[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.