Comment by Anderkent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Anderkent | Hacker News Reader

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As others have said, a stagnant (0% growth) economy still has many positive sum trades within it. If all trading stopped happening, you wouldn't see the GDP remain at the same level; it would crash to basically 0 as almost no one would even have access to food.

>With a total growth of 4-6%, you have to make many folks worse off in order to get ahead.

I mean, kinda, in that if you make something really good you make the person that made something slightly worse worse off, as they now don't get the money you earn instead? But this is not what you mean.

> Don't tell me tens of millions of individuals can get out of low-income situation, and billionaires can still keep getting rich, with a measley overall growth of 4-6%.

The way billionaires are rich is by controlling organisations that provide a lot of value and capture some of that value for themselves. One of them getting 10% 'richer' on paper doesn't mean that organisation grabbed some more resources from others; it's not real, current wealth, it's estimated value of total future income from that organisation.

So yes you can totally have those organisations become more valuable by more than 4-6% a year without other people losing out. You're confusing the total amount of value/utility produced in a year (which GDP is more-or-less trying to estimate) with projected total amount of value produced in all future years.

> As others have said, a stagnant (0% growth) economy still has many positive sum trades within it.

Wow, so I guess I was living with the wrong understanding of positive-sum all this time.

Positive sum doesn't just mean win-win. It also includes win-lose because the winning side actually won.

Got it.

I don't know if you're misreading on purpose or missing a point.

Suppose I each year I produce two eggs and you produce two slices of bacon. We both value these at $1 each. The total value produced this year was $4.

Next year, we produce the same, but we agree to a trade - one egg for one slice of bacon. Egg with bacon is clearly superior to just two eggs or just two slices of bacon for breakfast; so we value the combo of egg+bacon at $3, giving total value of $6.

Next year, we do the same. Total value was just $6, for 0% growth. However, that doesn't mean there was a 'winning side' to the trade. It just means the previous estimate for produced value already included the benefits of the trade, so there's been no change.

I'm neither misreading nor missing your point.

When your example is included in Norvig's simulation, it will result in two parties coming together, and instead of an interaction of (-1, +1), the interaction (+1, +1) will happen.

However, when such interactions are randomly mixed with zero-sum trades, and the simulaion is run over N (population) and t (time), it will result in net wealth W_after > W_before.

In order to mimic real-world scenario, the prob distribution has to be chosen such that the W_after is between 0.98 to 1.06 of W_before (in other words, between -2% to 6% growth, more or less). Anything far outside this bound would be highly unrealistic for a functioning economy.

However, when you impose this condition, you would realize that the (+1, +1) events have negligible impact, and that (-1, +1) type of events dominate. In other words, Norvig's conclusion pretty much does not change.

And that is my point. Mixing in a fraction of individual positive-sum interactions doesn't change the results, if the total wealth growth is capped based on real-world macroeconomic data.

>In order to mimic real-world scenario, the prob distribution has to be chosen such that the W_after is between 0.98 to 1.06 of W_before (in other words, between -2% to 6% growth, more or less). Anything far outside this bound would be highly unrealistic for a functioning economy.

No, you're missing the point.

0.98 to 1.06, to borrow your numbers, is the ratio of GDP one year to GDP the previous year. It is not the ratio of GDP accounting for positive-sum trades to GDP under only zero-some trades, and falsely equating those is disingenuous at best. The latter ratio might well be an order of magnitude larger.

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