> Wealth isn't zero-sum.
Of course it is. We live on a planet with finite resources; everything here is zero-sum. I don't buy the myth that we can create value from nothing. Some people are just better at socializing their harmful byproducts.
Of course it is. We live on a planet with finite resources; everything here is zero-sum. I don't buy the myth that we can create value from nothing. Some people are just better at socializing their harmful byproducts.
Previously we had some lumber worth $10 and now we have a chair worth $250 dollars.
Where did the $240 dollars come from? Was it stolen from somebody else?
All of those factors have hidden externalities baked into them that erode the net value you're creating. My argument is that it's all just a shell game where we're passing costs down the line to future generations while telling ourselves we're creating something valuable from nothing because it's what we need to do to sleep at night. We just don't perceive the longer-term externalities in a lot of cases.
But let's just say that you priced all of the externalities perfectly. In this hypothetical example, can you really make an argument that all of that adds up to more than, say, 100 dollars?
And if you can't, then you still have a lot of "value" to account for.
In an oversimplification, when Peter decides to do business with Paul and Paul is interested in taking his business it's because both believe they'll be better off after that.
Now you could [prematurely] argue that there might be externalities and so on, but you must recognize that that action of trading in itself can be seen as something that is going to increase the overall wealth of both as they'll be more satisfied after the fact (assuming everything goes well).
This isn't even true at a cosmic scale, let alone in human scales. Planet Earth receives exogenous energy from the sun.
You want an example of creating value from nothing? Say your choice this evening was to sit on the couch and do nothing versus charge your neighbor $20 to clean up his yard of fallen leaves. By choosing the latter, you have created $20 of value for your neighbor where none existed before.
> Some people are just better at socializing their harmful byproducts.
This is trivially true, but you make the great leap of equating all wealth creation to an arbitrage in externalities.
I do indeed. I think on a long-enough timeframe, all human activity is just externality arbitrage.