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> Wealth isn't zero-sum. Of course it is. We live on a planet with finite resources; everything here is zero-sum. I don't buy the myth that we can create value

> Wealth isn't zero-sum. Of course it is. We live on a planet with finite resources; everything here is zero-sum. I don't buy the myth that we can create value from nothing. Some people are just better at socializing their harmful byproducts.

Negitivefrags 3y ago
So if I have some wood, and I create a chair out of it, would you would say that nothing of value was created? Previously we had some lumber worth $10 and now we have a chair worth $250 dollars. Where did the $240 dollars come from? Was it stolen from somebody else?
- notpachet 3y ago
  Where did the wood come from? Where did the calories you used to make the chair come from? Where did your tools come from? Who trained you? Who owns the property where your workshop is located? How much marketing effort did you have to spend convincing another human that the chair is actually worth $250? What potentially carcinogenic chemicals did you treat the wood with, and how much grant money is your government giving to doctors to treat the consequences of those carcinogens in the larger population? All of those factors have hidden externalities baked into them that erode the net value you're creating. My argument is that it's all just a shell game where we're passing costs down the line to future generations while telling ourselves we're creating something valuable from nothing because it's what we need to do to sleep at night. We just don't perceive the longer-term externalities in a lot of cases.
  - Negitivefrags 3y ago
    I'm not going to claim that all externalities are priced. There is certainly a lot more that we could do. But many of them are. The cost of the calories, the tools, the training, the property, and the marketing are certainly all priced. But let's just say that you priced all of the externalities perfectly. In this hypothetical example, can you really make an argument that all of that adds up to more than, say, 100 dollars? And if you can't, then you still have a lot of "value" to account for.
    - notpachet 3y ago
      If all the externalities are perfectly priced at $100, then that's the value of the chair. At that point the extra $150 you manage to get out of the buyer is just grift, not extra value produced from thin air.
henvic 3y ago
Value is subjective. It's not from nothing. It's from human action. In an oversimplification, when Peter decides to do business with Paul and Paul is interested in taking his business it's because both believe they'll be better off after that. Now you could [prematurely] argue that there might be externalities and so on, but you must recognize that that action of trading in itself can be seen as something that is going to increase the overall wealth of both as they'll be more satisfied after the fact (assuming everything goes well).
gottorf 3y ago
> We live on a planet with finite resources; everything here is zero-sum. This isn't even true at a cosmic scale, let alone in human scales. Planet Earth receives exogenous energy from the sun. You want an example of creating value from nothing? Say your choice this evening was to sit on the couch and do nothing versus charge your neighbor $20 to clean up his yard of fallen leaves. By choosing the latter, you have created $20 of value for your neighbor where none existed before. > Some people are just better at socializing their harmful byproducts. This is trivially true, but you make the great leap of equating all wealth creation to an arbitrage in externalities.
- notpachet 3y ago
  > you make the great leap of equating all wealth creation to an arbitrage in externalities. I do indeed. I think on a long-enough timeframe, all human activity is just externality arbitrage.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    As Keynes said, in the long run, we are all dead.

Negitivefrags 3y ago

So if I have some wood, and I create a chair out of it, would you would say that nothing of value was created? Previously we had some lumber worth $10 and now we have a chair worth $250 dollars. Where did the $240 dollars come from? Was it stolen from somebody else?

notpachet 3y ago
Where did the wood come from? Where did the calories you used to make the chair come from? Where did your tools come from? Who trained you? Who owns the property where your workshop is located? How much marketing effort did you have to spend convincing another human that the chair is actually worth $250? What potentially carcinogenic chemicals did you treat the wood with, and how much grant money is your government giving to doctors to treat the consequences of those carcinogens in the larger population? All of those factors have hidden externalities baked into them that erode the net value you're creating. My argument is that it's all just a shell game where we're passing costs down the line to future generations while telling ourselves we're creating something valuable from nothing because it's what we need to do to sleep at night. We just don't perceive the longer-term externalities in a lot of cases.
- Negitivefrags 3y ago
  I'm not going to claim that all externalities are priced. There is certainly a lot more that we could do. But many of them are. The cost of the calories, the tools, the training, the property, and the marketing are certainly all priced. But let's just say that you priced all of the externalities perfectly. In this hypothetical example, can you really make an argument that all of that adds up to more than, say, 100 dollars? And if you can't, then you still have a lot of "value" to account for.
  - notpachet 3y ago
    If all the externalities are perfectly priced at $100, then that's the value of the chair. At that point the extra $150 you manage to get out of the buyer is just grift, not extra value produced from thin air.

henvic 3y ago

Value is subjective. It's not from nothing. It's from human action. In an oversimplification, when Peter decides to do business with Paul and Paul is interested in taking his business it's because both believe they'll be better off after that. Now you could [prematurely] argue that there might be externalities and so on, but you must recognize that that action of trading in itself can be seen as something that is going to increase the overall wealth of both as they'll be more satisfied after the fact (assuming everything goes well).

gottorf 3y ago

> We live on a planet with finite resources; everything here is zero-sum. This isn't even true at a cosmic scale, let alone in human scales. Planet Earth receives exogenous energy from the sun. You want an example of creating value from nothing? Say your choice this evening was to sit on the couch and do nothing versus charge your neighbor $20 to clean up his yard of fallen leaves. By choosing the latter, you have created $20 of value for your neighbor where none existed before. > Some people are just better at socializing their harmful byproducts. This is trivially true, but you make the great leap of equating all wealth creation to an arbitrage in externalities.

notpachet 3y ago
> you make the great leap of equating all wealth creation to an arbitrage in externalities. I do indeed. I think on a long-enough timeframe, all human activity is just externality arbitrage.
- gottorf 3y ago
  As Keynes said, in the long run, we are all dead.