fields with a static farm economy and no innovation in cultivation, then your point would be correct. But innovation increases the size of the pie. Yeah, the jealous may focus on the percentage kept by these innovators, but they really should be looking at the share of the pie.

Socialism is all about making sure that everyone is equally miserable.

[fartcannon]

If that's your analogy, then capitalism is about making a few people happy at the expense of everyone else.

We collectively are not done, yet. We can still make it better for everyone. Let's at least _try_ new ideas.

[rayiner]

As someone from a third world country where people live in poverty, my view is that new ideas are bad and dangerous. There is a blueprint for poor countries to become wealthy ones: free markets, rule of law, liberal democracy. It’s how the countries that are currently rich became rich. It worked in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. Its working in myriad other countries. While academics fuck around with “new ideas” progress is deferred and people suffer in poverty.

[munk-a]

A lot of really bad ideas have been tried and failed to work in this world and we should learn from them - that said I don't know if America's version of a liberal democracy has proven itself to be that great in the long run. There was a period of extreme common wealth growth but after WW2 (about the eighties) that's mostly dried up. While we need to recognize failures abroad (i.e. the Soviet system implemented by Lenin and its offshoots) I think our own system needs some active maintenance to be rebalanced. Lately the extremes have grown too wide and we need to do like Teddy and break up some of the big concentrations of wealth so that the engine can keep running clean for another half-century or so.

It's misleading to think of any democratic style government as being in stasis - the world is constantly in flux.

[tsimionescu]

You're disregarding the negative examples. Free markets have been tried and failed in Argentina, Russia, and to various degrees everywhere in most former 'communist' countries - they quickly turned into cleptocracy and corruption. China showed that you can get very wealthy without rule of law and without liberal democracy, and with massive government intervention in the market (but not with a planned economy).

In my own country, free markets only started bringing prosperity after getting at least some semblance of liberal democracy and rule of law - before that, in the absence of a strong state, it was a very literal robber barons' paradise.

[tptacek]

I think this is why Rayiner said the blueprint was "free markets, rule of law, liberal democracy", not "free markets" by themselves.

[ekiru]

Rayiner's own positive examples did not fulfill that blueprint, either, with the exception, I think, of Japan.