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Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in th

Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence,"

untilHellbanned 6y ago
What's the tangible evidence that the world is a positive-sum game? The tangible evidence to me seems to suggest it's a zero-sum game. E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees.
- harryh 6y ago
  The world is vastly richer today than it was in the past due to the development of new technologies and improved social systems.
  - wwright 6y ago
    Did billionaires accelerate that, or did they just profit from it disproportionately while slowing it down?
    - tux1968 6y ago
      That's an interesting question, and I don't have an answer. But what you can not deny, is that the system that produced those billionaires, is the same one that produced such a rise in wealth and standard of living worldwide. We better be very careful about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
      - mistermann 6y ago
        We should also consider being careful about how we divvy up the fruits of workers labour, lest they decide they're not happy with the current arrangement and the "wealth is not a zero sum game" style excuses, and proceed to throw out both the baby and the bathwater - or maybe something less dramatic, like elect a reality TV star to a second term as President, followed by who knows what after that.
      - wwright 6y ago
        I can’t deny that, but I can certainly point out that billionaires coinciding with the rise in quality does not mean that they were even produced by the same system, or that the presence of the billionaires was in any way necessary. To reframe your point: maybe we should be careful to identify where the baby is and spend a little less attention on what billionaires want.
        tux1968 6y ago
        It seems pretty clear that capitalism tends to produce concentrations of wealth. Billionaires are created by capitalism because of this tendency. The question is if you can stop the tendency of capitalism without killing the system altogether. We just have to keep in mind, for all its faults, it has a track record of provably doing more for the well-being and prosperity of masses of average people more than any other system.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Billionaires are a byproduct of the market mechanisms that produces that wealth. They don’t “profit from it disproportionately” enough to justify messing with the system. (In the US, billionaires make only about 1.5% of total annual income.)
      - SahAssar 6y ago
        > They don’t “profit from it disproportionately” enough to justify messing with the system. (In the US, billionaires make only about 1.5% of total annual income.) What percentage does that equal on the lower end? You say it does not justify messing with the system, but what is that based on? What would you feel is an equitable distribution of wealth within a country?
    - vosper 6y ago
      Or did they accelerate it AND profit disproportionately from it? There are more than two possibilities here.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      That question isn't very useful. A better question would be: “does there exist a more effective system?” (“Does that system have billionaires?” is an interesting question, too.)
    - refurb 6y ago
      Did Jeff Bezos accelerate or slow progress for online shopping?
  - StillBored 6y ago
    Richer if you put more value on having an addictive piece of electronics in your back pocket rather than a few acres of land to be self sufficient on. There are definite improvements (a fair amount of medical science), but I'm not sure on balance that the planetary destruction/extinctions/etc outweigh them. So, using made up GDP/capita numbers for justification that the world is "improving" is tenuous.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I do, as do most people. When you hear talk about subsistence farmers who live on less than a dollar a day and don't have running water, that's what the "few acres of land to be self sufficient on" lifestyle looks like in the absence of a strong market economy.
      - StillBored 6y ago
        Have you looked at the homeless in your city? Sure they might be fed with cheap food, but they are living under bridges. So, that is what a "strong market economy" gets you too. So don't compare the worse case subsistence farmer, with what was middle class in the US a few decades ago, where suburban houses on a couple acres were affordable my the top 70% of the population. We have more trinkets, but the price of basic necessities are becoming more "expensive" every day.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        These are the average case subsistence farmers. The worst case ones live even harder lives than an homeless person, very often dying of starvation after a bad harvest. The middle class in the US a few decades ago lived pretty good lives, but were very much dependent on market economies and innovation for their standard of living.
    - jerf 6y ago
      You can easily have "a few acres of land to be self-sufficent on". Clearly you don't value that, so you don't have it. If you actually value it, go get it.
  - untilHellbanned 6y ago
    Show me what that math looks like where there is a positive number to the left of the equal sign.
    - harryh 6y ago
      Here it is in graph form: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capita-across-countries-and-regions https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...
      - untilHellbanned 6y ago
        Comparing eras doesn't seem very useful. 90 years ago my grandma got one orange as a present once a year. Today people buy bags of oranges every day. Day-by-day the world is zero sum.
        harryh 6y ago
        In order to get from "one orange as a present once a year" to "bags of oranges every day" each day has to (on average) see a small amount of growth.
- xhkkffbf 6y ago
  More capitalism creates more products. If the world were just a bunch of fields with a static farm economy and no innovation in cultivation, then your point would be correct. But innovation increases the size of the pie. Yeah, the jealous may focus on the percentage kept by these innovators, but they really should be looking at the share of the pie. Socialism is all about making sure that everyone is equally miserable.
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    If that's your analogy, then capitalism is about making a few people happy at the expense of everyone else. We collectively are not done, yet. We can still make it better for everyone. Let's at least _try_ new ideas.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      As someone from a third world country where people live in poverty, my view is that new ideas are bad and dangerous. There is a blueprint for poor countries to become wealthy ones: free markets, rule of law, liberal democracy. It’s how the countries that are currently rich became rich. It worked in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. Its working in myriad other countries. While academics fuck around with “new ideas” progress is deferred and people suffer in poverty.
      - munk-a 6y ago
