Alternatively, a lot more businesses were created because the sum total of labor required to run a business went down, so businesses that would have been unprofitable back when it took a room of bookkeepers to manage a department store can now exist.
People think that economics is a zero-sum game, but the endless drive for efficiency and productivity is what makes our world possible and lifted billions out of abject poverty. It is the opposite of zero-sum.
The value that economics promises to create is wealth-weighted. By this metric, destroying the ability of a million people to eek by is a huge win if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much.
Thankfully, as you point out, it often does the exact opposite and makes everyone richer! But not always, not reliably, certainly not as a fundamental guarantee. "The Wedge" plot illustrates this fickleness, where about 40 years ago the American story switched from "a rising tide floats all boats" to "rich get richer, poor get poorer." The economy kept growing, but the overwhelming majority of people not only did not manage to capture a share of the new growth, they did not even manage to hold on to what they had. Yes, those on top scooped up more money than those on the bottom lost -- but how is that supposed to be comforting?
It frustrates me when certain elements preach the prosperity gospel while framing it as a matter of fact rather than self-serving faith. I personally have faith that we'll eventually figure out a compromise, but I don't believe that denying blatant trends helps us get there.
>if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much.
But that never happens. Ten million multiplied by twenty million is 200 trillion. You can't make 200 trillion dollars by taking a dollar away from a million people. Nobody has ever made 200 trillion dollars from anything, but if they did, it makes no sense to think there's some way it could be done by impoverishing a million people who have almost nothing. It sounds as illogical as the Matrix use of humans as batteries.
I think you misparsed that sentence as "20 million as much [as 10 million as much as one of those people]", where it should be "20 million as much [of one of those people]". An x2 multiplier, instead of an x20 million one.
Trying to put it in concrete terms - Jeff Bezos has maybe $180B. One ten-millionth is $18K. So the scenario is, suppose Bezos got his $180B by taking $1800 each from a million people, who relied on that capital to live, and somehow multiplied it by ten.
Since nearly everyone rich has less than Bezos, anything that happens a fair amount would involve smaller numbers.
It's not as absurd as making $200 trillion, but it still doesn't sound to me like a thing that happens to the extent that it says something about economics or utilitarianism or whatever. It seems like a contrived trolley problem to me.
Absolutely. A friend of mine started selling her cookies online without any help from anyone tech-savvy. She found out about Wix, Canva, Stripe and a bunch of other tools and setup her own business during COVID. She's not coming back to her old job.
True. Although with the increasing rate of changes, there would be a point where people can't re-skill themselves faster than their jobs are replaced by AI or software. Imagine change to a completely different job every 5 years. Hopefully societies are mostly well-off to give people food while they are busy learning another craft that hasn't been made obsolete.
People think that economics is a zero-sum game, but the endless drive for efficiency and productivity is what makes our world possible and lifted billions out of abject poverty. It is the opposite of zero-sum.