[TheTaytay]

Your phrase “extract” betrays a fundamental disagreement with what Paul is saying. (Externalities does so again) It assumes a zero-sum game where the job is to shift money from one person to another. Value, and thus money/wealth can be created. Literally. You are saying, in different words, that no one can do it “honestly”. He is saying one can.

[inigyou]

Yes, and the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create. It may or may not come alongside creating value. Uber creates value in the form of an app marketplace for taxis, but it also pushes taxi wages down below the sustainability line without pushing prices down that far, and pockets the difference for itself. Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone, just because it can.

[enriquto]

> the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create

in common parlance, theft

[csallen]

Accepting money from willing customers, who are paying you for access to some technology you created that they find valuable, is not theft. Quite the opposite, it's almost always two happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.

[ceejayoz]

> Quite the opposite, it's almost always two very happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.

When I buy an iPhone from Apple, I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy.

They are, however, deeply important to the transaction.

[csallen]

> I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy.

Okay, if you're going to make such a claim and trust in it, then can I presume you have answers to these two questions?

1. In a world without Apple, what would these people be doing that would make them happier?

2. What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?

[ceejayoz]

> What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?

I think the rise of China demonstrates they're certainly trying.

[esarbe]

1. Not being forced to work in the cobalt mines, I suspect.

2. Economic coercion. The people are forced by the capitalist system - that was shaped by capitalist interests - to participate in a system they don't have any say in. They cannot even opt out.

[satvikpendem]

They are working for money, often in jobs paying more than others in their local economy, when they otherwise wouldn't be.

[lkjdsklf]

It’s still exploitative.

The point is that the “gains” are overwhelmingly absorbed by the top.

There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share of the profits and raise up that entire part of the world.

But yet, they don’t. Because that would cost them some of their own wealth.

I’m not even saying it should be equally distributed. The disparity is insane right now though.

[ceejayoz]

Arbeit macht frei!

[inigyou]

Before the chokepoint capitalist: you go to a store and pay $20 for an average-quality product. The value chain benefits by getting $20, you benefit by getting the product. Mutual exchange of value.

After the chokepoint capitalist: the store has closed so you go to a website and pay $30 to receive the crappiest version of the product in 6 to 10 business days. The website gets $20, the value chain that does 100% of the work (the website didn't add value, just stuck itself in the middle of your transaction) gets $7, the post office gets $3, you get the product. Mutual exchange of value.

This "mutual beneficial exchange" stuff is like that xkcd alt text on free speech: it's as if the best argument you can make to support a political position position is that it's not literally illegal to express support for it. "It's a mutually beneficial exchange" is saying the best thing about a transaction is that it's not literally a scam. Seems we should aim a bit higher than that if we want a society that works, yeah?

[stouset]

This is the key insight.

Chant “mutually beneficial exchange” all you want but the system and its players have done everything possible to ensure that everyone at the bottom has as little leverage and as few alternatives as humanly possible.

[csallen]

Every time my mom comes to visit me, she insists on going to the store to buy things just like she always did. There are plenty of stores. In most cases, these brick-and-mortar stores have significantly fewer options than online stores, for obvious reasons -- because they're physical and have limited space. The online stores are often competitively priced, often cheaper, even with shipping, because they have the benefit of scale. I can get an incredible amount of high-quality goods off Amazon at blazing speeds, often the same day, without having to leave my desk, drive my car, burn any fuel, or clog any roads. It provides tons of value.

Not only that, but I have an incredible amount of competition. Thousands of alternative products, listings, websites, etc. I went to buy a standing desk last week, and there were literally thousands of choices all over the internet: solid wood standing desks, aluminum standing desks, tall ones, short ones, mid-century modern ones, futuristic ones, etc.

I have no idea what planet y'all are living on to say that people now have no leverage, few alternatives, no stores, slow delivery, and get no value.

[ToValueFunfetti]

I don't think most people would use this definition. It covers gambling/lottery winnings, finding buried treasure or a gold mine, and paying someone to file your taxes and splitting the extra deductions they found. Really, it includes employment at large- the only 'non-theft' employment would be that which provides no net benefit to the employer. There are parlances where these are included intentionally and they share a starting syllable, but to the common people this is not a definition of theft.

