If it doesn't make sense then you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor. We're getting off topic though quibbling over where to plant the goalposts.
you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor
This is a ridiculous claim. Do we have the same amount of total wealth as we did a hundred or a thousand years ago, and the only difference is how it's distributed?
It is still a zero-sum endeavor because all this new wealth didn't materialize out of thin air. It was created by people, and specifically by people doing productive work with their hands and their brains - which does not describe the suits on top, no matter how much they try to convince us otherwise. The reason why the latter end up with most of this newly produced wealth in their pockets is simply because they have access to a wide assortment of mechanisms to collect economic rent from the people who actually produce - this is the zero-sum part. The notion that, without the suits, the wealth wouldn't have been produced at all is nonsense.
This is a ridiculous response. Have we extracted more natural resources than we had a hundred or a thousand years ago? Are the biomes that our species utilize for foodstuffs more or less healthy than they were a century ago?
Sounds like you haven’t came to terms with it being zero sum either.
Zero-sum: adj, of, relating to, or being a situation (such as a game or relationship) in which a gain for one side entails a corresponding loss for the other side.
GDP can still increase, but doesn’t disprove capitalism isn’t zero-sum. If you haven’t been paying attention we are currently living in a period of the most wealth inequality in recent history.
Did the conversation slip into geologic timescales or something? Unless you're advancing the argument that modern day corporate structures bear some kind of significant relationship to feudalism the phrase was recent history. I'm fairly certain reasonable people wouldn't classify, for example, the War of the Roses as recent events.
> If it doesn't make sense then you apparently haven't come to terms with the fact that capitalism is a zero sum endeavor
How ignorant do you have to be to still say that in 2024? We literally spent the last century conducting worldwide social experiments to show exactly the opposite. At this point objecting to capitalism itself (I’m not talking more or less regulation within a capitalist system) is like being a flat-earther.
Leftist westerners loved my home country—as an object of their virtuous pity—when it was socialist. You’d see commercials begging for $1/day to feed people. Thanks to capitalism the country has changed completely in the last two decades. Vietnam and China both abandoned communism for capitalism and their prosperity soared.
"At this point objecting to capitalism itself (I’m not talking more or less regulation within a capitalist system) is like being a flat-earther."
You're welcome to that delusion but you're cheerleading a system that among it's many flaws is predicated on continuous growth that's based on a closed system with finite resources to draw from. Three guesses how that ends.
lol. people have been predicting the end to natural resources like oil, gas, minerals, and ores for over 100 years now, but they keep getting cheaper showing that they are more abundant now than ever. go read about the Simon and Ehrlich wager where Ehrlich just got humiliated.
Now who's ignorant? You're confusing the fruits of the combination of technological advancements in extraction and exploitation of the 3rd world with endless abundance. 150 years ago oil wells were routinely dug with nothing more complicated than a pick axe and some dynamite. You think companies invested in the complexity and cost of off shore drilling (as an example) in spite of simpler more cost effective methods being available? Pull your head out.
This is a ridiculous claim. Do we have the same amount of total wealth as we did a hundred or a thousand years ago, and the only difference is how it's distributed?