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Comment by fizixer | Hacker News Reader

You cannot get ahead in society without making someone somewhat worse off.

How many you made worse off, and how much you made them worse off is a function of how much you got ahead and in how much time.

"Free-market is not a zero sum game", is a lie that morons that go by the name of 'economists' like to tell you. The world economy is growing by a minuscule amount of 4% every year. Yes it's pretty much a zero-sum game, when some grow way more than 4%, and others less, or even grow negative.

When CD tech became widespread, the VCR industry went out of business. When DVD tech came along, CD industry went out of business. Online streaming put pretty much everyone else out of business.

Do you not call this making people worse off? I do.

Is it a bad thing? that's a different question.

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While inventing the printing press certainly put many scribes out of business, few would call it zero-sum or robber-barony. The amount of new wealth generated was exponential. That is still happening. 4% growth per year is over 10x in an average person's lifetime. Even accounting for inflation, the amount of wealth per capita is always increasing with technology and innovation.

You allude to the fact that you don't consider it to be a bad thing at the end, but even calling it a zero sum game is plainly wrong.

You are right about one thing, though. The incumbents are made worse off by a better innovation. Sometimes that comes in the form of mom and pop shops, sometimes big slow corporations. However, the positive net wealth gains and the fact that this is the only way to achieve progress makes it seem worthwhile.

There has been no economic growth at all over the past 5 years and possibly much longer (if you account for possible market manipulations by reserve banks). If you measure the market cap of the biggest corporations relative to any scarce commodity like Gold or Silver, the charts would be totally flat. If you measure stock prices in terms of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, then stock prices have been dropping rapidly.

It doesn't make sense to measure stock prices in terms of fiat currencies anymore because the Reserve Banks of the world can and have printed unlimited amounts of it. You should only measure the price of stocks relative to the value of scarce assets which have a stable intrinsic value (which is not the case for the dollar or any fiat currency).

In Venezuela, the stock market yields hundreds or even thousand of times your investment per year if returns are denominated in the national Venezuelan Bolivar currency; this is way higher than any ROI you can get from any modern stock markets in the US or anywhere else... It doesn't mean that these companies are good investments and are actually growing (they're not; they're tanking just like Venezuela itself).

If you think this is not what's happening in the US, just consider that the price of US stocks are strongly correlated with each other... This is totally consistent with what's happening in Venezuela; the degree of correlation in price of unrelated stocks tells you the degree to which the so-called 'growth' can be attributed to currency inflation.

Try benchmarking the latest and greatest desktop computer from 5 years ago against what you can build today. Try using a 5 year old smartphone versus a new one. Count how many skyscrapers have been erected in big cities that didn't exist 5 years ago. You are arguing about some different topic, such as currency manipulation and the implications of government debt.

However, total wealth certainly hasn't been stagnant, which is what this thread is about.

Wealth is about value. Personally I never cared much about the latest smartphone, I wouldn't mind going back to my phone from 5 years ago. As for skyscrapers, as COVID19 has shown, we don't need most of them (since people can just work remotely). The money would have been better spent on giving millenials higher salaries (or better, investing more in independent startups) so that they could afford to buy their first house in the suburbs instead of keeping them enslaved to their landlords and their corporate paymasters in the city centers. In terms of the things that actually matter, wealth hasn't grown at all.

I can stack millions of rocks on top of each other into a giant pile but that doesn't mean I've been productive or that I created any wealth if nobody benefits from my pile of rocks or if people are coerced into accepting its legitimacy as a measure of wealth.

Wealth is about perceived value. What you personally perceive as valuable is different than the majority of participants in the economy, so trying to enforce your judgments upon the system to show that no value was created is pointless. You clearly have many gripes with various aspects of the economic system, but my point is that value is still being created. I've created a ton of value since 2015. The professional hardware and tools I use have improved tremendously since that time. While the exact value below the paper wealth numbers may be difficult to ascertain, it doesn't mean no wealth was created. It should be obvious that things are still advancing to someone in the tech space.

I can, watch me: I code a webpage for a business. Or make any other software for a business.

Let me know in 30 years.

If you had more than 4% annual growth the whole time (on average), and the world grew only 4% (on average), yes you did make someone somewhat worse off. You may not know who that is, or where, or how many, but they exist.

edit: The one who you made worse off might be a billionaire, while you a middle class person. That's why I said it's a different question if it's a bad thing. But the fact remains.

That his gains made someone else worse off because he beat the average is a bad assumption.

To make someone worse off, they need to perceive it as such (not absolutely, but mostly yeah). If I helped them get ahead, they don't think I made them worse off, it's an exchange - and I exchanged value that I created, I didn't need to make someone worse off.

I cannot believe that people would downvote this comment. It's completely reasonable and I agree 100%.

HN has a really strong "rich people bad" attitude coming up lately (~ since the last US election) which is also prevalent on sites like Reddit. On the other hand HN is the site where I think probably most commenters are in the top 1% in the US by salary [1]. It's a really strange phenomenon and as an outsider it's also interesting to observe.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/07/01/how-much-you-...

You think most californian commenters on hn make more than $659k a year? Hmm.

It's not just HN and reddit. It's anyone who's not living alone in the woods. Class consciousness is thankfully becoming more prevalent, and these days how could you not notice: the rich get richer, the 99% is worse off, the planet is being destroyed, there's no accountability, and electoralism is failing.

There's a large swath of pro-capitalism sentiment on HN because it's overwhelmed with people who've "won" the game at the expense of everyone else. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't thousands of millionaires that read this site at least once a week.

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