[inigyou]

Why do people keep assuming that employers don't do any work? Management is work. Is an employee stealing if they receive any net benefit from their employment?

[mannanj]

Everything is a rich man’s trick.

- Documentary

[BobbyJo]

You're overlooking that net new value was created in both of the scenarios. Don't you have any idea how many family horse businesses went under with the invention of the car? How many artisans wound up broke post-industrialization? We can both agree that we'd all be much much poorer in the world where those things didn't happen. NVidia makes a huge margin on the things they sell. Is that theft?

[verall]

No they aren't overlooking it. They literally call out the additional net value created (i.e. iPhone hw sales), and then call out that to make the enormous amounts that they do make, they also crib value from others (i.e. app store).

You can argue that the app store and vetting process itself is worth up to or over 30% (i.e. they are giving value away, not extracting it), but they make a clear distinction.

[BobbyJo]

Overlooking was the wrong word. I meant more like downplaying or underestimating. Uber completely changed transportation, and the legal saga that follows shows just how big of a change they made on the world, for better or worse. Likewise with Apple and the iphone. They created (or popularized depending on how you want to frame it) the platform that now dominates the human condition. We are literally fumbling, on a global scale, with how to interact with our phones because of how much influence they have over us.

[pydry]

The issue isnt that theyre overlooking new value created it's that you're overlooking the enormous power imbalance some parties are using to exploit others for material gain.

Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers and less well capitalized competitors.

Whether somebody acknowledges this reality or not tells you where their political allegiances lie.

[fastball]

The entire "app-based rideshare market" was created by Uber, and in 2026 they don't capture anywhere close to 100% of it. An Uber driver's share of profits without Uber existing is $0.

[inigyou]

Back before Uber existed I was ordering a taxi on a website and they even had real time tracking. Yeah it wasn't an app, but most things weren't at that time.

[pydry]

Why is that relevant to what I said?

[fastball]

Because what you said is nonsense. They are capturing a fraction of the value they created with the invention of app-based ridesharing. They are not dipping into some magical pool of "exploitation" to juice that. Anyone that is unhappy with being an Uber driver can literally do anything else. Nobody is forcing them, there is no exploitation.

[BobbyJo]

> Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers

That feels like a number you are just making up based on hating Uber.

[steveBK123]

The world is not zero sum, AND in practice most business models are not entirely value creation or rent seeking, but a mix of both.

Ideally a new business creates more value than it simply takes out of an existing marketplace.

I think one can argue a lot of 2010s app-ification, Uber-of-X, or what I called "re-intermediation" was more than 50% rent seeking.

The business model of being willing to lose billions selling $1 of goods for 80cents (before even talking CapEx) until your competitors fold (and then raise prices) is the kind of thing we used to regulate against.

At some point our regulation shifted towards a more short term "if it makes consumer prices lower right now its OK".

[nfw2]

The word "create" is too fuzzy here. If the thing that your company is selling wouldn't exist if you hadn't started the company, did you not "create" it?

[ip26]

Parallel invention would like a word. Elisha Gray registered a patent for a telephone the same day as Alexander.

It's impossible to fully prove a counterfactual, but few things "wouldn't exist at all" if "that one person" hadn't done it.

Netflix is a decent example. Many people saw the coming of video streaming. We would still be able to stream videos today even if Hastings had stayed at Rational.

[nfw2]

Sure, if you extend time horizon to infinity, everything would probably be invented eventually by someone else. Two people filing patents on the same day is an exceptional case though, not the norm.

There are also products that seemingly should exist but don't because no would-be inventor has found capital, eg. a decent bluetooth keyboard+trackpads with the same layout as a laptop. I know because I spent an hour trying to find one yesterday, and they basically just don't exist.

[ip26]

You don't need to project to the heat death of the universe to get Facebook without Zuckerberg.

[nfw2]

But you do need to project to the heat death of the universe to get high speed rail in California, which is the counterfactual worth considering since the entire system of capital is what is under criticism

[wavemode]

> Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone

Apple was already a multibillion dollar company almost 30 years before the iPhone was invented...

(though I'm sure you will have no trouble inventing some other reason that that wealth, too, was created through exploitation)

[ZeroGravitas]

Even before Apple existed Steve Jobs was stealing wages from Steve Wozniak who did the actual work.

