Hacker News Reader

Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it really? Given that wealth is the amount of resources you can command, and resources are finite, doesn't increasing your wealth decrease everyone else's? It's why printing money reduces the value of everyone else's money and gives it to you.

View on HN

The amount of resources aren’t constant, and how much that is created depends on the wealth distribution. Too little wealth concentration and there won’t be built any factories. Too much wealth concentration and too few can buy what the factories produce.

the amount of resources is very much constant, I don't see the earth adding mass anytime soon...

You might think about certain natural resources, such as minerals and oil as the only resources. But some resources grows, like trees for building material, and those depend on how many trees that we decide to plant. And other resources, like available teachers or programmers depend on how many we have taught and how much money we are willing to pay them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource

There's still only so many trees that we can have on earth at once, as past a certain point, some trees would have to die in order to either have physical space or nutrients to grow new ones. Which would be zero sum...

It's the same with everything. When you're not at your limits of your ecosystem - things aren't zero sum. However once you do hit your limits, things become zero sum.

You even see this with businesses. Industries go through a growth phase. In the startup-growth-adoption phase, all businesses in that industry can grow. However, once market matures and reaches saturation, businesses struggle to grow or change. The only significant way mature businesses can grow larger at that point, is via mergers and acquisitions of other businesses.

Increased productivity means that we can produce more with less (usually labour, but also energy or natural resources). That a market reaches saturation usually means that the demand is met. It is rare that it means that not more can be produced.

>That a market reaches saturation usually means that the demand is met

A limit is a limit, doesn't matter if that's a demand limit, or a production limit, or a resource limit. The effect is still the same. Being under limits, makes things zero sum. If those limits were suddenly removed or increased temporarily, things would return to not being zero sum - at least until you hit another limit.

>It is rare that it means that not more can be produced.

In practicality sure. I'm sure we could make more basketballs than we do now. But physically speaking, you'd eventually hit limits. The earth is not infinite... we certainly could not make more basketballs than there is mass of earth itself. At which point we would either have to make new basketballs out of old basketballs, (zero sum), or raise our limits (mine matter out of other celestial bodies).

> Being under limits, makes things zero sum. If those limits were suddenly removed or increased temporarily, things would return to not being zero sum

Why do you think so?

> In practicality sure.

And that is what matters? Why is it interesting that there is a theoretical limit on how many basketballs that is possible to produce with the resources available on Earth when no conceivable situation exists when that limit ever becomes relevant?

I'm not sure under which rock you are living, but we are hitting limits fast. Soil degradation, climate change, acidification of the seas or phosphate ressources. Probably you'll die before these limits hit us hard(est). But eventually they will hit us and these are very conceivable situations...

We are able to use existing resources more and more efficiently. This is why the global wealth per person is higher than it was in say Roman times, despite the global population being orders of magnitudes higher

That only means that you can add wealth up to the new delta. Anything more is zero-sum.

But we don't value things solely based on their natural resource composition; we pay far more for "labor" and other intangibles.

As a result of the above, the value of a natural resource changes over time. For example, natural resources used in electronics and batteries are relatively more expensive now than they were 100 years ago.

So, you can be technically correct by saying that wealth is zero-sum, but that's pretty much the same thing as saying "the world's 'wealth' traded for natural resources sums up to 100% of all natural resources"

and we are also much better at exploiting resources. Which ultimately run out. Oh, wait...

You can make stuff. Writing a book say, doesn't cause the other books to cease to exist.

yet the book doesn't feed or cloth anyone. This is generally done by the sun (and stored energy from it in the form of many fossil fuels). Also, for a finite population, all the other books can not be consumed anymore. So yes, it is a zero-sum game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com