Yes it is possible for everyone's wealth to increase.

In the year 1900 Global GDP was 1 Trillion. Today it is 77 Trillion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

In Layman's the Global Pie is growing. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen DRASTICALLY over the last 25 years. https://twitter.com/humanprogress/status/913901718823489538

So the people with the smallest piece of the pie are slowly getting a larger piece, but the people who already have the biggest piece of pie are getting even bigger pieces faster. But because the pie is growing, it doesn't mean that their larger piece is making someone else get a smaller piece.

The only people who have a proportionally smaller piece than they used to are in the middle class. Which is what happens when first world work more closely with developing nations. Taking more people out of extreme poverty but putting slight downward pressure on the middle class.

> The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen DRASTICALLY over the last 25 years.

This is defined as people living on less than a dollar a day. Yes, it has more than halved in 30 years. Congratulations. I totally see how this progress actually over half a century relates to the world's richest getting an extra trillion in one year. Yep, makes sense to me.

The "dollar" has been adjusted over time, though, and is currently actually USD 1.90.

Your tone sounds sarcastic but I don't see the justification for it. The number of people who are actually hungry and malnourished has gone down significantly, and far more people are vaccinated today then 25 years ago, and far more children can go to school and literacy rates are up.

Sorry to hijack this, but referring to your other comment, I also saw weird stuff going on today with posts getting flagged. Seems the bots and trolls have found our corner of the internet as well... Not sure what's going on exactly.

Even if it did increase, most of that increase is just inflation anyway. And it's usually the wealthy that benefit from inflation (at least more than regular people do).

Compare the "regular" person of today to the "regular" person of 50 years ago.

Is it easier or harder to afford basic foodstuffs? Do they eat out (luxury) more or less? If they own a home, is it larger or the same size? Who travels more? Who has better healthcare? Who spends more on entertainment? How much do they spend on the family pet? Who spent more time furthering their education?

All of these are measures of wealth, and the modern "regular" person would be wealthier in every one of these categories. And that's not even factoring in advances in technology that make the quality of life of a person better even if there share of societal wealth goes down.

House prices less affordable than 50 years ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8468605.stm

This is very shortsighted-claiming that all of these trends have to do with being richer, is simply absurd. Also, "regular" person? What age? Male? Female? What does that even mean? This is just utter nonsense. But I will humor you:

> Is it easier or harder to afford basic foodstuffs?

Processed foods are far easier to afford, but they are extremely unhealthy. As for other basics, many have gone up over the last 50 years.

> Do they eat out (luxury) more or less?

Women now work. 50 years ago they did not. Less time/people to cook at home. Not like everyone is eating at steakhouses. They just don't have the time so they go to Chipotle or McDonalds or Panera.

> If they own a home, is it larger or the same size?

Most people own legacy homes-they are the same size because they are the same homes. New builds are building bigger houses but what "regular" person builds new homes?

> Who has better healthcare?

This has more to do with advancements in medicine and technology than people becoming richer.

> Who spends more on entertainment? How much do they spend on the family pet? Who spent more time furthering their education?

Furthering education is largely on credit, so this is a bad measure.

> and the modern "regular" person would be wealthier in every one of these categories.

Nope.

> This has more to do with advancements in medicine and technology than people becoming richer.

It's impossible to separate people becoming richer from advancements in technology. We didn't grow GDP by 77 times, because we work 77 times harder.

Improvements in underlying technology are what help us create more wealth. The problem is that the new wealth being created and benefits of that new technology is being shared so proportionally.

Fifty years ago, my grandparents built a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house on 4 acres of land with cash saved up from my grandfather's manual labor job (he stopped going to school in 8th grade) working for a sugar cane plant. They never, in the entirety of their lives, took out a loan. The simple fact of the matter is that they saved and invested back when it was easy to save and invest and thus never needed to rely on a bank for anything other than a place to store money. Oh, and they sent their 5 kids to college.

Try to do that today in the same area. The foremen at the same sugar house could never afford a regular residential lot, much less the a house to put on it. It would take them 20+ years to save the money.

> it's usually the wealthy that benefit from inflation

Inflation is a regressive feature of modern currencies. It transfers wealth from lenders to borrowers and away from investors. The degree to which it does so is a function of the amount of wealth one has.

Mind explaining how the wealthy benefit from inflation? Their bond holdings certainly don't benefit.

The wealthy absolutely do not benefit from inflation, and lose the most money due to it in reality. Inflation depreciates the value of your liquidity, which is why every major company (except apple, it seems) dumps as much currency as possible into appreciable and tax deductible assets. However, that's more difficult for persons, and most of the super wealthy end up holding a plurality of their money on their person. Part of the reason for this is that they have enough money that they can't easily enter the market with a sizable amount of their total funds without moving the market against themselves.

> Inflation depreciates the value of your liquidity, which is why every major company (except apple, it seems) dumps as much currency as possible into appreciable and tax deductible assets.

When you read stories that Apple (or whoever) has $X billion "in cash" it's not actual cash. They keep some around in money markets and the like for near term expenses, but the majority is in bonds that pay more than inflation. In fact, if Apple were classified as a bond fund they would be the largest in the world:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/apple-buy...

