6 ms·

One reason is how much ever we try to disagree, the socio economic construct is still a zero sum game with an ever increasing pie. People who argue otherwise po

One reason is how much ever we try to disagree, the socio economic construct is still a zero sum game with an ever increasing pie. People who argue otherwise point to the size of the pie without practically ever stating what those in difficult positions can realistically do to get more of it. Other reasons are that honestly there is not much "real work" to be done so we can argue that a very small % of existing population suffices for maintaining the system. The tiny elite (countries, billionares, intellectuals) essentially work towards maintaining their control over the system and resources.

mcv 4y ago
But if the pie increases, it's not really a zero sum game, is it?
- snidane 4y ago
  Entities without competition inflate prices until they capture all the extra new pie. You receive increase in salary from your boss one year and next year it gets eaten away by monopolies like healthcare, education, housing and landlords.
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    Rent seeking may be zero sum, but the economy as a whole not. If we banned rent seeking the economy would likely grow faster. You could argue that's changing the game, but the economy is a weird one in that changing the game is part of the game.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      We do ban a lot of rent seeking, though. For example, theft and fraud are rent-seeking activities. So the sorts of rent seeking that you still see are the ones that are hardest to ban.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Banning rent seeking doesn't work. Christianity tried banning interest and it just causes non Christians to offer lending services which then results in xenophobia. Interest payments partially derive from the liquidity services provided by market participants (think long opening hours and storing products ahead of time). Money effectively becomes a public institution where people voluntarily give it value in the form of liquidity services. That public institution is then kept in private hands who lend out money and then get to market these liquidity services as if they provided the public institution themselves. Basically someone else does the work and you get to benefit. The answer to this problem is a demurrage fee on cash. Banks can then compete by offering the ideal negative rate that is in proportion to the liquidity premium. Banks can then use this fee to pay for liquidity services. Is anyone doing this? No and I don't think it will happen in the next 30 years.
      - brutusborn 4y ago
        So rent seeking doesn't work because a long time ago one subpopulation banned it and it didn't work for the population as a whole? That's ridiculous. It's like saying prohibition in the US didn't work because booze was legal in Canada.
- brutusborn 4y ago
  I think the logical fallacy is thinking about the economy as a steady state system. At any given time there are finite resources, so it is "zero sum" in that the pie is finite and slices can only be shared once.
  - wizeman 4y ago
    That's not zero sum. The pie can be 100% finite and yet, while everything else remains equal, two people can both benefit and be happier at the same time by simply (and voluntarily) exchanging a good or service between them, because they value those things differently at that point in time. If I have 10 chickens and you have 10 goats, we can exchange between us and each of us would simultaneously benefit more from having 5 chickens and 5 goats each, even though the pie hasn't changed. Or maybe I prefer to have 8 chickens and 2 goats, while you prefer to have 8 goats and 2 chickens, and both be happier as a result by exchanging between us while the entire pie has remained exactly the same. So happiness/usefulness/value was created by the exchange of goods and services even though the pie hasn't changed at all. Also, these preferences can change over time, so value can continue to be created even if the pie doesn't change.
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      I agree :)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
realgeniushere 4y ago
What are you talking about? Everyone is eating bigger pieces of pie these days. A lot of the things we take for granted weren’t even available to wealthy people one or two hundred years ago. Electricity, running water, sewage, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, effective surgery, motorized transport, sturdy housing. Not to mention the increasingly universal availability of education. Sure, some people still live in squalor, but it’s a rapidly shrinking percent of the world.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
  the developing world does not have access to TV Refrigerator and to a lesser extent Cellphone and our society and tech as we know it cannot produce the energy they need to power these appliances
  - lezojeda 4y ago
    What do you mean by developing world? I live in Argentina, developing world afaik, and I have all of that. Majority of people here does.
docdeek 4y ago
FTA: In 2019 there were about 648 million people living in extreme poverty, subsisting on the equivalent of $2.15 per day or less. Those 648 million people made up 8.4% of world population — representing an improvement over 1990, when 35.9% of people lived on that little. This seems to be the inverse of a zero-sum game: the West might have got a lot richer, but hundreds of millions of people were lifeted out of extreme poverty at the same time.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  I wonder though - this growth has been largely taken out of ignoring an externality: the environment. We are living a global extinction event which will show up in the fossil record.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  > equivalent of $2.15 But what does this even mean? The buying power of the dollar (or its “equivalent”) where those people live can be much higher than in the US. (Unless you mean to compare with living on that much per day in the US.)
  - laputan_machine 4y ago
    Even then, $2.15 in Jackson, MS will get you further than $2.15 in NYC.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    It means you have to spend close to your entire income to buy enough rice to not starve each day. Basically you are a subsistence farmer or equivalent, you don't have time or energy to do much else than work to not starve. You can't save up to buy a bike or a book, just work for food, all day entire life. Add a bit more income and suddenly people can afford bikes and books if they save up, that is the lowest point necessary for people to start to pull themselves up and improve their society which is why it is so important to get as many people as possible to at least that level.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  that reduction in inequality did probably come at the expense of the first world's middle class though, a process that may not be completed.
ninkendo 4y ago
If there has to be poor people in order for there to be rich people, let’s make robots be the poor people. The best endgame we can probably hope for is for there to be a sustainably small number of really comfortable, happy humans on this planet, and an army of robot servants/AI to keep us all fat and happy.
- danparsonson 4y ago
  But the tiny proportion of very rich people can never get enough and therefore what will actually happen is we'll end up with an army of robot servants making the rich people richer and more comfortable, while the rest of us fight over the scraps.
- brutusborn 4y ago
  I used to have the same utopic dream, but I have started to question whether a "small number" is actually desireable. If everyone on earth is working on great things, having more people might be better. Maybe even Elons vision of people spilling out into the stars.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Everyone on Earth is contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem. "Spilling out into the stars" is impossible, there aren't enough physical resources.
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      But there must be a subset that isn't? A perfect sized human resource footprint to match earths carrying capacity? And I'm not aware of any current physical limits to space colonization? I thought the main limit was energy, and the sun has a lot to give for a while.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    This is impossible with baseline humans, no matter how good you make education (without slipping into much heavier indoctrination).
greenbit 4y ago
"The tiny elite (countries, billionares, intellectuals) ..” Hold up. Intellectuals? How many 'intellectuals' own personal helicopters, mega-yachts, mansions? Or hey for that matter, even regular old homes?
imtringued 4y ago
The problem is that people think money is wealth, it is merely a claim to wealth. Each dollar is backed by a dollar of debt. That makes sense but it doesn't mean having more dollars means more wealth, it just means more dollars are necessary to run the economy. If anything, a worshipping of money as wealth results in the opposite problem. People think they are wealthier than they are and then get disappointed, which is why governments and economists insist on permanent growth as debt increases. A lot of wealth is not in the form of a stock but in the form of a flow. The wealth is alive so to speak and you must keep it alive if you want to benefit.

