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Comment by y4mi | Hacker News Reader

> You are not screwing over anybody. It is a two-sided deal that both parties find good.

There are no situations in which every participants wins. There are always "losers" as long as there are finite resources.

Like you said, both participants in the mentioned deal could be profiting, but there are more participants involved on the open market which are affected.

The "losers" are often hard to determine, as the previous commenter correctly pointed out. Nonetheless, the wealth came from somewhere. If it really was "created" from the interaction then this creation causes inflation, effectively removing wealth from everyone holding the currency in which the money was "created".

It's true that this particular deal will have a miniscule effect, but in does matter in aggregation with everyone else that made similar deals.

Macroeconomics is a much more challenging topic then you seem to realize

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> There are no situations in which every participants wins. There are always "losers" as long as there are finite resources.

How about the comparative advantage that Ricardo developed in 1817? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

The theory is valid but too abstract to really point out where people lose something in return for what they've gained.

It's true that people can gain efficiency with specialization for example, but that's not necessarily a gain unless you define efficiency as the primary goal to be achieved.

This gained efficiency will then over time make this the most economical way to produce. This effectively harms everyone that hasn't adapted yet

It's just not an easy topic and claiming it is doesn't help whatsoever

Macroeconomics are not a zero sum system and wealth creation is also not money creation.

No, it's not. A full field of research can never be adequately reflected with a single term.

Nor did I ever claim that it was Zero Sum at any point. I just pointed out that there are, by necessity, always "losers". That doesn't make it a zero sum game, as the values can be different and have very confusing side effects.

Not sure there is a strict necessity for "losers", either, if you want to go to positive sum, but claim some gain more than others lose. Situations where in a small world both sides gain (ie no loser) are conceivable.

Edit: I flatly reject the notion that strictly someone's gain requires someone's (non-proportinate) loss, ie that there are always "losers". That notion is also not really a current macroeconomic position.

There are not always losers, though, in a very real sense. If I have nothing but 100 gallons of water and you have nothing but 100 pounds of meat, then an exchange of some amount at the margins benefits both of us in every way. If we set the amounts that we trade carefully enough, then we'll both win by the exact same amount (however we measure that in our own heads), and it's really hard to call anyone in that situation a "loser".

Presumably what you're referring to is that in a realistic market, there are also tons of other people who are willing to swap their wares, and maybe they'll offer me something better for a gallon of water than a pound of meat. So sure, I could be taking a sub-optimal deal by trading with you at the rate you want. But the trade is still positive-sum, no loser in sight. In an efficient market most trade is net beneficial to everyone and doesn't necessarily have losers, including when you start layering in credit and derivatives and inflation and velocity of money and whatnot, even if it gets really complicated. That is possible because we all have slightly different self-valuations of money, goods, and risk at different scales, and the markets let you trade each for the other until you've self-optimized your portfolio blend.

That's not to say you can't come up with scenarios where there are unambiguous losers, but it's definitely not some law of economics or anything like that.

This discussion is quiet far from what I've initially said from my perspective, nonetheless...

> it's definitely not some law of economics or anything like that.

This is a no true scotsman fallacy. It's true that this is not a preordained truth, but you'll realistically always have someone at a loss for as long as resources are limited. And if you can't see one than you're just ignoring the one's at a loss as irrelevant.

I.e. descendents with natural resources or even non-human entities in the context of meat production etc

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