        A lot of really bad ideas have been tried and failed to work in this world and we should learn from them - that said I don't know if America's version of a liberal democracy has proven itself to be that great in the long run. There was a period of extreme common wealth growth but after WW2 (about the eighties) that's mostly dried up. While we need to recognize failures abroad (i.e. the Soviet system implemented by Lenin and its offshoots) I think our own system needs some active maintenance to be rebalanced. Lately the extremes have grown too wide and we need to do like Teddy and break up some of the big concentrations of wealth so that the engine can keep running clean for another half-century or so. It's misleading to think of any democratic style government as being in stasis - the world is constantly in flux.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees. this is orthogonal to the economy being positive/negative/zero sum. if total real wealth increases over time, the world is positive sum, regardless of how that wealth is distributed. positive sum doesn't imply that everyone gets wealthier over time, only that it's possible for people to get wealthier without it being directly at the expense of others.
  - untilHellbanned 6y ago
    So because a homeless person today has $1, can sleep under a bridge in a jacket they got from Goodwill rather than $0.05 like 50 years ago or sleeping under a tree possibly getting eaten by wolves, this means the world is positive sum? Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      > So because a homeless person today has $1, can sleep under a bridge in a jacket they got from Goodwill rather than $0.05 like 50 years ago or sleeping under a tree possibly getting eaten by wolves, this means the world is positive sum? I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this question. the homeless person could even be worse off today than they were fifty years ago, and the economy could simultaneously be positive-sum. suppose you have an economy with two people that each start with $100k. if after 10 years, one person has $500k and the other has nothing, this is a positive-sum game because the total gains exceed the total losses. positive sum does not imply that everyone, or even most people, will become wealthier over time. > Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game. if you pick an infinitesimally small window of time where nothing can be produced, then sure, I guess you could say any changes in wealth would have to be zero-sum (assuming you could somehow transfer wealth instantly). I don't really think this is a useful analysis though. over the course of a whole day, the economy could be positive, negative, or zero sum. it depends on how much total wealth was created and destroyed on that day. even in an hour, I could create something of value that didn't exist before, or an explosion could go off in a port causing billions of dollars worth of damage.
- xoa 6y ago
  >What's the tangible evidence that the world is a positive-sum game? LEDs. To take one very specific, simple example, though feel free to substitute in everything from computers to engines. Fundamentally, we have both increased our average energy budget per person and we can accomplish far more of what we want to do for far less energy. Taking the basic general goal of "I wish to have visible photons available to me at a sufficient level for my eyes to work well at arbitrary times and places", compare the total costs and % of resources converted to the goal vs wasted as heat/losses/externalities of say torches to oil/gas lamps to electric arc to early incandescent to later incandescent to halogen to fluorescent to LEDs. We can now do with single watts for tens of thousands of hours and pennies of silicon/impurities what would once have taken dozens to hundreds of watts to kilowatts and lasting just hundreds of hours, tens of hours, or even mere minutes. Increasing abundance and efficiency for human goals is the definition of increasing overall wealth. Even given imbalance in ultimate distribution, the pie has absolutely grown larger. Massively humongously wildly larger. Positive spirals thankfully abound, such as better nutrition and knowledge of infectious disease at young ages yielding better outcomes and life expectancies for the rest of their lives. None of this is to downplay the importance of keeping inequality from going too far, but to even suggest it's a zero-sum game, that world economics are actually the same right now as they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, is frankly ludicrous. Edit: >E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees. That makes absolutely no sense as a standard or line of reasoning. The total sum has nothing inherently to do with how its divided, are you sure you're clear on definitions here? When something is zero-sum that means that for anyone to gain a larger percentage, someone else must necessarily lose a smaller percentage. But when the total sum itself is increasing then somebody could be gaining more and everyone else could also be gaining more, just not as much more as if it were equally split. Also, what is "too large of a %" and how do you know? And if the product costs $X, but previously other competing products cost 7*$X, and as a result the company is many times the size it would be otherwise, and in turn the % the employees get is still an absolute amount far larger then it would have been anywhere else, now what? Rather then thinking about fuzzy "proper %" it seems better to investigate power imbalances, human limit edge cases, information asymmetry, cost externalization, etc., that affect the equilibrium of the system. Of which there are many!
  - 6y ago
groby_b 6y ago
Imbalance is not a zero-sum issue. "Imagine four people got all the food, and the rest got another 20%" is still imbalanced, even with 120% of the food. And there still would be violence. The problem is that the benefits of anything not zero-sum disproportionately accrue to the people who already have more than enough. And that simultaneously zero-sum resources also disproportionately accrue to the ones who already have so much. It's not "playing a zero sum game" when you question why e.g. Bezos should accrue another $40 billion in net value, while hospitals struggle to provide PPE to their health care workers. It's not "a zero sum game" if you ask why we have a world where somebody can hoard $150 billion while 800 million people need to go hungry every day. Hugely disproportional resource allocation will break civilizations, zero-sum or not. (I'm fairly convinced that some inequality might contribute to a better society, but we've exceeded reasonable limits long ago)
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Your mention about hospitals makes me wonder whether we should call the problem "resource allocation". Maybe it's an issue of resource leaks? For example, hospitals get a lot of money, objectively, but there are also whole industries that parasite on that money, by overcharging, vendor-locking, encouraging waste, and doing all the kinds of shady things competitive companies tend to do.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    Yes, absolutely. Any economy is ultimately about efficient resource allocation. The question is then, how do you measure efficiency. Proponents of a more equal world argue that the current extreme imbalance is only "efficient" for a very small subset of the population, and likely inefficient both for the vast majority, and for long-term success of societies. The long-term question is basically a result of economies being feedback loops - if benefits accrue inequally, and capital results in opportunities, any system that doesn't have some negative feedback loops ultimately will amplify the inequality more and more. In extremis, that means one person with all the resources. I'd argue that this is an outcome that probably nobody wants. And in the context of OP: unless the total cake grows faster than the inequality, this holds true for non-zero-sum games, too. The world has experienced tremendous growth in the past. It doesn't right now (and it can't sustainably continue growth in many areas), so the question is, what feedback loops do we want in place.