We have evidence he was still doing this decades later when he colluded to depress wages with Eric Schmidt at Google when he felt Apple employees were being offered too much in salary.

I'm happy to assume he was stealing money from people at every point in between because he was, quite famously, an asshole.

[_DeadFred_]

I mean Apple only survived because very exploitive Microsoft kept them afloat so that Microsoft had someone to point to as competition when the government came around talking about monopolies. So yeah, Apple only exists because a very exploitive corporation propped them up as protection from consequences of that company's exploitation.

[sophrosyne42]

It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the market operated. Profits only come from exchange. It is more accurate to say profits are given than extracted.

[runarberg]

What you are describing is exploitation. And to be fair, you probably also mean exploitation. I’ve never really understood the distinction, nor do I believe there is any meaningful distinction. Externalizing costs is just one of many ways capitalists exploit workers. But externalities doesn’t sound quite as bad so maybe capitalists can justify their obviously evil behavior by using a fancier term for their exploitation against their workers.

[jmyeet]

"Extract" here has two meanings:

1. Extracting from the market or the economy. It seems like (correct me if I'm wrong) this is what you're reading it as? Here you're generally exploiting what private equity calls "pricing power" or what economists call "enclosures" (or "rent-seeking") so inelastic demand (eg housing) or market protection (eg making municipal broadband illegal); and

2. Extracting from labor. This is the basis of the labor theory of value [1].

The point of comments like AOC's is mostly the second one, which is to say that you only become a billionaire by extracting it from your workers. And yes, this is a fundamental disagreement with many people. Some will say that the startup founder who makes a billion dollars deserves it by taking the risk or being the leader or however you want to frame it.

The counterargument is that that value simply wouldn't exist if it wasn't for those workers and their work. Even Instagram, which famously had only 13 employees when acquired for $1 billion, still needed those workers. It would've been nothing without them.

Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.

The term for this is "surplus labor value".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[taffer]

As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.

> Take Google as another example. The profit per employee has famously been (at times) over $1 million per year.

So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way? I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.

[overfeed]

> So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?

Google ads "extracted" value from traditional advertising in newspapers and magazines, so the "exploitation" (or efficiency gains, if you're charitable) came at the expense of employees at other organizations worldwide.

[jmyeet]

> As the Wikipedia article states, the labour theory of value (LTV) was replaced by the theory of marginal utility in mainstream economics due to its major inconsistencies.

"Mainstream economics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It didn't "replace" LTV. Marginal utility is simply an an ideological rejection of it with the confusion of price vs value that ignores class exploitation. The proponents of this were the gensis of the so-called "Austrian school" [1] and thus the fathers of neoliberalism [2].

> So, are you saying that the employees were exploited in some way?

Yes, objectively, as measured by profit. The counterargument is that many were well-paid compared to their non-tech colleagues. While true, they still created way more value than what they were paid.

> I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.

I'm all ears.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

[taffer]

> > I could give you examples of how value is created without any work at all.

> I'm all ears.

Ageing whisky.

[blocko]

There's a great deal of labor involved in building+preparing casks, storing them, monitoring, maintaining the temp/humidity of a space. Additionally, a good chunk of the price of aged whisky is just due to the fact that the product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input. Price increase != value created

[taffer]

You're missing the point. The difference between three-year-old and fifteen-year-old whisky is mainly due to capital costs, not labour costs. According to the LVT, capital costs are not real.

> product is constantly evaporating and you're getting a lower yield on the same initial input

This so-called 'angel's share' accounts for ~2% per year, not 10%.

[overfeed]

Some laboror has to cask it first.

[taffer]

You're missing the point

[taffer]

> "Mainstream economics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

As is "mainstream medicine" or "mainstream climate science". If you don't trust mainstream science, you must be either extremely smart or just delusional.

[demorro]

Surely you can see that not trusting mainstream economics shouldn't be as controversial as the hard sciences. Mainstream economics consistently fails to make correct or replicatable predictions.

[_DeadFred_]

Soft sciences are not at all the same thing as hard science.

[taffer]

Neither is medicine, climate science, nor the marxist interpretation of the labor theory of value I was replying to.

