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Comment by wasdfff | Hacker News Reader

Eventually you will run out of wood to make chairs or people who want chairs, you can’t make infinite value as every product ever made requires commodities going in one end and customers with disposable income on another.

The problem is when a company makes x, ceo takes 0.1x in compensation, while everyone else on the payroll combined also takes 0.1x in compensation just because they didn’t show up to work with the same provenance as the ceo. For a company, there is very much a fixed pile of money that every employee competes for.

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(As people use forests, others will notice and start making tree farms.)

I don't see how it's inherently wrong for a CEO to take 10% of revenue and employees split 10%. And why do companies have a fixed pile: shouldn't an effective CEO grow top-line revenue? What if employees are splitting twice the revenue compared to a year ago? (If the company isn't growing, replace the CEO for someone who earns their 10%.)

Money-making inequality, on its face, doesn't seem different than artistic inequality. Should I be angry that Warren Buffet gets 20% annual return on his investments while index funds only do 8%?

(As people use forests, others will notice and start making tree farms.)

Stories of countless species hunted to extinction show that this is not what happens.

Let's look at the physics(?) of the economy: where does wealth actually come from? It's either from transforming things into more useful things or increasing efficiency of processes. There are limits to both of those things.

We live on a planet that's in a rough equilibrium in terms of both matter and energy.

So we have a finite maximal amount of value that we can extract from a constant amount of matter - which means that overall wealth is limited - we're just moving it around and at a finite rate at that - somebody is getting a bigger slice of this pie than the others.

Is wealth truly proportional to matter? How many physical resources are used when making software, music, art, theater, writing? How much wealth did the internet create and how much matter did it use?

There may be a finite limit on potential wealth but it’s effectively limitless for human planning purposes.

(For the trees, we can certainly mismanage our resources; it doesn’t mean it’s a priori impossible to create a growing and sustainable form of wealth.)

How many physical resources are used when making software, music, art, theater, writing?

Actually a pretty decent amount over the life cycle of a person. After all those things require a functioning civilisation that educates properly to begin with.

The internet is mostly a means of making communication more efficient - that was one stupidly inefficient process ripe for an upgrade.

So yeah, no additional wealth really - just much less losses.

What "pretty decent" physical resources does making software consume? (Beyond energy, which is renewable.)

The internet and other tech doesn't create new wealth? Why has the size of the economy grown exponentially since the industrial revolution?

If wealth were fixed, as population in increased we'd be getting vastly poorer worldwide (1.6 billion in 1900 -> 7 billion people today). Have we gotten 5x poorer on average?

(These facts are easily googleable.)

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