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Comment by tmnvix | Hacker News Reader

> The amount of money in circulation expands by an average of 5-6% per year.

I think you have to ask yourself where this newly minted money ends up first. I think you'll find that it largely just increases the nominal value of assets.

> The pie grows every year.

The 'pie' is the world's resources - not the money. If new money essentially just increases the nominal value of assets it doesn't invalidate what I've said. Quite the opposite. An increase in the money supply exacerbates wealth inequality as can be seen recently with historically low interest rates.

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>The 'pie' is the world's resources - not the money.

Except that's not zero sum either. Oil that was in the Permian Basin was there all along, but before the invention of fracking it might as well not exist because of how hard it was to get out of the ground. If some company gets rich because they were able to extract said oil, is the world really worse off because "inequality"?

Silicon is basically refined sand. Sand whose value is effectively 0. Refine it into a silicon wafer, etch it into semiconductor chips with a few billion transistors each, and that wafer of a few dozen chips is worth tens of thousands of dollars.

If your imagination limits "resources" to bare materials, yes, of course they're limited—though there's an awful lot of sand in the Earth's crust. But it's a stunted view of economics, so stunted as to be worthless as a model.

> The 'pie' is the world's resources

If so, then its always increasing, we have not fully discovered all the world's resources.

Bullshit resources are finite.

You are just being obstinate all over this thread not even rebutting points, just straw-manning.

You read like an argumentative'AI'.

Yes, the world's resources are finite and we use them up all the time.

No, humanity has not discovered them all, or know the actual quantity available to us. Like how discovery of silicon leads to enrichment of a country pretty much immediately (relative scale, still may take a few decades). The resource was there the entire time, the economic output was not, it was not a part of the market until it's discovery.

> You are just being obstinate all over this thread not even rebutting points, just straw-manning.

If I am, then its in opposition to another's "strawman".

> You read like an argumentative'AI'.

Thanks, I do like to defeat other people's logic by the most simplest means. If you can't answer, then you don't have a solution, you have an opinion of dubious quality.

> The 'pie' is the world's resources

We're on HN and I don't know if you got the memo but there's this thing called computing and digital information.

Zeros and ones, which can be copied near infinitely and make nowadays a huge part of the GDP.

I listen to music, watch movies, participate in discussion, read books, etc. without it eating much of the world's natural resources.

I know Marx totally missed that that would happen but, well, shocker, it happened: Microsoft, Google and Meta are three of the top 10 companies by market cap in the world. Software.

Software. It's time for people to get their head out of Marx's ass.

> Software. It's time for people to get their head out of Marx's ass.

I find Henry George's much more accommodating.

His definition of land is important to distinguish between different sorts of wealth. We are a part of nature and as such natural resources have particular importance to us.

Curiously, the part that can be infinitely copied without restrictions is not directly part of GDP, as it is not directly commoditized. Closed source software with legal restrictions to copy the data and services are part of the GDP. Marx is very good to understand this distinction.

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