Comment by vinibrito
3 days ago
It's not a zero sum game. Think, an agronomist visits a farm, instructs to cut a certain plant for the animals to eat at a certain height instead of whenever, the plant then provides more food for the animals to eat exclusively due to that, no other input in the system, now the animals are cheaper to feed, so more profit to the farmer and cheaper food to people.
How would this be zero sum?
It would be if demand was limited. Let's assume the people already have enough food, and the population is not growing - that was my premise. Through innovation, one farmer can grow more than all the others.
Since there already was enough food, the market is saturated, so it would effectively reduce the price of all food. This would change the ratio so that the farmer who grows more gets more money in total, and every other farmer gets a bit less.
As long as there is any sort of growth involved - more people, more appetite, whatever, it would be value creation. But without growth, it's not.
At least not in the economical sense. Saving resources and effort that goes into producing things is great for society, on paper. But with the economic system that got us this far, we have no real mechanism for distributing the gains. So we get over supplying producers fighting over limited demand.
The world is several orders of magnitude more complex than that example, of course. But that's the basic idea.
That said, I'm not exactly an economist, and considering it's a bleak opinion to hold, I'd like to learn something based on which I could change it.
Who will eat the extra meat if the population has reached parity?