I agree, how dull and uninspired. I'm very much with Paul Graham, who believes in the creation of wealth (as opposed to the extraction of money).
I'd definitionally describe all voluntary transactions free of coercion to imply the buyer values the utility of what they're buying (i.e. true wealth - piles of currency are not true wealth, they're what you exchange for true wealth) more than the currency they're trading for it, no?
Involuntary transactions featuring coercion on the other hand, like the government demanding you pay taxes under threat of imprisonment (enforced at gunpoint, if necessary) are clearly extractive, by my definition.
Wealth Creation: creating new pie.
In practice, a lot of things that look extractive (e.g., designing better high frequency trading algorithms) potentially have some marginal utility (e.g., creating market liquidity), but the money high performing people make is likely larger than the utility they add to the system (because most of the money in having the best high frequency trading algorithm comes from beating other people's high frequency trading algorithms).
Even in a purely digital world - most of the economy is not zero sum - i.e., it _creates_ wealth. I pay you 100USD for 1 million LLM tokens - a purely digital transaction - the net result of this is the 1 million tokes that I can consume and use - net of the transaction.
For example, the added value provided by sub-millisecond arbitrage between NY and Chicago - while making the prices converge a fraction of a millisecond faster, makes the overall set of people playing that game in excess of 1B USD in aggregate. I'd argue that such a ratio of profit vs value-added gain is very bad, bordering on 0 - thus making that effectively a zero-sum game.
You’ve defined scamming people, a totally voluntary error, as creative not extractive.
You’ve also defined building roads as extractive not creative.
I think you’re latching onto some very misguided principles.
Public roads, OTOH, are extractive because someone is taking money from you to build them even if you don't consent to it and deliberately avoid them at every opportunity.