I suspect you are trying to be technically correct. The usage of the term "zero-sum" has a wider meaning in usage. It is commonly applied to games where there

I suspect you are trying to be technically correct. The usage of the term "zero-sum" has a wider meaning in usage. It is commonly applied to games where there is one winner - because simplistically one person wins and everyone else loses. Games are often ranking systems and who gains and who loses is more obvious than many other situations in the wider world. > Also, reputation is not just a peking order I think it is pretty clear we know that. It is almost the point of the article! You are trying to nitpick against everyone's nebulous non-academic usage of words. Yeah, it is hard to understand what people really mean, but HN is one of the few places where it seems the norm is to try to. > wealth You have chosen a nebulous word and then straw-manned it. Wealth is adjacent to this argument - most of the points about reputation could be equally argued about wealth. Mostly when talking capitalism it is better to use the word "money" because that can be ranked (comparison between disimilar things is almost money's core feature). If a significant part of wealth depends on reputation, and if reputation is strongly ranked then wealth has a top limit. Yeah, apples and oranges, but the concept of wealth being larger or smaller contains its own self-paradox.