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Comment by stocknoob | Hacker News Reader

Do you think the economy is zero sum? Go back 50k years, all the current wealth must have been distributed among a mere 50k cavemen. Were they all billionaires? Quality of life must have been amazing for them.

When you go into the woods and stack rocks into a house, you created value. What part of the economy shrank?

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How many jobs do you have? Like as a professional in some sector of the economy, how many sectors do you personally occupy? Are you a farmer that also writes iOS software? No, obviously not. Whatever job you do is fixed and it contributes a finite amount of economic value. Since the population is now decreasing there are fewer people, which means if all the economic value from everyone is added up then the total contribution will be less than another population with more people.

It doesn't make sense to talk about zero-sum economics because economics is always a positive sum arrangement of work and specializations. The number of workers is the main limiting factor in any productive economy, every other measure is essentially an approximate proxy of that.

The financial sector on the other hand is indeed a zero-sum system. If someone is making money then someone else must be losing it because there is a finite supply of dollars in the economy at any given moment so if the supply is fixed then the monetary economy is a zero-sum game.

All of this is derivable from first principles but for some reason most people are constantly parroting some nonsense about wealth and zero-sums.

Even finance isn’t zero sum. The money supply is literally something that is managed. When you take a loan, the bank has created money, since the deposits are still on the books. When you buy insurance, you are getting security, insurance company is getting a premium, and you are both happy.

When you take a loan and start a business, the bank makes money on the interest, and you (hopefully) make money because your business is providing more value than it was. You bought a new machine and make widgets 10x faster, etc.

Also, people confuse money and wealth. One is bandwidth, the other is data. You use bandwidth to transfer data, which is what you care about, and its possibility for creation is basically limitless.

You probably should spend some more time thinking about how that all fits together because saying that the bank creates money from interest rates means that the central bank sets the rate according to what economic growth they're expecting. If the rate is decoupled then it stops tracking real economic productivity as I've defined it. The obvious logical conclusion is that raising rates will lead to a recession because economic productivity has been stagnant for some time now. So if the rate is above actual economic productivity then that will reduce the total money supply and this seems to be their main goal. There is no way to reduce inflation without destroying money.

> There is no way to reduce inflation without destroying money.

Of course there is. When inflation is caused by supply restrictions, increasing supply will reduce the rate of inflation. Inflation is about prices, it's not about the money supply per se.

You've been making some weird personal attacks and telling people they need to "spend some more time thinking" and you should really stop doing that.

Telling people to think is only a personal attack if they prefer not to.

> If someone is making money then someone else must be losing it because there is a finite supply of dollars in the economy at any given moment so if the supply is fixed then the monetary economy is a zero-sum game.

That is simply untrue. The money supply is not fixed.

In a sense it is if it's tied to value, you can print trillions of empty dollars but the ratio will be the same if there will be no growth behind it, now instead of 1$ you will pay 10$ for something, so maybe amount is not fixed but representation or ratio or how you want to call it seems to be.

People conflate money and value / wealth. We can individually create things of value: food, art, services, inventions, shelter. There is no practical upper bound. Money is a medium of exchange from one to another. Having more money in the system means it’s easier to get bandwidth to transfer that data between interested parties. Without it, you are inefficiently bartering to exchange value.

Value existed long before money, and its potential for creation is not dependent on it.

> All of this is derivable from first principles

I'm waiting

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