xhkkffbf 6y ago
Exactly. Capitalism adds more wealth to the mix. The creators are incentivized to increase the size of the pie. Sure, they may take a lot on a percentage basis, but most people still do quite well. Places like Venezuela and Soviet Russia tried to distribute things equally and the richest people in those worlds had it worse than the 10th percentile in capitalist countries. This is why the Soviet Union had to build a wall to keep people in but the US is considering building a wall to keep people out. Just
- royaltheartist 6y ago
  40 million people are on track to being evicted in one of the biggest economic downturns in history. Except, the wealthy just got even more wealthy. This system is a failure for everyone that isn't in the 1%
  - blisseyGo 6y ago
    1. How's that the fault of the wealthy? Blame the politicians who are mandating crazy inconsistent policies of keeping big businesses open while closing the small businesses down. 2. A stock price going up is not exactly getting "richer".
    - ianleeclark 6y ago
      > How's that the fault of the wealthy? Blame the politicians who are mandating crazy inconsistent policies of keeping big businesses open while closing It's almost like capital ownership awards undue power that can then be used to further entrench power.
      - blisseyGo 6y ago
        If we are blaming them for further entrenching power, then we are also to blame ourselves who voted for the politicians to allow this to happen and to fall for propaganda from those same "rich" people. When the richest man in the US who happens to own the largest online shopping site and also uses his own newspaper to push more propaganda to push for more lockdowns - thus eliminating more competition from small businesses, is the richest man to be blamed or are the politicians listening to him and the people reading his propaganda newspaper and following orders to be blamed too? When all the massive multi-national corporations that have questionable hiring, firing, healthcare, worker's rights, and safety track records promote and sponsor your cause and your Revolution has corporate sponsorship, you are not a revolutionary, you are a pawn. It's just amazing how those who kept advocating for opening up small businesses and ending the lockdowns got called all sorts of names by the same people who complain about the rich getting richer.
5cott0 6y ago
Makes perfect sense when you consider that the author is a former McKinsey consultant.
rayiner 6y ago
Absolutely. If you divided up Bill Gates’ wealth among everyone in India and Bangladesh everyone would get $65. That would be a one-time redistribution. His contributions through the Gates foundation are immensely more valuable in the long run.
- munk-a 6y ago
  This isn't untrue but I think it's a naive approach. If that money was divided between the governments to spend for their citizen's welfare then they could also invest it to benefit their citizens. The question (the big one that America is super divided over) is which actor is better at allocating goods for public well-being, a billionaire who has proven (probably) they have good business acumen or the government that (ideally) exists to work for the benefit of the people. I have my personal opinion but I wanted to neutrally (I hope) highlight that this is the heart of the issue.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > This isn't untrue but I think it's a naive approach. If that money was divided between the governments to spend for their citizen's welfare then they could also invest it to benefit their citizens. Especially in the developing world, governments are more likely to piss away money given to them than to invest that money to the benefit of citizens. If governments were good at investing money communism would have worked. There would be no point having companies like Apple develop cell phones if the government could do it just as well without enriching shareholders in the process. We’d just have a government agency in charge of building cell phones and giving them away or selling them to citizens at cost. We don’t have a private sector for funsies. We have it because we recognize that governments aren’t good at investing money and producing results.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      I am of a split mind on that topic - on the one hand I agree with you that massive corruption is pretty commonplace within some governments... on the other hand you've been talking about India which (while not a great example of a lack of corruption) has managed to invest heavily into toilets to fight against an epidemic of rape aaaand, I'm concerned about falling into the colonialism trap of "We in the west know better" - that road doesn't lead to good things in the long run. I don't know which approach is better but I know that both roads contain pretty significant dangers and both contain benefits. Additionally, I'm not particularly interested in going down a path towards communism - the leninist soviet system was an utter failure but germany and scandinavia seem to be doing pretty alright - in fact, on the topic of cell phones, Nokia started out in Finland which is a pretty heavily socialist country. I think there are a lot of options on the spectrum between 1637s Dutch Capitalism and Leninist Soviets - both extremes result in failure and, IMO, all centrist solutions are constantly being pulled toward the nearer of the extremes and need to actively work to stay from slipping into those dark places.
alpha_squared 6y ago
I don't think you can have people who are wealthy without having people who aren't. Wealth is a relative measure, therefore there are those who aren't. Let's imagine a scenario where 400 people each have $1, the average wealth is therefore $1 per person. If, however, we have 1% of people (4 in the same scenario) have $2 each, the overall wealth is still $1 per person on average, however the 1% would have $2 per person and the remaining 99% would have $0.99 per person. If we skew that a little more, let's have 50% of the total wealth ($200) in the hands of the 1% (again, just 4 people). The average for the population is still $1 per person, but the 1% now have $50 each and the remaining 99% have just over $0.50 each. I get that this is an exercise in explaining what zero-sum is, something you don't believe this situation reflects, but it's important to recognize that people build wealth by acquiring it from somewhere else. If there was an infinite supply of money (there isn't), then we could have a conversation about this not being zero-sum. I don't think it's a good faith discussion to start with the assumption that money is infinite.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Money isn't infinite, but billionaires don't have a billion dollars of money. They have a billion dollars of assets, and it's very possible to create new assets without creating new money. When people say e.g. Zuckerberg is worth $100 billion, that doesn't mean $100 billion of money has flowed to him or is locked up in his vaults.
