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Are you sure? The earth has finite resources. Wealth is a zero sum game. Even if you want to look at things like entertainment that can be reporduced cheaply,

Are you sure? The earth has finite resources. Wealth is a zero sum game. Even if you want to look at things like entertainment that can be reporduced cheaply, musicians and directors need fed, food is limited, therefore even films/music are limited.

deleted 9y ago
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slavik81 9y ago
Yes. If wealth were a zero-sum game, every choice would have to result in the same total amount of wealth in the world. Wealth could not be created or destroyed, only transferred. Any use of a resource would be equally as valuable as any other. That's clearly not the case. The classic example is building a house alone in the woods, but let's consider art. With different choices, a person could use the same paint to make a good or a bad painting. The choices made while painting decide if it will be a mess or something beautiful. Even if it's never shown or sold to anyone else, the person who made a beautiful painting would be wealthier for it.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Wealth, generally, is destroyed with time. Much of what's seen as wealth production is instead liquidity production -- turning natural capital into financial currency. In the case of any production chain founded on fossil-fuel energy, the transformation requires a draw-down of natural capital worth many millions of times the market-price and wealth "created". Activities founded on renewable or sustainable processes are less fraught, but there's still the accounting for potential disruption or reduction: soil loss (rougly 100x the rate of creation), sink-exhaustion (waste and pollution factors), biodiversity loss (rates of extinction > speciation), and the like. There's little accounting for any of this within conventional economic theory. Ecological, biophysical, and thermoeconomics address parts. Steve Keen is starting to write mathematical descriptions of production factors in which the role of energy is taken into account.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
The only non-finite resource is knowledge, and even that runs into asymptotes of diminishing marginal utility.
- aoeuasdf1 9y ago
  Everything is finite when you have a fixed amount of information and mass in the universe. That doesn't mean the common economic definitions of wealth are useless. The act of creating capital such as a piece of art, a new algorithm, or a manufacturing tool all change the total amount of wealth in the world.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Information is also amost certainly bounded. In humans it's limited by the rate of transmissibility -- if what the next generation has to learn is greater than what the present generation can pass on, knowledge will be lost. Given various inefficiencies of educational institutions, this is all but certain to be occurring as we speak. There is a notion of a "forgetting curve". And, as you note, information can at best asymptotically achieve some maximum theoretical efficiency. It's not a limitless fount of potential.
chrisco255 9y ago
The earth has finite resources. Let's go with that point for a moment. Do you think there were more resources available on planet earth 5000 years ago or today? The world population was several orders of magnitude less than today, natural resources had not yet been fully exploited, and yet, mankind was much, much poorer in terms of quality of life. What happened in the meantime? We live in the most abundant age in history. Worldwide poverty is at an all-time low. Surely wealth is growing in absolute terms and it's not just the top 1% benefiting.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

slavik81 9y ago

Yes. If wealth were a zero-sum game, every choice would have to result in the same total amount of wealth in the world. Wealth could not be created or destroyed, only transferred. Any use of a resource would be equally as valuable as any other. That's clearly not the case. The classic example is building a house alone in the woods, but let's consider art. With different choices, a person could use the same paint to make a good or a bad painting. The choices made while painting decide if it will be a mess or something beautiful. Even if it's never shown or sold to anyone else, the person who made a beautiful painting would be wealthier for it.

dredmorbius 9y ago
Wealth, generally, is destroyed with time. Much of what's seen as wealth production is instead liquidity production -- turning natural capital into financial currency. In the case of any production chain founded on fossil-fuel energy, the transformation requires a draw-down of natural capital worth many millions of times the market-price and wealth "created". Activities founded on renewable or sustainable processes are less fraught, but there's still the accounting for potential disruption or reduction: soil loss (rougly 100x the rate of creation), sink-exhaustion (waste and pollution factors), biodiversity loss (rates of extinction > speciation), and the like. There's little accounting for any of this within conventional economic theory. Ecological, biophysical, and thermoeconomics address parts. Steve Keen is starting to write mathematical descriptions of production factors in which the role of energy is taken into account.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

The only non-finite resource is knowledge, and even that runs into asymptotes of diminishing marginal utility.

aoeuasdf1 9y ago
Everything is finite when you have a fixed amount of information and mass in the universe. That doesn't mean the common economic definitions of wealth are useless. The act of creating capital such as a piece of art, a new algorithm, or a manufacturing tool all change the total amount of wealth in the world.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Information is also amost certainly bounded. In humans it's limited by the rate of transmissibility -- if what the next generation has to learn is greater than what the present generation can pass on, knowledge will be lost. Given various inefficiencies of educational institutions, this is all but certain to be occurring as we speak. There is a notion of a "forgetting curve". And, as you note, information can at best asymptotically achieve some maximum theoretical efficiency. It's not a limitless fount of potential.

chrisco255 9y ago

The earth has finite resources. Let's go with that point for a moment. Do you think there were more resources available on planet earth 5000 years ago or today? The world population was several orders of magnitude less than today, natural resources had not yet been fully exploited, and yet, mankind was much, much poorer in terms of quality of life. What happened in the meantime? We live in the most abundant age in history. Worldwide poverty is at an all-time low. Surely wealth is growing in absolute terms and it's not just the top 1% benefiting.