It depends on the business. A lot of businesses create things that do take away from other people. Amazon destroyed the local bookstore, for one. In a sense, we

It depends on the business. A lot of businesses create things that do take away from other people. Amazon destroyed the local bookstore, for one. In a sense, wealth is spread through redundancy and waste, and the more efficient people get the less wealth. My home town going from three regional retail chains to a single walmart led to the destruction of plenty of wealth through efficiency. edit: it depends really too what we mean by wealth. If we define wealth as being employed, good lord wealth is zero sum. The amount of jobs the modern tech sector has created has been pitiful, with poorer compensation than many unskilled fields. If it means by possessing things, its a mixed blessing.Plenty of free or low cost content, though large staple goods like houses or cars are climbing up there. Also, Martin Ford mentions something called the lights in the tunnel problem. Imagine a tunnel full of lights that represent the wealth of people. In the modern world, a handful of lights shine intensely bright, while increasingly more are dark, dim, or low-intensity. But the tunnel is dark, because a handful of lights can't generate enough light to make it illuminated. He used it in context of automation, but this is modern wealth creation, and eventually it will reach the point where the ones controlling the wealth have done so by dimming so many people that the tunnel goes dark.