[andrekandre]

economics isn't a hard science though; and there is a lot of politics underlying a lot of theory there (see the laffer curve/trickle down etc)

[geysersam]

The word "extracted" does not betray a belief that value cannot be created. You can "extract" value that is created just as you can extract value that was there already. The question is not whether or not value was created, the question is who deserves to control the value that was created.

The fact is the billionaire managed to extract value from the market. The ethical question is: who deserves to get the value that was created by the market? The answer could be "the founder" but it could also be the funder, the worker, the customer, the political structure that enables the market economy, the mother of the funder who raised them to be hard working, the nurse that treated the founders minor illness in an early stage and prevented it from causing a physical disability, etc.

[automatic6131]

You're asserting a dichotomy that doesn't exist. One can both create and extract at the same time.

That's why we're here debating, because one can create value, and one can extract value. Both statements are true and easy to argue for. The synthesis is that creating value also grants licence to extract since it's impossible (possibly even theoretically impossible) to define exactly where the line between the two is.

[hjkl0]

Based on this article at least, he is not disagreeing with those claims, he is not even acknowledging they exist.

The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.

And it’s not even necessary to claim that billionaires did something uniquely wrong to become billionaires. It’s just that their share of the exploitation is so, so, so much bigger.

[tyre]

From an HN comment recently:

> There are three ways to make a living:

> 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.

> 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.

> 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

[csallen]

He explicitly and clearly disagreed with the claims, and argued against them:

> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.

To any honest reader, it's clear he's saying the system isn't necessarily dishonest, and that it's possible (if not common) to rapidly earn money in the system by simply creating things of value and selling them to willing customers.

[MattRix]

Except he says nothing about the system, he only talks about the founder.

[csallen]

I don't know what you're reading, but he's talking about the fact that her startup is growing, and has happy end users, who are purchasing her product, and telling their friends.

That is the system.

[ModernMech]

The system is a lot bigger than her product and users. Also no one in that anecdote is a billionaire so it's not even relevent to the claim.

[aloe_falsa]

> The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.

Right, but, taken to its logical conclusion, you cannot earn any amount of money honestly at all, because you'll always create negative externalities to some extent, or supporting people who do/companies who exploit their workers, even as a rank-and-file employee.

[snapplebobapple]

The original claim is stupid because it is applying a personal moral judgment to a legal system at the individual level, usually for the purposes of justifying theft or other punishments for the person being talked about. it is irrelevant whether the person is honest or dishonest by your own personal moral compass, what matters is whether what they did was legal or not by the legal standard we are all operating under. The criticism needs to be leveled at the legal system and its ability and desire to change to accommodate the criticisms is the measure of the total system. By this correct measure what we have is amazing vs what has come before and alternate systems tried in the 20th century (looking at you *isms, which have all been terrible in the long run and usually also in the short and medium run).

The marxist nonsense about exploitation is getting really tired and needs to die already. Yes, we get it, marxists don't value anything that grows total output, don't think it should be compensated and are totally fine living in the stagnation that view creates. If they could all just skip a few steps and go to the end game of their philosophy that would be great because I'm tired of hearing from them.

[ModernMech]

> what matters is whether what they did was legal or not by the legal standard we are all operating under.

Last election cycle, the world's richest man made the nation's largest political donation to the most expensive campaign in US history. In return he was given unprecedented (and arguably illegal) access to take a figurative chainsaw (his imagery) to our institutions.

We're all under the same laws, but we are not all operating under the same rules. To quote the President, "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."

[snapplebobapple]

This doesn't contradict my claim at all. This is and should be a criticism of the system because the system has an ambiguity of outcome built in. If I can hire the same lawyers and skew my outcome to the better for me side then we are all still operating under the same rules. I do agree with you that it would be nice to fix this so that the only difference between hiring the 50 dollar an hour and the 2000 dollar an hour lawyer is spending an additional 1950 dollars. I don't really see a way to fix this without also losing the ambiguity that makes other aspects of the system work though (i.e. the ability to do illegal things like same sex marriage/relationships enough that the overton window moves in the population enough to allow a legislative change to allow those things).

[ModernMech]

> If I can hire the same lawyers and skew my outcome to the better for me side then we are all still operating under the same rules.

First, this the same logic as "the law is equal because the rich and poor are both equally barred from sleeping under bridges." Moreover, no, you cannot hire the same lawyers and that's the point, because what Musk got wasn't through the law, but throwing $300 million dollars at an autocrat. This isn't about $50 vs $2000.

