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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

> made the money spent

Transfer of wealth is not the same as consumption of resources

You should read the Paul Graham essay on wealth, specifically the "Pie Fallacy" paragraph. Hopefully it'll be insightful. :)

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

yep, I understand that "wealth" isn't a zero-sum concept.

Perhaps I should've chosen my words more carefully, because I am emphasizing the 'consumption of "natural" resources', more than to "wealth".

(If we're going to keep using the word "wealth", a movie may produce intangible "wealth" in the form of happiness, among other things)

Paul Graham is wrong. There's a finite amount of wealth. His idea of "creating wealth" is simply expending energy in order to transform some thing into a more valuable configuration; both fixing a car and writing a computer program fall into the category of rearranging atoms into more valuable configuration. But energy itself is also a form of wealth, and there's only so much of it in the universe (and, more relevantly, on Earth) and only so much available to be used per unit of time.

In other words, you can bake another pie, but not without using some of the flour in your pantry and some gas to run the oven. Once the flour runs out, you're done baking pies.

In that case the amount of energy in the universe is infinite.

As far as we can tell, it's not.

Also, there is no such thing as farming, because the terrestrial carbon cycle is zero-sum

I'm not sure what it is you're saying.

So if solar flux is zero-sum, then farmers are appropriating sunlight that would otherwise be productive in other ways. All they're doing is using carbon as energy transport, not "creating" anything per se.

What I'm saying is your idea is insane.

I'm not sure what you both are on about regarding entropy and cycles, but my point was that raw materials can be used in different ways, productively (converting those raw materials/labor to a more useful form) and wastefully (converting those raw materials/labor to a form that has no "durable value", even if some people make "money"/"wealth").

I didn't think "the universe has a finite capacity" to be such a controversial idea.

Look, if you use land for farming then you can't use it for something else, right? And the Earth has a finite surface, right? So once all arable land has been farmed and all other land has been allocated for other uses, then necessarily land allocation will become a zero sum game.

If wealth can just be created ex nihilo then human population should be able to grow without bounds, no? The pie is a lie, after all. We can just bake more pies. I don't see how that's possible when both space and food production capacity are bounded.

This is a complete non-sequitur. What you've said is that energy is a form of wealth, and energy is finite, therefore wealth is finite. It doesn't begin to follow; what about forms of wealth other than energy? You even admit those exist when you say "transform [something] into a more valuable configuration".

The only other forms of wealth are matter, which is even more limited than energy, and information, which is theoretically infinite but practically requires matter and/or energy to be stored and/or processed.

Can you give an example of a form of wealth that's infinite in amount?

Let's wait until we've built an energy-capturing shell around the sun before we start using your ideas in arguments.

Even if we built a Dyson sphere, we would not be creating wealth, we would just be making available to ourselves more of the wealth that's already out there.

If all things are made of matter and energy and matter and energy are limited, wealth is therefore limited.

You are correct, this is a fundamental truth of reality. If the root of all things is limited, everything that extends from it is limited.

In fact thanks to entropy one can say wealth is not only limited, but tends towards zero.

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