[klabb3]

Depends how much the people at the top (money-wise) are playing zero-sum games. If they are, to a large extent, engaging in asset acquisitions and passive growth of eg real estate, or monopolistic protectionism, then there’s plenty of room for others to engage in activities with positive externalities instead.

There’s no question a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to pursue their niche passions and drives, based on a bad birth lottery ticket. There’s a lot of wasted potential in countries that reduce aperture of the early success funnels.

[lwhi]

The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

Their wealth actually comes from those people who have so little.

Stop peddling this absolute fabrication that there's unlimited wealth and the super rich should be left get richer still.

[WendyTheWillow]

You're going to need to do a lot of work to demonstrate that wealth is zero-sum, as it doesn't comport with any well-respected economic model I'm aware of.

But even granting that, a government that creates a "survival floor" would protect against wealth-seeking in a world where it was zero-sum. The floor only needs to be high enough to allow people not to be held to the floor should they desire to participate in the accumulation of wealth and its ensuing benefits.

The whole point is to incentivize value creation.

Edit: You really won't like what this paper [0] has to say:

> Globally, zero-sum thinking is associated with skepticism about the importance of hard work for success, lower income, less educational attainment, less financial security, and lower life satisfaction.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/...

[thiago_fm]

If the people who ran that study were really as smart as they pretend to be, as they are from Harvard, they would understand how even their own thoughts, the language they speak and so on, all happened because they were lucky.

Let me repeat to you, as you seem unable to read and comprehend what I have previously written, it can be reading comprehension issue, so I won't judge you negatively like Harvard, an elitist school would, here it is:

Talent is everywhere. It's abundant. There is an immense amount of hard-working people that even if they don't believe in "zero-sum", get nowhere. They still wake up every day early, work much harder than you ever will in your life, but are still in a shithole and this situation will stay as it is until they perish.

That study was done by one of the most well-known universities, full of privilege in a country that managed to have its reigns on the world for so long, an empire.

Let's think together. It would be strange if either the study or the University would conclude that people work really hard. And are as talented as the people able to attend Harvard, but because they were unlucky and that the world is unfair, they couldn't.

That would be a big counterargument to Harvard's selection process, it wouldn't feel it's a really deserving university, nor that the creator of the study is as good as he believes to be. Why would anybody want to pay for its overpriced curriculum that are literally books you could buy it at Amazon? I'm not saying it is all fake, but you can understand how much reputation is bought, not acquired.

You aren't special, nor the thought of zero-sum thinking is what creates poverty. People are drawn into those ideas, not because of stupidity, but lack of luck.

Stop pretending you have so much control of yourself and your thoughts, read more science and you'll see how all those conclusions you believe to be true are really naive.

[zozbot234]

> They still wake up every day early, work much harder than you ever will in your life, but are still in a shithole

A sad fact about the world is that one can work hard and end up accomplishing very little for their effort. "Working hard" may be a necessary condition for pulling oneself out of poverty (or very near to one, at any rate), but it's not even close to being sufficient.

[WendyTheWillow]

I would even argue that "working hard" is dying, if not already dead, as a means of escaping poverty in developed nations.

What matters substantially more is working "intelligently," which is even harder for those in poverty, given their lack of education.

[WendyTheWillow]

I grant you all of this (for argument's sake). However, none of it actually addresses the merits of the "zero-sum" claim about capitalism or the claim that economic disparity will in the future be regarded in the same way as racism.

Also maybe I'm blind, but I don't think we've interacted before.

[Shocka1]

I'm having a hard time figuring out why you are being downvoted so much when you are following the HN policy that has been around for a very long time now, providing sources, etc. As someone that works with data, I would absolutely love to get my hands on the data associated with the visitors of this site since it first started. It may or may not exist, but referral addresses, location and whatnot. Then run some modeling on it and see what kind of interesting things popped up.

I've been browsing here for a very long time. Anecdotally I've noticed a pickup in the lack of progress, or degradation in threads, especially when it comes to economic systems and the corresponding bias that comes with it. I don't necessarily agree or disagree with you, but you've followed the HN guidelines, being insulted several times along the way.

Old HN there was of course some bias and debate, but it hardly ever resolved to petty insults about reading comprehension.

[klabb3]

Both activities happen in the same economy. Zero-sum or negative-sum activities are plenty. Asset speculation is one such area where the first, second and third order effects are all completely useless to society as a whole, and lack meaningful externalities. Yet people invent the most far-fetched fairy tales to explain why golden handcuffing the brightest math and physics phds to work for hedgies/hfts is a critical piece of human progress.

The truth is markets work great for some things and terrible for other things. When you make a means a goal you always end up with absurdity, in any system.

[WendyTheWillow]

That's not true; speculation is the absorption of risk, an immensely useful financial tool. For example, farmers require speculators to secure guaranteed revenue from crops. Landlords create (yes, they create) housing for people who can't afford to purchase homes by ensuring capital flow into housing construction, among other things.

Investors take on risk in exchange for additional reward. The upside is the people who can't afford the risk have safe ways to protect themselves.

[lwhi]

I'm sorry. I consider you either very sheltered from poverty, delusional or both.

[thiago_fm]

I just gave you a long answer, now you have no excuse to complain, but I agree with lwhi. You can only be either of those, or both.

[WendyTheWillow]

Why would anyone give heed to such a vague, unsupported claim? Would you care if an Internet stranger simply declared you, "sheltered from poverty or delusional" without offering any explanation at all?

[SenAnder]

> The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

In an ideal world, we could first ban those practices, and only resort to punitive wealth/income taxes [1] if/when those measures fail to resolve the problem. The problem is regulatory/legislative capture by the wealthy. But I have doubts wealth caps would solve that - organizations such as WIPO or the BSA don't need multi-billionaire members to lobby effectively. A wealth cap would just multiply the number of shareholders.

[1] In the sense that they are intended to prevent ultra-richness, instead of merely filling government budget shortfalls from the pockets of those who can most afford it.