Can you do that and buy your own government agency and a pseudo-cabinet position that circumvents senate confirmation? No? Neither can I. We're not under the same rules they are.

Your point same sex marriage doesn't make sense to me you'll have to explain it better.

[snapplebobapple]

You missed my first point. You get a different outcome because you can hit a different price point securing your outcome and that outcome is still constrained by law. If you make a few hundred billion like Elon did you too can do that. My point was that this mechanism is a criticism of the system, not of Elon. Elon is not doing something wrong here (at least not provably wrong yet in a court of law, see what happens as the horse he bet on loses political clout and the various institutions take a look at what was done with a different political foot on their throat).

The second point was the ambiguity in outcome is what allows societal change and I don't want to lose that because there is still a lot of stupid enshrined in our legal code and institutions. We need enforcement to be lax enough to allow people to break stupid laws and the legal code to be ambiguous enough that, when enough people's opinions have changed by the law breakers breaking the law and nothing bad happening/ the law breakers being closer friends and family of enough people that you can get a big change to the law through, either via the courts deeming the law unconstitutional or the congress critters changing the law. It's a fine line on multiple fronts there between effective changing to suite current needs and too much corruption and I don't see a way to change the system that decreases corruption without also decreasing flexibility for change so I am very cautious on that front.

[Avicebron]

Can he provide evidence of one that has?

[cm2012]

Look around you and see we are not living in mud and huts anymore

[inigyou]

Actually I'd rather start from a mud hut and then upgrade it myself than live in the current rental system, but I don't have that option because landlords own most of the land.

[crawfordcomeaux]

It's racism that fuels this comparison with value. I'm living in a yurt and would gladly trade it for a mud hut. Humans are currently threatening most life (including our own species) on the surface with extinction in multiple ways. That's not value and it is an inevitable conclusion to any form of binary thinking at scale. That includes the thinking that says "this way of life has more value than that way of life." We're living in the curse of the Greeks, whereby we've grown away from connection with our environments in the same ways they did by pedestaling their ways, including a form of logic that's too constrained to model reality.

Here's a paper on uncertainty logic to expand from. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03123

[AndrewKemendo]

Thank you for saying it. The racism is so embedded into western society it’s intractable

[crawfordcomeaux]

And saying so will get you downvoted on here most times. To anyone downvoting, show us the depth of your reasoning for it?

[cm2012]

The fact that while racism exists, Western society is certainly not at the forefront of it? If anything the collective "West" is the most sensitive about race and racial issues.

[saghm]

Housing prices certainly can get high, but they aren't anywhere close to a billion dollars, which is the actual number under discussion

[margalabargala]

The thing being discussed is that wealth can be created, not merely stolen.

The existence of housing is an example of something vlauable being created. The price of housing is not relevant to the example.

[hnav]

But it's extractive, i.e. the housing costs what you can pay if you sacrifice. Those who got housing first need to get paid by latecomers. If the cost of building magically went to 0, the soft costs would inflate.

[margalabargala]

Sure. The extractiveness of housing costs can exist alongside the fact that constructing a building on land creates value.

[oh_my_goodness]

Always the same straw man argument. Nobody here is arguing that wealth can't be created.

[margalabargala]

Did you not read the comment chain above? That's precisely the point that was being discussed, then misunderstood.

[BurningFrog]

Also note that we're 8 billion people living on a much higher average material living standard than when we were 2 billion 100 years ago.

[atwrk]

No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.

Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.

[jrm4]

But he seems wildly oblivious to the fact that there even is an argument to be had here, which there emphatically is.

Reasonable people can disagree as to the nature/extent -- or even the existence of -- exploitation, but this guy absolutely has impermissibly strong blinders on, rendering most of this article a waste.

[altcognito]

Seriously, the paragraph is bad enough to warrant an accusation of bad faith.

Like, does PG really not understand that nobody is arguing that a company can build a billion dollars worth of value? Has he not read Adam Smith? Is his definition or understanding of rent seeking so limited that he can't see the grey areas between "extraction" and "earning" money?

Anybody who earns significant income from investment, including VC money, should recognize that they are at some level extractive, not the hard won dollars that the folks at the ground level are generally putting in.

