No. The world has absolutely gotten wealthier over the last few centuries.
Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.
Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.
No, it actually means something. We have access to refrigeration, climate control, near-limitless computation, entertainment, transportation, knowledge, communication, and medicine. All of this stuff would BLOW THE MINDS of medieval kings. Even if you're living in a 1BR apartment, working at Walmart and struggling to pay rent, you enjoy many luxuries Charlemagne could scarcely dream of.
Go to the store, grab a pineapple off the shelf, take it home, and eat it. Then read about the great lengths [1] the wealthy people of the past went to in order to try to grow pineapples in Europe, and how obsessed the culture became with this fruit.
No one made that claim.
By nearly any sane metric the world is wealthier. You can verify this on sites like Our World in Data.
We are healthier, have more leisure time, are less likely to die in natural disasters, etc.
It's willful ignorance to define wealth in a way that wouldn't show humanity as having gotten more wealthy. You're doing harm by overlooking massive gains we've made and understanding why we made them and instead redefining the common sense understanding of basic terms.
I would also point out people living in "poverty" in the US would be considered quite wealthy in other countries like Cuba or Haiti.
Everything is relative to how you define wealth and what you're comparing it to.
The latter is absolutely zero sum, because of everybody has a billion, a billion isn't that much any more. E.g. human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor, and the fact that even those poor people might have access to things an emperor 1000 years ago would have dreamed of doesn't change that, because the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today, the absolute increase compared to people who lived N years ago is a red herring.
We could very obviously stop our progress in resources and technology. It has happened throughout history many times and we see plenty of modern examples.
You seem to be treating the accumulated products of civilization as though they are geological facts rather than fragile outputs of maintained institutions.
Maybe you should ask yourself why you believe that 1) access to resources and technology are "basically constantly rising" and 2) why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology.
Because people have and share ideas, and I was using that as a shorthand. Even if they aren't, if you completely strike that part -- my point remains completely untouched.
> why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology
Because in the context of "Wealth is having economic power over the people around you.", that is the definition of wealth that is used. To quote a randomly picked one, emphasis mine:
"Large possessions; a comparative abundance of things"
> You are aware that the default state of humanity hasn't been one of continually increasing access to resources and technology?
There was no default "state", at least by the time you're talking about humans, we probably already learned from each other by observation. Sure, politics and wars and religion and feudal dynasties and whatever make bumps in the line, but generally it goes up. Once things get out, they're out, roughly speaking (that's the keyword here), and even in the animal kingdom.
And as I said, even if that's completely false, doesn't matter for the wider point about wealth, and that it can only buy you power over others if they have less of it.
No, that's not the shape of the line. You can view it here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca...
The hockey stick upturn in recent centuries needs explanation.
I'm pushing back so hard on this comparative definition of wealth (which I notice is the secondary definition you found behind large possessions) because I think it's silly to do that when we have an unbelievably dramatic increase in wealth in recent centuries which needs understanding first.
Hand-waving away human progress and forcing zero sum definitions of wealth feels unserious. You have terms for things like inequality, why not use those instead of distorting what wealth means?
But it's a decent enough proxy for the parts of human progress that I think are meaningful that it illustrates the point well.
That website is an excellent resource and you can find other more compelling charts there.
Why? It goes up. As I said.
> I think it's silly to do that when we have an unbelievably dramatic increase in wealth in recent centuries which needs understanding first.
That's not pushing back, that's wanting to talk about something else first. That's just not something I'm interested in.
> distorting what wealth means?
It simply means both things, from context it was obvious how it was used in this instance, you ignoring that and going on tells me explaining it yet another time won't help.
No, it doesn't. This is an absurd claim, and nobody intelligent should take it seriously. Human trafficking exists because some people choose to do evil things. There are plenty of relatively-rich people who are actively trying to stop the evil of human trafficking.
Furthermore, just being wealthy has not, historically, made you immune to being made a slave. For just one example, look at the story of Joseph in the Bible. He was his father's favorite son, the heir presumptive to fantastic wealth for his time (that "coat of many colors" his father gave him cost the equivalent of what a sports car would today), and yet his brothers who hated him sold him into slavery while his father wasn't around to protect him. Throughout history, cross-border slave raiding has been a thing, too: it didn't matter how much gold you had tucked under your bed if the Vikings (or whoever) caught you alone, or outnumbered and overpowered your hired guards: once they hauled you away and slapped chains on you, you no longer had access to your wealth, and your life depended on making your captors happy with your work.
To think that slavery, ancient or modern, is caused by relative wealth differentials reveals an abysmal ignorance of both history and human nature.
I claimed no such thing, you read way too much into your missing the point.
> if the Vikings (or whoever) caught you alone, or outnumbered and overpowered your hired guards
Wait, I thought it was just because "some people do evil things", nothing to do with relative power?
And if you didn't mean that slavery is caused by relative wealth differentials, then saying "... the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today ..." was a very poor way of making your point. So what was your point that I missed, then?