- pjmorris 6y ago
  On the other hand, money is one of the most plentiful, elements of the economy. "There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman Money is also the most fungible element of the economy. Given monetary policy, particularly the Fed's policies of the last decade or so, it is also not good faith to assume money as a constant.
  - alpha_squared 6y ago
    > it is also not good faith to assume money as a constant. Agreed. It's not constant and it's not infinite. The question then becomes at what rate does it grow and is that rate higher or lower than the stratification of wealth. If it's higher, it's either hyperinflation or wealth accumulation appears logarithmic in growth. If it's lower, it's either deflation or wealth accumulation appears exponential in growth. It appears to be lower and wealth accumulation does, indeed, appear to be exponential. We're also completely glossing over just who it is that's likely to be wealthy and suddenly it's not just an economic issue, but a socioeconomic one.
mistermann 6y ago
> Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game Is it not true that when the books are balanced at the end of a period, wealth resulting from economic activity within the period ends up distributed among the public such that not every person does not end up with an identical amount? If so, is it possible to state this without simultaneously believing that economics is a zero-sum game?
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  If I set fire to the fields, there is less wealth. Therefore, it's not zero-sum. A zero-sum game is one in which no strategy changes the amount of wealth available. There are clearly strategies that create or destroy wealth. Therefore, it's not a zero-sum game. (This does not imply that every player has ever-increasing wealth each turn.)
  - mistermann 6y ago
    I did not assert that wealth is a zero sum game, I was replying to this: >> Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence," "economics is not zero sum game", "correlation != causation", etc - certain ideas seem to be kind of like catnip for humans.
    - jordan_curve 6y ago
      If by catnip, you mean fundamental concepts that are routinely not understood, then yes.
      - mistermann 6y ago
        No, more like once the ideas are learned, they seem to excite the mind once a person is (or perceives to be) in the presence of an example. A loose variation of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon perhaps. It was not that long ago (a year or so? Just when the trade war rhetoric with China was heating up) when "lolololll, economics is not a zero sum game!!!" seemed to be a satisfactory dismissal of Trump's issues with China's trade practices, both in the media and in forums. Shortly after, when the various media outlets seemed to all have a spontaneous change of heart on the matter and get onto the same page of noticing that there actually is a fair amount of complexity involved in international trade, and since then I've read very little "zero-sum" talk on the matter. Perhaps a media blitz on this issue might help illuminate more of the unseen complexity in this situation, although that scenario seems a bit less likely to me.
antisocial 6y ago
Not a zero-sum game, the pie is growing etc are some of the reasons we tell ourselves so that we (the middle class knowledger workers) can sleep at night. I bought 'Winners take all' last year, but finally started reading it recently and finished more than 50%. I would like the commenters to read an author's work before criticizing it, otherwise you are the one who is making assumptions.
BrandonM 6y ago
This quote stood out to me, too. I'm not sure that the night would end in violence if it was the organizers of the dinner who took half the food. I feel like the more complete analogy is that 4 people organize the dinner (the elite 4). They make enough food for 1,000, distribute the best cuts out of about 100 meals among themselves, give the other 396 people 400 meals to share among themselves, and sell the other 500 meals to another party, pocketing an overall profit for their endeavor. Would the other 396 look at the elite 4 in envy? Awe? Hate? Appreciation? Would they enjoy the 400 meals in a fairly equal way, or would they fight over allocations? Would the elite 4 encourage fair distribution of the 400 meals, or would they encourage in-fighting among the other 396, causing sufficient turmoil to distract the other 396 from organizing their own elite-and-profitable meals? There are a lot of scenarios that don't end in violence, even if a lot of people leave with a bad taste in their mouths. I think it's a really interesting analogy, and it might even bolster the author's points about the importance of how elites behave and what systems they promote. It's too bad that the analogy was cut short with a reductionist assertion.
sg47 6y ago
Maybe a different way to look at this - "Imagine 400 people in a room. 10 can get all the food they can eat i.e unlimited food. 200 people get one plate of food. 100 people get half a plate of poor quality food. The rest get half a carrot". This situation lasts a week. What would happen?
- refurb 6y ago
  But you’re missing an important step. The government comes in and gives people who have little food, enough food. And of the food distributed, 70% of it comes from the top 50%.
rsweeney21 6y ago
This is such a bad analogy, I stopped listening to the rest of his arguments. Why did the four people get half the food? If it was because the organizer picked his four favorite people, sure, people would feel like it is unfair. That's a dictatorship. If it was because they planted the crops, tended the fields, and did all the work to harvest and prepare it, I don't think any reasonable person would complain. We feel like that is a fair outcome because most nations have collectively agreed that owning property is a fundamental human right. In the US it's the 5th amendment.
- ip26 6y ago
  I don't think any reasonable person would complain That depends on whether they are starving.
  - rsweeney21 6y ago
    That wasn't his analogy. "Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence." Hence my point that this is a bad analogy.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Sure, but in reality the people who tended the fields never get that much of the food - whether it's feudal lords or modern capitalists, labour never gets paid the full amount of what they've produced.
  - sillyphus 6y ago
    >labour never gets paid the full amount of what they've produced 1) I am certain there are laborers who get paid more than they produce. 2) Labor never takes the risk of providing capital.
- alpha_squared 6y ago
  If I may fix a major assumption, I'd like to acknowledge it: > If it was because they [enslaved or underpaid people who] planted the crops, tended the fields, and did all the work to harvest and prepare it, I don't think any reasonable person would complain. We feel like that is a fair outcome because most nations have collectively agreed that owning property is a fundamental human right. In the US it's the 5th amendment. All of a sudden it doesn't sound so reasonable and yet comes off a fair bit truer than the original.
jkingsbery 6y ago
Agreed. There wouldn't be violence. 396 people would say "forget this guy," and find somewhere that they could get food. People vote with their feet (and their wallet).

