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.
>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.
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.
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".
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.