Comment by wek
1 day ago
A bit hard to read but some fun images and examples. I appreciated his post on capitalism as not a zero sum game.
1 day ago
A bit hard to read but some fun images and examples. I appreciated his post on capitalism as not a zero sum game.
Capitalism is 100% a zero sum game and capitalists love to try to pretend that it’s not
The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.
If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes
So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
>The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they "can’t count them" and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
The article explicitly addresses this:
Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46434065
Steel man: GP could be using "capitalism" to refer to the distribution of capital - financial markets - rather than the entire system. Financial markets are zero-sum as they don't produce anything and their consumption (wages, electricity, etc) is paid in by their users. They can influence wealth creation asnd destruction but that isn't part of the market itself.
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That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
You should read about Baumol cost disease if you want to understand why what you just said is totally misguided
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no.
Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe
Nothing is free
energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process
No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that
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