Economics is a zero sum game
Everyone can't be the boss or land owner
If an ordinary citizen accumulates wealth of $500,000+ and retires or goes part time, he has "won" against his fellow citizens
By foregoing consumption, he wins in the long term and has to exert himself less
If you have 100 people on a desert island, someone has to pick up tools and work on the land / crops of another guy. Everyone cannot logically be a capitalist
These are observations not criticisms
Economics has potential for exponential infinite growth, if you include all outer space
Yet everyone is orders of magnitudes wealthier than they were 200 years ago even if the dollar amount difference between richest and poorest is greater.
orders of magnitude, sorry
Creation and trading of information immediately invalidates the idea of economics being a zero sum game. Also
This.
>Creation and trading of information immediately invalidates the idea of economics being a zero sum game. Also
Great, I have the information on how to construct a flying car.
Now who actually has to spend time building it? Or supervising the machine which builds it, and doing a quality check? While the guy who owns the factory relaxes in the sunshine.
OP, I appreciate your attempts at forming your own thoughts, but everything you say is wrong.
Wealth can be created "out of thin air" by work. Its not zero sum at all.
Everyone can be capitalist, when human work is no production factor anymore. Example: Everyone owns a robot that does work for him.
It costs a dollar to make noodles in Beijing. It costs 20 dollars to make the same noodles in New York.
A man has 20 dollars. Before, he could buy 1 unit of noodles. Now he can buy 20.
Obviously, this is a simplistic example. But economics is definitely not "zero sum." Try reading a textbook.
No, it isn't.
The robot builds the car while the humans who would have built it relax in the sun. Even if some humans have to monitor the robot, it's objectively less work than doing it themselves.
Congratulations, you just disproved your own point.
wrong
economics describes the efficient allocation of resources. by maximizing the allocation of resources, gdp growth is maximized
everyone can be a capitalist because the means of production is more and more shifting to machinery vs. human capital.
But, with or without money, people get richer.
1000 years ago : medieval age, ne medecine, no inernet
Today : more than 70 % of the world has access to internet
Food hunger is less and less each year
The mean life expectancy has more than doble for the entire world
Conclusion : your mom is fat and should have aborted you
if you are the sole proprietor of that information, you certainly have the upper hand when it comes to profiting from it. make a contract with those who are capable of doing the manufacturing and borrow what funds are required. everyone is going to make a lot of money, but only if you share the plans, you hold the key and can therefore command whatever share you please
...
quality of life has nothing to do with capital
>Economics is a zero sum game
Wrong.
If I spend $1,000,000 to build a house, I now have $1,000,000 less value in liquid assets (i.e. cash), but a house worth AT LEAST $1,000,000. In addition, my money hasn't vanished; most of it has been distributed among the architect, the builders, the foreman, and anyone else who helped build the house, and the rest has gone to the state via taxes, to be redistributed or spent on public works.
Productive activity creates wealth.
And the architects, builders, etc, spend that money on goods and services, which also contribute to the economy. The goods and services they purchase go to others who spend on more goods and services, and so on. Each dollar spent has more economic impact than just a dollar.
ok heres what you. this may be alot for you to understand, but its really simply.
ok you paying attention?
so heres what you do
you go to the factory.
yeah?
you go to the factory-but wait, theres more
you then talk to the owner of the factory, right.
you then say, and i know this is a lot of information for you to handle karl.
you say, without sperging out,
"hi i would like to sell you the plans for the flying car, for 1 billion dollars as well as 5% of profit."
right so he buys the plans off of you
now,
the factory owner, the guy who you consider evil, organizes the workers, right?
and not only that, he also puts his own money into the project, right?
you see, he goes out, and buys the equipment and inventory and other things he owns calls assets.
now he goes out and organizes the workers, and he pays them, with his own money,
wages to the workers right? they get currency in exchange for performing a service.
then Mr. evil capitalist, the guy who you says "relaxes in the sunshine" also has to keep track of everything and making sure nobody is going to start shit, right?
did you get all of that down? no, its ok. all communists today are medically diagnosed retards so its ok fellow friend. now go play with the block igor. remember the circle fits in the circle and not the square.
This from an example straight from the richest man in babylon.
>Each dollar spent has more economic impact than just a dollar.
nope, a dollar spent means it is not able to be invested in the future to get a bigger return, spending a dollar instead of investing it leads to decivilization
And if you didn't spend that $1 million, it would be loaned out or in the markets, doing the exact same thing.
take an econ class
>In addition, my money hasn't vanished; most of it has been distributed among the architect, the builders, the foreman, and anyone else who helped build the house
This is disingenuous keynesianism. The wealth generating function is, as you state, the building of the house. There is now a house there that was not there before and its owner is wealthier for it. How much wealthier that makes its owner depends on the variable amount that he (and other potential owners of the property) value the house as opposed to a haphazard pile of unworked construction materials.
But to get the house the land owner has to make a trade with the house builder, who trades his time, sweat, and expertise. Because the land owner is not a house builder he values the other person's time, sweat, and expertise more than that person does and so he will trade something (it can be anything, but in modern times we tend to use money) that's less than what he values the house at, but more than what the builder values his own time, sweat, and expertise at. In this way, they both "profit". The quantities of wealth can't be expressed in currency, but rather the difference between the currency lost or gained and what each individual person would be willing to accept to be party to the transaction.
Extremely Dumbed Down Example: Person A asks Person B to do a job for $10. A values the results of that job at $12, B values his time and effort at $9. The equivalent of $3 of "real wealth" are generated out of thin air.
It's only zero-sum in the short run.
Anything past that and its still very well approximated by a zero-sum model however.