Comment by fhd2

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.