[fhd2]

It would be if demand was limited. Let's assume the people already have enough food, and the population is not growing - that was my premise. Through innovation, one farmer can grow more than all the others.

Since there already was enough food, the market is saturated, so it would effectively reduce the price of all food. This would change the ratio so that the farmer who grows more gets more money in total, and every other farmer gets a bit less.

As long as there is any sort of growth involved - more people, more appetite, whatever, it would be value creation. But without growth, it's not.

At least not in the economical sense. Saving resources and effort that goes into producing things is great for society, on paper. But with the economic system that got us this far, we have no real mechanism for distributing the gains. So we get over supplying producers fighting over limited demand.

The world is several orders of magnitude more complex than that example, of course. But that's the basic idea.

That said, I'm not exactly an economist, and considering it's a bleak opinion to hold, I'd like to learn something based on which I could change it.

[malloryerik]

Late comment but if technology brought down the price of food then people could spend less on food, more on other good and services. Or the same on higher quality food. You don't need an increasing population for that. The improvement in agriculture could mean some farmers would have to find other work. So you can have economic growth with a stagnant or falling population. And you can rather easily have economic growth on a per-capita basis with no overall GDP growth, like is common in Japan today.

About the farmer needing to change jobs, in the interview that is the subject of this thread Ilya Sutskever speaks with wonder about humans' ability to generalize their intelligence across different domains with very little training. Cheaper food prices could mean people eat out or order-in more and then some ex-farmers might enter restaurant or food preparation businesses. People would still be getting wealthier, even without the tailwind of a growing population.