mcv 4y ago

But if the pie increases, it's not really a zero sum game, is it?

snidane 4y ago
Entities without competition inflate prices until they capture all the extra new pie. You receive increase in salary from your boss one year and next year it gets eaten away by monopolies like healthcare, education, housing and landlords.
- brutusborn 4y ago
  Rent seeking may be zero sum, but the economy as a whole not. If we banned rent seeking the economy would likely grow faster. You could argue that's changing the game, but the economy is a weird one in that changing the game is part of the game.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    We do ban a lot of rent seeking, though. For example, theft and fraud are rent-seeking activities. So the sorts of rent seeking that you still see are the ones that are hardest to ban.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Banning rent seeking doesn't work. Christianity tried banning interest and it just causes non Christians to offer lending services which then results in xenophobia. Interest payments partially derive from the liquidity services provided by market participants (think long opening hours and storing products ahead of time). Money effectively becomes a public institution where people voluntarily give it value in the form of liquidity services. That public institution is then kept in private hands who lend out money and then get to market these liquidity services as if they provided the public institution themselves. Basically someone else does the work and you get to benefit. The answer to this problem is a demurrage fee on cash. Banks can then compete by offering the ideal negative rate that is in proportion to the liquidity premium. Banks can then use this fee to pay for liquidity services. Is anyone doing this? No and I don't think it will happen in the next 30 years.
    - brutusborn 4y ago
      So rent seeking doesn't work because a long time ago one subpopulation banned it and it didn't work for the population as a whole? That's ridiculous. It's like saying prohibition in the US didn't work because booze was legal in Canada.
brutusborn 4y ago
I think the logical fallacy is thinking about the economy as a steady state system. At any given time there are finite resources, so it is "zero sum" in that the pie is finite and slices can only be shared once.
- wizeman 4y ago
  That's not zero sum. The pie can be 100% finite and yet, while everything else remains equal, two people can both benefit and be happier at the same time by simply (and voluntarily) exchanging a good or service between them, because they value those things differently at that point in time. If I have 10 chickens and you have 10 goats, we can exchange between us and each of us would simultaneously benefit more from having 5 chickens and 5 goats each, even though the pie hasn't changed. Or maybe I prefer to have 8 chickens and 2 goats, while you prefer to have 8 goats and 2 chickens, and both be happier as a result by exchanging between us while the entire pie has remained exactly the same. So happiness/usefulness/value was created by the exchange of goods and services even though the pie hasn't changed at all. Also, these preferences can change over time, so value can continue to be created even if the pie doesn't change.
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    I agree :)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

