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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thinking is the root of most populist rhetoric - that money and wealth is zero sum and it just shifts hands.

This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into.

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How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference.

I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum.

"Value", being subjective, is just warm fuzzy feelings. You can't measure it, let alone prove that it's proportional to anything (such as price, which is objective), and you can't pay bills in it. They say how much "value" something has is determined by how much is satisfies someone's wants. But you can't sell how satisfied you are. Money is what determines what you can afford, not "value". If you have money, or can get money easily, you are rich, and if you don't have and can't get money, then you are poor. Money IS zero-sum. For someone to acquire money, someone else must spend money. The only exception is when the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing and hand it to their friends.

The question isn’t about money but rather wealth. Is AI just about transferring of wealth or creating new wealth/prosperity? It is obviously creating it and not merely transferring.

Money is just a medium or technique to enable this whole economic process. It’s not important here.

It's not obviously creating any wealth (which is just anything you own that you can get money for). What it's obviously doing is creating a whole lot of people who used to have money and no longer do, and a handful of people with massive "net worth" based on the belief that AI companies are going to make a lot of money one day (from what buyers? everybody is going to be unemployed, and therefore poor, and therefore unable to afford any product that might come out of the other end of the AI investment craze, at least not at a price that would support a profit).

The only way AI can turn a profit is from a government bailout.

"fiat money" is not limited. wtf? they keep printing without matching anyting or giving anything for new prints. new printed money ends of up VC companies and selected inv. bankers favorites (aka Elon) it's not fully zero sum because you can take positining to these. Getting allocation or finding the real undervalued stock is real hard part

It's easy if you have enough data on Kevin Warsh, as the Big Tech companies probably do. They can probably predict when he'll print more money, and who he'll give it to.

Difficult argument to make with the huge increase in wealth disparity the last several decades.

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