[_jal]

> Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game.

It isn't either/or. Nearly all businesses do "create value". Nearly all businesses also compete for a limited supply of customers, because nearly all markets can produce more outputs than are needed.

The ratio between the two matters a lot to the character of the company.

[Hongwei]

I agree with you completely. There are certainly rent-seeking businesses that do not create value (or net value?). And the majority of businesses are competing in (disrupting) existing markets.

Even if they don't increase total consumer spending by offering better products and winning market share, they do increase consumer _wealth_. I'm glad I can buy a 65" 4k TV for as much as my parents paid for a 15" CRT 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.

That's the median outcome. Then you get outliers like the sewing machine that greatly increased the productivity of vast amounts of workers, making those users much richer and society wealthier because clothes got cheaper.

I find it disingenuous to claim, as the OP did (perhaps unintentionally), that innovators are bad faith actors playing a zero sum game. Surely that's the exception, not the norm. Just as there are bad actors in academia and any other profession.

[walleeee]

> I find it disingenuous to claim, as the OP did (perhaps unintentionally), that innovators are bad faith actors playing a zero sum game. Surely that's the exception, not the norm. Just as there are bad actors in academia and any other profession.

I didn't intend to claim bad faith. As you point out there are surely bad actors in any field. More common, I think, is the (most likely subconscious) Lippmann effect: "We are peculiarly inclined to suppress whatever impugns the security of that to which we have given our allegiance."[0]

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1919/11/the-bas...

[dzolob]

>>Even if they don't increase total consumer spending by offering better products and winning market share, they do increase consumer _wealth_. I'm glad I can buy a 65" 4k TV for as much as my parents paid for a 15" CRT 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.

I think this depends of how are you calculating the cost of things. In this day in age, misery wages and huge negative externalities have more to do with cheap clothes and appliances than the sewing machine, imho. The later mostly contributed on how many of them you can make by the second, but you still need farms of people to work them.

[eloff]

It's not fixed though. You may think the market for cars only has so much demand, but if you can make a car cheaper, demand goes up. This is one of the most fundamental laws of microeconomics (the non bullshit part of economics.)

There are definitely some zero sum games, I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out a nuance. The market for eyeballs/attention is zero sum. Netflix famously thinks of its competition as everything outside of Netflix including "real life."

[galaxyLogic]

> Netflix famously thinks of its competition as everything outside of Netflix

Is that true or just marketing? Is Netflix seriously competing against every other type of industry? How could it survive if there was nothing but Netflix? Or are they so megalomaniac that they are trying to take over the pharmaceutical industry too? And agriculture? And military? I can't believe.