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Comment by porjo | Hacker News Reader

It's a great temptation to point the finger at 'those filthy rich people over there' but to someone else you and I are those filthy rich people. Let's all have an attitude of gratitude, and not forget that wealth isn't a zero sum game. Make the most of what you've been given, and leave the world a better place.

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I think you're underestimating the problem. In most industrialized nations the gap between rich and poor has been increasing since the 50s of last century. The ever increasing division between the rich and the poor is one of the biggest problems of the 21st Century.

In one way or another, societies will have to tackle this problem or there will be some major social disruptions such as widespread civil unrest, radicalization, mass migration, revolutions, and civil war. All of these possibilities may seem like on-issues to you in your country now, but we already see their beginnings and the trend towards increasing the gap continues.

To make this clear, I'm not talking about politics. If the trend is not stopped, there will be problems regardless of what political opinions you have.

To paraphrase your argument;

"You have 1,000 times more wealth than a poor person so you can't say it's bad that someone else has 1,000,000,000 times more."

You know what, I absolutely can.

Sure, go right ahead - just don't be self righteous about it. Don't become what you hate in that other person.

It has nothing to do with a specific rich person, it's the underlying systems, institutions, and human-made rules that make such realities possible that's of concern.

It's about the allocation of resources, efficiency of the marketplace, assymetry of wealth and political power and how it affects the democratic project we've all been engaged in globally for a few hundred years.

Economic systems are human-invented games; the rules can be rewritten. Things as basic as property and trade are human constructed concept with fine human-constructed nuances (people aren't property for instance) The laws are a chosen set of axioms that can be voluntarily changed.

The question is if this is the outcome we'd like to see from an optimal set of rules. Can't we design something better that doesn't lead to mass extinction, climate change, mass poverty, and a system that crashes the global economy every 10 years?

These are open challenges to improve things, that is, if we choose to take those challenges on.

Explain to me how certain relevant aspects of wealth such as food, housing, energy or not wrecking the planet are not a zero sum game.

Well, this game can be played cooperatively or adversarially. For the latter approach, everything is a zero sum game.

Getting back to your points:

> food

We already (can) produce way more food than we consume. The main problem is distributing it and the lack of economic incentives to make this distribution global and fair.

> housing

We have the tech and resources to provide everyone adequate non-slum housing. It's again a problem of global and fair distribution. More than that, more people need to accept that we need more high density urban environments. This point will come back later :)

> energy

From an energy point of view, we're kind of at the "food" point. The real challenge is converting energy production to renewables. Which brings us to...

> not wrecking the planet

We absolutely have all the tech and know-how to not wreck the planet. But it's a tragedy of the commons.

Not wrecking the planet is the final end game, the ultimate cooperative move. Heck, it's the final anti-zero sum game move.

Seems pretty simply? All those things exist in greater quantities than yesteryear. There's more farms, more houses, more power plants and accessibe energy sources.

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