For guys like PG, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, Thiel their very identity is tied to winning this as a game, and thus, any actions they take must defended at all costs, and the score must be seen as righteous and deserved and free from interference.

[inigyou]

I think most people who make their living by owning stocks sincerely don't believe their way of making money is fundamentally different from ours.

[cyanydeez]

no one is doing it honestly in the disparity

musk isnt a trillionaire because his assets would equate to physical product. his valuation is an inflated target of market manipulation.

when you add up all the physical goods in the world that directly benefit people, that comes nowhere near these valuations.

and externalities are one way wealth is taken from the environment. then theyre parlayed.

[twoodfin]

Why should we only count physical goods as benefits?

That sounds like a pretty impoverished world to live in. No music, no art, no communication with our friends and family beyond speech…

[tsimionescu]

I don't think that was the point, you can add those to the physical goods list as well, as well as many other human services (education, cutting hair, open air games, etc).

The point was that the real money comes from finance games, like the stock market, forex trading, etc - things of much more dubious value when you actually look at them objectively.

[nradov]

Why should we believe that your opinion is more objective than other market participants?

[inigyou]

Which opinion?

[jrm4]

Percievable goods and services, then.

[twoodfin]

What’s imperceptible about what, say, Meta produces? It seems to me everything they sell is perceptible and valuable to the corresponding buyer.

[thelastgallon]

And no nfts and crypto

[stuaxo]

You can have a system that generally isn't one of zero sum games that was that at the same time can become one when it becomes extremely unbalanced (e.g. when billionaires exist).

[tw04]

There is a finite amount of land on earth, and a finite amount of most natural resources. We currently have no indication we will EVER develop faster than light technology.

Any discussion not grounded in those facts is a dishonest discussion. It is a zero sum game until those externalities change because ultimately our species is built upon extraction resources to produce wealth. It IS a zero sum game until you or someone else invents a means of solving the first order problems.

[CommieBobDole]

Isn't most of our economic growth based off inputs of energy (in the form of labor, electricity, etc) that ultimately derive from the sun, though, rather than primarily non-renewable non-recyclable resource extraction? The sun is technically a non-renewable resource, I guess, but only on cosmic timescales.

[tw04]

Where do you get photovoltaic cells? Where do you get copper wire to transport it? Where do you get transformers? Where do you get batteries?

Anyone downvoting me because they think renewable energy overcomes the finite resources on planet earth are absolutely delusional.

We literally have evidence of the scarcity of resources when China started threatening to limit access to rare earths. CaN other countries build capacity at some point? Sure. What happens when you’re in a country that has none naturally and the countries that do have access don’t feel like selling you any?

What’s that? It’s a finite resource that results in a zero sum game?

[cm2012]

On a trillion year time frame, sure.

[tw04]

How much of the land on planet earth is currently unclaimed by a nation state or individual?

You don’t need a trillion year scale for the average man to already be dealing in finite resources and ability to create wealth.

It takes 30 seconds of research to see the cost of an acre of land has far exceeded inflation over the last 50 years. That’s finite resources at work.

[nrdxp]

Money is not a representation of value. It is a representation of desire. I agree that, in principle, an economy does not have to be set up as a zero sum game, and at smaller scales (many of us don't realize that 1 billion is relatively small for global scale economics), it really doesn't have to be. I agree that value can be created. But value doesn't run this economy, desire does. And sometimes desire runs totally counter to what is _actually_ valuable.

Not to mention that, especially in a fiat environment where currency is printed out of thin air, it is literally a zero-sum game by definition. When the printer winds up, the bankers win big at everyone elses expense; setting the tone for the entire market. Anecdotal success stories of hard working, honest billionaires is a nice distraction, but that's all it is.

The substantive reality of the status quo is one of unprecedented levels of extraction, and as we continue down this AI power consildation story, that will be harder and harder to deny as we go forward. If you happen to win big as an outlier, more power to you, but the article even admits to the rarity of this story implicity. 20 years. thousands of companies. 30 billionaires.

Even if every single one of those people are honest to goodness saints, that's only slightly better odds, perhaps, than winning the lottery.

[_DeadFred_]

Don't forget this is from the group of people who get an extraordinary helping hand in the form of YC and all that represents, and of businesses hand picked to be the most likely successes. And even then, it's still just winning the lottery.