untilHellbanned 6y ago

What's the tangible evidence that the world is a positive-sum game? The tangible evidence to me seems to suggest it's a zero-sum game. E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees.

harryh 6y ago
The world is vastly richer today than it was in the past due to the development of new technologies and improved social systems.
- wwright 6y ago
  Did billionaires accelerate that, or did they just profit from it disproportionately while slowing it down?
  - tux1968 6y ago
    That's an interesting question, and I don't have an answer. But what you can not deny, is that the system that produced those billionaires, is the same one that produced such a rise in wealth and standard of living worldwide. We better be very careful about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      We should also consider being careful about how we divvy up the fruits of workers labour, lest they decide they're not happy with the current arrangement and the "wealth is not a zero sum game" style excuses, and proceed to throw out both the baby and the bathwater - or maybe something less dramatic, like elect a reality TV star to a second term as President, followed by who knows what after that.
    - wwright 6y ago
      I can’t deny that, but I can certainly point out that billionaires coinciding with the rise in quality does not mean that they were even produced by the same system, or that the presence of the billionaires was in any way necessary. To reframe your point: maybe we should be careful to identify where the baby is and spend a little less attention on what billionaires want.
      - tux1968 6y ago
        It seems pretty clear that capitalism tends to produce concentrations of wealth. Billionaires are created by capitalism because of this tendency. The question is if you can stop the tendency of capitalism without killing the system altogether. We just have to keep in mind, for all its faults, it has a track record of provably doing more for the well-being and prosperity of masses of average people more than any other system.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Billionaires are a byproduct of the market mechanisms that produces that wealth. They don’t “profit from it disproportionately” enough to justify messing with the system. (In the US, billionaires make only about 1.5% of total annual income.)
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      > They don’t “profit from it disproportionately” enough to justify messing with the system. (In the US, billionaires make only about 1.5% of total annual income.) What percentage does that equal on the lower end? You say it does not justify messing with the system, but what is that based on? What would you feel is an equitable distribution of wealth within a country?
  - vosper 6y ago
    Or did they accelerate it AND profit disproportionately from it? There are more than two possibilities here.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    That question isn't very useful. A better question would be: “does there exist a more effective system?” (“Does that system have billionaires?” is an interesting question, too.)
  - refurb 6y ago
    Did Jeff Bezos accelerate or slow progress for online shopping?
- StillBored 6y ago
  Richer if you put more value on having an addictive piece of electronics in your back pocket rather than a few acres of land to be self sufficient on. There are definite improvements (a fair amount of medical science), but I'm not sure on balance that the planetary destruction/extinctions/etc outweigh them. So, using made up GDP/capita numbers for justification that the world is "improving" is tenuous.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I do, as do most people. When you hear talk about subsistence farmers who live on less than a dollar a day and don't have running water, that's what the "few acres of land to be self sufficient on" lifestyle looks like in the absence of a strong market economy.
    - StillBored 6y ago
      Have you looked at the homeless in your city? Sure they might be fed with cheap food, but they are living under bridges. So, that is what a "strong market economy" gets you too. So don't compare the worse case subsistence farmer, with what was middle class in the US a few decades ago, where suburban houses on a couple acres were affordable my the top 70% of the population. We have more trinkets, but the price of basic necessities are becoming more "expensive" every day.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        These are the average case subsistence farmers. The worst case ones live even harder lives than an homeless person, very often dying of starvation after a bad harvest. The middle class in the US a few decades ago lived pretty good lives, but were very much dependent on market economies and innovation for their standard of living.
  - jerf 6y ago
    You can easily have "a few acres of land to be self-sufficent on". Clearly you don't value that, so you don't have it. If you actually value it, go get it.
- untilHellbanned 6y ago
  Show me what that math looks like where there is a positive number to the left of the equal sign.
  - harryh 6y ago
    Here it is in graph form: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capita-across-countries-and-regions https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...
    - untilHellbanned 6y ago
      Comparing eras doesn't seem very useful. 90 years ago my grandma got one orange as a present once a year. Today people buy bags of oranges every day. Day-by-day the world is zero sum.
      - harryh 6y ago
        In order to get from "one orange as a present once a year" to "bags of oranges every day" each day has to (on average) see a small amount of growth.
xhkkffbf 6y ago
More capitalism creates more products. If the world were just a bunch of fields with a static farm economy and no innovation in cultivation, then your point would be correct. But innovation increases the size of the pie. Yeah, the jealous may focus on the percentage kept by these innovators, but they really should be looking at the share of the pie. Socialism is all about making sure that everyone is equally miserable.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  If that's your analogy, then capitalism is about making a few people happy at the expense of everyone else. We collectively are not done, yet. We can still make it better for everyone. Let's at least _try_ new ideas.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    As someone from a third world country where people live in poverty, my view is that new ideas are bad and dangerous. There is a blueprint for poor countries to become wealthy ones: free markets, rule of law, liberal democracy. It’s how the countries that are currently rich became rich. It worked in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. Its working in myriad other countries. While academics fuck around with “new ideas” progress is deferred and people suffer in poverty.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      A lot of really bad ideas have been tried and failed to work in this world and we should learn from them - that said I don't know if America's version of a liberal democracy has proven itself to be that great in the long run. There was a period of extreme common wealth growth but after WW2 (about the eighties) that's mostly dried up. While we need to recognize failures abroad (i.e. the Soviet system implemented by Lenin and its offshoots) I think our own system needs some active maintenance to be rebalanced. Lately the extremes have grown too wide and we need to do like Teddy and break up some of the big concentrations of wealth so that the engine can keep running clean for another half-century or so. It's misleading to think of any democratic style government as being in stasis - the world is constantly in flux.
leetcrew 6y ago
> E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees. this is orthogonal to the economy being positive/negative/zero sum. if total real wealth increases over time, the world is positive sum, regardless of how that wealth is distributed. positive sum doesn't imply that everyone gets wealthier over time, only that it's possible for people to get wealthier without it being directly at the expense of others.
- untilHellbanned 6y ago
  So because a homeless person today has $1, can sleep under a bridge in a jacket they got from Goodwill rather than $0.05 like 50 years ago or sleeping under a tree possibly getting eaten by wolves, this means the world is positive sum? Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    > So because a homeless person today has $1, can sleep under a bridge in a jacket they got from Goodwill rather than $0.05 like 50 years ago or sleeping under a tree possibly getting eaten by wolves, this means the world is positive sum? I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this question. the homeless person could even be worse off today than they were fifty years ago, and the economy could simultaneously be positive-sum. suppose you have an economy with two people that each start with $100k. if after 10 years, one person has $500k and the other has nothing, this is a positive-sum game because the total gains exceed the total losses. positive sum does not imply that everyone, or even most people, will become wealthier over time. > Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game. if you pick an infinitesimally small window of time where nothing can be produced, then sure, I guess you could say any changes in wealth would have to be zero-sum (assuming you could somehow transfer wealth instantly). I don't really think this is a useful analysis though. over the course of a whole day, the economy could be positive, negative, or zero sum. it depends on how much total wealth was created and destroyed on that day. even in an hour, I could create something of value that didn't exist before, or an explosion could go off in a port causing billions of dollars worth of damage.
xoa 6y ago
>What's the tangible evidence that the world is a positive-sum game? LEDs. To take one very specific, simple example, though feel free to substitute in everything from computers to engines. Fundamentally, we have both increased our average energy budget per person and we can accomplish far more of what we want to do for far less energy. Taking the basic general goal of "I wish to have visible photons available to me at a sufficient level for my eyes to work well at arbitrary times and places", compare the total costs and % of resources converted to the goal vs wasted as heat/losses/externalities of say torches to oil/gas lamps to electric arc to early incandescent to later incandescent to halogen to fluorescent to LEDs. We can now do with single watts for tens of thousands of hours and pennies of silicon/impurities what would once have taken dozens to hundreds of watts to kilowatts and lasting just hundreds of hours, tens of hours, or even mere minutes. Increasing abundance and efficiency for human goals is the definition of increasing overall wealth. Even given imbalance in ultimate distribution, the pie has absolutely grown larger. Massively humongously wildly larger. Positive spirals thankfully abound, such as better nutrition and knowledge of infectious disease at young ages yielding better outcomes and life expectancies for the rest of their lives. None of this is to downplay the importance of keeping inequality from going too far, but to even suggest it's a zero-sum game, that world economics are actually the same right now as they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, is frankly ludicrous. Edit: >E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees. That makes absolutely no sense as a standard or line of reasoning. The total sum has nothing inherently to do with how its divided, are you sure you're clear on definitions here? When something is zero-sum that means that for anyone to gain a larger percentage, someone else must necessarily lose a smaller percentage. But when the total sum itself is increasing then somebody could be gaining more and everyone else could also be gaining more, just not as much more as if it were equally split. Also, what is "too large of a %" and how do you know? And if the product costs $X, but previously other competing products cost 7*$X, and as a result the company is many times the size it would be otherwise, and in turn the % the employees get is still an absolute amount far larger then it would have been anywhere else, now what? Rather then thinking about fuzzy "proper %" it seems better to investigate power imbalances, human limit edge cases, information asymmetry, cost externalization, etc., that affect the equilibrium of the system. Of which there are many!
- 6y ago