realgeniushere 4y ago

What are you talking about? Everyone is eating bigger pieces of pie these days. A lot of the things we take for granted weren’t even available to wealthy people one or two hundred years ago. Electricity, running water, sewage, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, effective surgery, motorized transport, sturdy housing. Not to mention the increasingly universal availability of education. Sure, some people still live in squalor, but it’s a rapidly shrinking percent of the world.

dr-detroit 4y ago
the developing world does not have access to TV Refrigerator and to a lesser extent Cellphone and our society and tech as we know it cannot produce the energy they need to power these appliances
- lezojeda 4y ago
  What do you mean by developing world? I live in Argentina, developing world afaik, and I have all of that. Majority of people here does.

docdeek 4y ago

FTA: In 2019 there were about 648 million people living in extreme poverty, subsisting on the equivalent of $2.15 per day or less. Those 648 million people made up 8.4% of world population — representing an improvement over 1990, when 35.9% of people lived on that little. This seems to be the inverse of a zero-sum game: the West might have got a lot richer, but hundreds of millions of people were lifeted out of extreme poverty at the same time.

actionfromafar 4y ago
I wonder though - this growth has been largely taken out of ignoring an externality: the environment. We are living a global extinction event which will show up in the fossil record.
Koshkin 4y ago
> equivalent of $2.15 But what does this even mean? The buying power of the dollar (or its “equivalent”) where those people live can be much higher than in the US. (Unless you mean to compare with living on that much per day in the US.)
- laputan_machine 4y ago
  Even then, $2.15 in Jackson, MS will get you further than $2.15 in NYC.
- Jensson 4y ago
  It means you have to spend close to your entire income to buy enough rice to not starve each day. Basically you are a subsistence farmer or equivalent, you don't have time or energy to do much else than work to not starve. You can't save up to buy a bike or a book, just work for food, all day entire life. Add a bit more income and suddenly people can afford bikes and books if they save up, that is the lowest point necessary for people to start to pull themselves up and improve their society which is why it is so important to get as many people as possible to at least that level.
SuoDuanDao 4y ago
that reduction in inequality did probably come at the expense of the first world's middle class though, a process that may not be completed.

ninkendo 4y ago

If there has to be poor people in order for there to be rich people, let’s make robots be the poor people. The best endgame we can probably hope for is for there to be a sustainably small number of really comfortable, happy humans on this planet, and an army of robot servants/AI to keep us all fat and happy.

danparsonson 4y ago
But the tiny proportion of very rich people can never get enough and therefore what will actually happen is we'll end up with an army of robot servants making the rich people richer and more comfortable, while the rest of us fight over the scraps.
brutusborn 4y ago
I used to have the same utopic dream, but I have started to question whether a "small number" is actually desireable. If everyone on earth is working on great things, having more people might be better. Maybe even Elons vision of people spilling out into the stars.
- lupire 4y ago
  Everyone on Earth is contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem. "Spilling out into the stars" is impossible, there aren't enough physical resources.
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    But there must be a subset that isn't? A perfect sized human resource footprint to match earths carrying capacity? And I'm not aware of any current physical limits to space colonization? I thought the main limit was energy, and the sun has a lot to give for a while.
- hoseja 4y ago
  This is impossible with baseline humans, no matter how good you make education (without slipping into much heavier indoctrination).

greenbit 4y ago

"The tiny elite (countries, billionares, intellectuals) ..” Hold up. Intellectuals? How many 'intellectuals' own personal helicopters, mega-yachts, mansions? Or hey for that matter, even regular old homes?

imtringued 4y ago

The problem is that people think money is wealth, it is merely a claim to wealth. Each dollar is backed by a dollar of debt. That makes sense but it doesn't mean having more dollars means more wealth, it just means more dollars are necessary to run the economy. If anything, a worshipping of money as wealth results in the opposite problem. People think they are wealthier than they are and then get disappointed, which is why governments and economists insist on permanent growth as debt increases. A lot of wealth is not in the form of a stock but in the form of a flow. The wealth is alive so to speak and you must keep it alive if you want to benefit.