When I am healthy, or plant a fruit tree (on previously unused land), or come up with a better or healthier way of doing something, nobody else looses anything.

When I am healthy, or plant a fruit tree (on previously unused land), or come up with a better or healthier way of doing something, nobody else looses anything. (That has been going on since the dawn of time if you will, and certainly not just since the last 200 years.) But on the other hand, a million dollars is in no small part worth a lot because most people don't have it; if everybody did, that wouldn't make everybody rich, it would just mean a loaf of bread now costs a million dollars. You can't just ignore that "because rising standards of living". Wealth is first and foremost a word, not an actual thing, and the associated concepts can be complex... but wealth purely in the sense of market shares, of bank accounts, even of being an expert in comparison to non-experts.. there is so much of what we tend to consider as wealth that is obviously a zero-sum game.