groby_b 6y ago

Imbalance is not a zero-sum issue. "Imagine four people got all the food, and the rest got another 20%" is still imbalanced, even with 120% of the food. And there still would be violence. The problem is that the benefits of anything not zero-sum disproportionately accrue to the people who already have more than enough. And that simultaneously zero-sum resources also disproportionately accrue to the ones who already have so much. It's not "playing a zero sum game" when you question why e.g. Bezos should accrue another $40 billion in net value, while hospitals struggle to provide PPE to their health care workers. It's not "a zero sum game" if you ask why we have a world where somebody can hoard $150 billion while 800 million people need to go hungry every day. Hugely disproportional resource allocation will break civilizations, zero-sum or not. (I'm fairly convinced that some inequality might contribute to a better society, but we've exceeded reasonable limits long ago)

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Your mention about hospitals makes me wonder whether we should call the problem "resource allocation". Maybe it's an issue of resource leaks? For example, hospitals get a lot of money, objectively, but there are also whole industries that parasite on that money, by overcharging, vendor-locking, encouraging waste, and doing all the kinds of shady things competitive companies tend to do.
- groby_b 6y ago
  Yes, absolutely. Any economy is ultimately about efficient resource allocation. The question is then, how do you measure efficiency. Proponents of a more equal world argue that the current extreme imbalance is only "efficient" for a very small subset of the population, and likely inefficient both for the vast majority, and for long-term success of societies. The long-term question is basically a result of economies being feedback loops - if benefits accrue inequally, and capital results in opportunities, any system that doesn't have some negative feedback loops ultimately will amplify the inequality more and more. In extremis, that means one person with all the resources. I'd argue that this is an outcome that probably nobody wants. And in the context of OP: unless the total cake grows faster than the inequality, this holds true for non-zero-sum games, too. The world has experienced tremendous growth in the past. It doesn't right now (and it can't sustainably continue growth in many areas), so the question is, what feedback loops do we want in place.

xhkkffbf 6y ago

Exactly. Capitalism adds more wealth to the mix. The creators are incentivized to increase the size of the pie. Sure, they may take a lot on a percentage basis, but most people still do quite well. Places like Venezuela and Soviet Russia tried to distribute things equally and the richest people in those worlds had it worse than the 10th percentile in capitalist countries. This is why the Soviet Union had to build a wall to keep people in but the US is considering building a wall to keep people out. Just

royaltheartist 6y ago
40 million people are on track to being evicted in one of the biggest economic downturns in history. Except, the wealthy just got even more wealthy. This system is a failure for everyone that isn't in the 1%
- blisseyGo 6y ago
  1. How's that the fault of the wealthy? Blame the politicians who are mandating crazy inconsistent policies of keeping big businesses open while closing the small businesses down. 2. A stock price going up is not exactly getting "richer".
  - ianleeclark 6y ago
    > How's that the fault of the wealthy? Blame the politicians who are mandating crazy inconsistent policies of keeping big businesses open while closing It's almost like capital ownership awards undue power that can then be used to further entrench power.
    - blisseyGo 6y ago
      If we are blaming them for further entrenching power, then we are also to blame ourselves who voted for the politicians to allow this to happen and to fall for propaganda from those same "rich" people. When the richest man in the US who happens to own the largest online shopping site and also uses his own newspaper to push more propaganda to push for more lockdowns - thus eliminating more competition from small businesses, is the richest man to be blamed or are the politicians listening to him and the people reading his propaganda newspaper and following orders to be blamed too? When all the massive multi-national corporations that have questionable hiring, firing, healthcare, worker's rights, and safety track records promote and sponsor your cause and your Revolution has corporate sponsorship, you are not a revolutionary, you are a pawn. It's just amazing how those who kept advocating for opening up small businesses and ending the lockdowns got called all sorts of names by the same people who complain about the rich getting richer.

5cott0 6y ago

Makes perfect sense when you consider that the author is a former McKinsey consultant.

rayiner 6y ago

Absolutely. If you divided up Bill Gates’ wealth among everyone in India and Bangladesh everyone would get $65. That would be a one-time redistribution. His contributions through the Gates foundation are immensely more valuable in the long run.

munk-a 6y ago
This isn't untrue but I think it's a naive approach. If that money was divided between the governments to spend for their citizen's welfare then they could also invest it to benefit their citizens. The question (the big one that America is super divided over) is which actor is better at allocating goods for public well-being, a billionaire who has proven (probably) they have good business acumen or the government that (ideally) exists to work for the benefit of the people. I have my personal opinion but I wanted to neutrally (I hope) highlight that this is the heart of the issue.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > This isn't untrue but I think it's a naive approach. If that money was divided between the governments to spend for their citizen's welfare then they could also invest it to benefit their citizens. Especially in the developing world, governments are more likely to piss away money given to them than to invest that money to the benefit of citizens. If governments were good at investing money communism would have worked. There would be no point having companies like Apple develop cell phones if the government could do it just as well without enriching shareholders in the process. We’d just have a government agency in charge of building cell phones and giving them away or selling them to citizens at cost. We don’t have a private sector for funsies. We have it because we recognize that governments aren’t good at investing money and producing results.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I am of a split mind on that topic - on the one hand I agree with you that massive corruption is pretty commonplace within some governments... on the other hand you've been talking about India which (while not a great example of a lack of corruption) has managed to invest heavily into toilets to fight against an epidemic of rape aaaand, I'm concerned about falling into the colonialism trap of "We in the west know better" - that road doesn't lead to good things in the long run. I don't know which approach is better but I know that both roads contain pretty significant dangers and both contain benefits. Additionally, I'm not particularly interested in going down a path towards communism - the leninist soviet system was an utter failure but germany and scandinavia seem to be doing pretty alright - in fact, on the topic of cell phones, Nokia started out in Finland which is a pretty heavily socialist country. I think there are a lot of options on the spectrum between 1637s Dutch Capitalism and Leninist Soviets - both extremes result in failure and, IMO, all centrist solutions are constantly being pulled toward the nearer of the extremes and need to actively work to stay from slipping into those dark places.

alpha_squared 6y ago

I don't think you can have people who are wealthy without having people who aren't. Wealth is a relative measure, therefore there are those who aren't. Let's imagine a scenario where 400 people each have $1, the average wealth is therefore $1 per person. If, however, we have 1% of people (4 in the same scenario) have $2 each, the overall wealth is still $1 per person on average, however the 1% would have $2 per person and the remaining 99% would have $0.99 per person. If we skew that a little more, let's have 50% of the total wealth ($200) in the hands of the 1% (again, just 4 people). The average for the population is still $1 per person, but the 1% now have $50 each and the remaining 99% have just over $0.50 each. I get that this is an exercise in explaining what zero-sum is, something you don't believe this situation reflects, but it's important to recognize that people build wealth by acquiring it from somewhere else. If there was an infinite supply of money (there isn't), then we could have a conversation about this not being zero-sum. I don't think it's a good faith discussion to start with the assumption that money is infinite.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Money isn't infinite, but billionaires don't have a billion dollars of money. They have a billion dollars of assets, and it's very possible to create new assets without creating new money. When people say e.g. Zuckerberg is worth $100 billion, that doesn't mean $100 billion of money has flowed to him or is locked up in his vaults.
pjmorris 6y ago
On the other hand, money is one of the most plentiful, elements of the economy. "There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman Money is also the most fungible element of the economy. Given monetary policy, particularly the Fed's policies of the last decade or so, it is also not good faith to assume money as a constant.
- alpha_squared 6y ago
  > it is also not good faith to assume money as a constant. Agreed. It's not constant and it's not infinite. The question then becomes at what rate does it grow and is that rate higher or lower than the stratification of wealth. If it's higher, it's either hyperinflation or wealth accumulation appears logarithmic in growth. If it's lower, it's either deflation or wealth accumulation appears exponential in growth. It appears to be lower and wealth accumulation does, indeed, appear to be exponential. We're also completely glossing over just who it is that's likely to be wealthy and suddenly it's not just an economic issue, but a socioeconomic one.

mistermann 6y ago

> Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game Is it not true that when the books are balanced at the end of a period, wealth resulting from economic activity within the period ends up distributed among the public such that not every person does not end up with an identical amount? If so, is it possible to state this without simultaneously believing that economics is a zero-sum game?

wizzwizz4 6y ago
If I set fire to the fields, there is less wealth. Therefore, it's not zero-sum. A zero-sum game is one in which no strategy changes the amount of wealth available. There are clearly strategies that create or destroy wealth. Therefore, it's not a zero-sum game. (This does not imply that every player has ever-increasing wealth each turn.)
- mistermann 6y ago
  I did not assert that wealth is a zero sum game, I was replying to this: >> Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence," "economics is not zero sum game", "correlation != causation", etc - certain ideas seem to be kind of like catnip for humans.
  - jordan_curve 6y ago
    If by catnip, you mean fundamental concepts that are routinely not understood, then yes.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      No, more like once the ideas are learned, they seem to excite the mind once a person is (or perceives to be) in the presence of an example. A loose variation of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon perhaps. It was not that long ago (a year or so? Just when the trade war rhetoric with China was heating up) when "lolololll, economics is not a zero sum game!!!" seemed to be a satisfactory dismissal of Trump's issues with China's trade practices, both in the media and in forums. Shortly after, when the various media outlets seemed to all have a spontaneous change of heart on the matter and get onto the same page of noticing that there actually is a fair amount of complexity involved in international trade, and since then I've read very little "zero-sum" talk on the matter. Perhaps a media blitz on this issue might help illuminate more of the unseen complexity in this situation, although that scenario seems a bit less likely to me.

antisocial 6y ago

Not a zero-sum game, the pie is growing etc are some of the reasons we tell ourselves so that we (the middle class knowledger workers) can sleep at night. I bought 'Winners take all' last year, but finally started reading it recently and finished more than 50%. I would like the commenters to read an author's work before criticizing it, otherwise you are the one who is making assumptions.

BrandonM 6y ago

This quote stood out to me, too. I'm not sure that the night would end in violence if it was the organizers of the dinner who took half the food. I feel like the more complete analogy is that 4 people organize the dinner (the elite 4). They make enough food for 1,000, distribute the best cuts out of about 100 meals among themselves, give the other 396 people 400 meals to share among themselves, and sell the other 500 meals to another party, pocketing an overall profit for their endeavor. Would the other 396 look at the elite 4 in envy? Awe? Hate? Appreciation? Would they enjoy the 400 meals in a fairly equal way, or would they fight over allocations? Would the elite 4 encourage fair distribution of the 400 meals, or would they encourage in-fighting among the other 396, causing sufficient turmoil to distract the other 396 from organizing their own elite-and-profitable meals? There are a lot of scenarios that don't end in violence, even if a lot of people leave with a bad taste in their mouths. I think it's a really interesting analogy, and it might even bolster the author's points about the importance of how elites behave and what systems they promote. It's too bad that the analogy was cut short with a reductionist assertion.

sg47 6y ago

Maybe a different way to look at this - "Imagine 400 people in a room. 10 can get all the food they can eat i.e unlimited food. 200 people get one plate of food. 100 people get half a plate of poor quality food. The rest get half a carrot". This situation lasts a week. What would happen?

refurb 6y ago
But you’re missing an important step. The government comes in and gives people who have little food, enough food. And of the food distributed, 70% of it comes from the top 50%.

rsweeney21 6y ago

This is such a bad analogy, I stopped listening to the rest of his arguments. Why did the four people get half the food? If it was because the organizer picked his four favorite people, sure, people would feel like it is unfair. That's a dictatorship. If it was because they planted the crops, tended the fields, and did all the work to harvest and prepare it, I don't think any reasonable person would complain. We feel like that is a fair outcome because most nations have collectively agreed that owning property is a fundamental human right. In the US it's the 5th amendment.

ip26 6y ago
I don't think any reasonable person would complain That depends on whether they are starving.
- rsweeney21 6y ago
  That wasn't his analogy. "Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence." Hence my point that this is a bad analogy.
tsimionescu 6y ago
Sure, but in reality the people who tended the fields never get that much of the food - whether it's feudal lords or modern capitalists, labour never gets paid the full amount of what they've produced.
- sillyphus 6y ago
  >labour never gets paid the full amount of what they've produced 1) I am certain there are laborers who get paid more than they produce. 2) Labor never takes the risk of providing capital.
alpha_squared 6y ago
If I may fix a major assumption, I'd like to acknowledge it: > If it was because they [enslaved or underpaid people who] planted the crops, tended the fields, and did all the work to harvest and prepare it, I don't think any reasonable person would complain. We feel like that is a fair outcome because most nations have collectively agreed that owning property is a fundamental human right. In the US it's the 5th amendment. All of a sudden it doesn't sound so reasonable and yet comes off a fair bit truer than the original.

jkingsbery 6y ago

Agreed. There wouldn't be violence. 396 people would say "forget this guy," and find somewhere that they could get food. People vote with their feet (and their wallet).