That makes sense. Morningstar groups all near term liquidity together, and so I figured Apple had to be constantly expanding aggressively or something and needed a warchest 7x the size of microsoft's to do it. Sitting on bonds as amid-near term solution makes more sense.

Yes, they absolutely do. Without inflation, it would be almost impossible to borrow money from a bank. No borrowing = no new investment. Most super-wealthy people are constantly borrowing money because the rates they borrow at are lower than their return on investing that money.

Yes, it is definitely possible and expected. Your line of reasoning is a pretty common one and is sometimes referred to as the "zero-sum fallacy" or "fixed pie fallacy"[0].

[0] http://www.aei.org/publication/the-fixed-pie-fallacy/

As many other commenters have pointed out, it is possible for net global wealth to increase (e.g., the increase in total real GDP). As far as I understand, the main reason this is possible is the development of new "technology" -- in the very general, economic sense of the word technology [0], which includes anything that increases the productivity of a single worker; this can include everything from new technology in the traditional sense to new processes (e.g., agile vs. waterfall for software development, or more optimal supply chains) and investment in infrastructure (e.g., better road networks).

For example, a single farmer today can not only produce many times more crop compared to a farmer 100 years ago, but also safely and efficiently distribute this produce to consumers across the globe. In general, assuming everyone in the economy works equally hard, the total production (i.e., the global net wealth) can increase as long as technology is increasing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_function

Rich people tend to have most of their worth in stock. In theory, assuming your stock got more expensive, you get richer without anyone in particular getting poorer.

Inflation = everyone in cash got poorer

Or. everyone with debt - which is usually a very large portion of the population - had their burden reduced.

edit: Ability to pay grows with inflation, by definition. Unless you have a particularly unusual type of debt, the principle is constant and the interest is based on the remaining principle and is therefor a pre-inflation value. Wages grow in absolute terms (even though their purchasing power is otherwise constant), so the debt is easier to pay off.

Along with their ability to repay their debt, so that's a wash.

Not if you have bitcoins, right?

The theory is naive, dismissive, and wrong. Stock value increases are coming from optimizations within companies that reduce employee benefits and compensation. On the consumer side of things, profits also come from taking advantage of deregulation, lowering the quality and safety of consumer products and services. Executive leadership and investors are pocketing gains made from making everyone else's lives worse.

Getting richer has a strong relationship with making others poorer.

Are you saying stock value increases only come from reducing employee benefits and compensation or from lowering the quality and safety of products and services? Seems like that is simply not true across the board. If a company sells say software they could easily grow revenue and profits without changing their product or reducing employee benefits and compensation. Their earnings would be higher and their stock would go up.

How much of this opinion is coming from being involved in the management of companies vs news articles tuned to generate outrage so that they can generate clicks?

I'm serious. Do you have first hand knowledge of what you speak, or are you just looking for someone to be angry at?

Also, looking at your comment history, you've literally only ever commented on the misery of the proletariat and related topics, which makes me suspect this is an astroturfing account.

> Getting richer has a strong relationship with making others poorer.

This theory is naive, dismissive, and wrong. You have accurately seen some bad examples, and it has led you to incorrectly conclude that the bad examples are the bulk of what is going on.

The notion that wealth is a fixed-size pie is central to the long-debunked economic error known as mercantilism.

The central idea of capitalism is that voluntary exchange enriches both parties. So the answer to your first question is yes.

The central idea of capitalism is the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor.

Voluntary exchange is not capitalism. Voluntary exchange has existed since the dawn of society. Capitalism is a form of production that developed with the industrial revolution. I can't tell if you've fallen for or are employing a sleazy equivocation.

To assert the existence of surplus value, one must also declare the baseline. For Marxists, the baseline is the “labor-value.”

That the labor theory of value is entirely bunk is trivial to see. If you present to a buyer two indistinguishable instances of the same good but describe how one was meticulously hand-crafted by skilled artisans and the other produced by machines in a factory, in the prospective buyer’s view the former is no more valuable than the latter. Value is imputed by the end consumer who is willing to pay only so much for a pair of shoes, a hat, a computer, a book, an automobile, a house, whatever. Marxists object that this is “commodity-fetishism,” but their many syllables fail to camouflage their deep confusion.

Even employers — rather than exploitative expropriators — are sellers of goods or services but buyers of labor, one of many factors of production. Consumers set prices with their willingness to buy. Producers seek to meet this demand at a profit. (Running a break-even operation is a bad model: at best you end up back where you started and otherwise book red ink.) To take profit, they must produce at a cost below what the consumer will pay, the prevailing price. Raw materials must be bought ahead of time. Employees expect regular paychecks. The employer must risk all of these costs by paying up front for a chance of turning a profit in the end.

Employees likewise are sellers of labor, a role that Marxists fail to recognize or else they’d have to slap expropriator labels all around. Employees shop their skills to find the buyer who values them most highly. When a better offer comes along, we usually congratulate the person for finding a better situation even though it is the same worker now supposedly “extracting” more value. The downside is sellers compete against one another. When the value proposition grows too rich, we buyers start shopping elsewhere. “Cheap labor” is nothing nefarious; everyone is looking for a better deal. Sellers of goods, services, and labor must all continue to improve their offerings.

From top to bottom, this is a network built on voluntary exchange with no extraction or exploitation. The ruthless player is the fickle consumer whose tastes, demands, foibles, and sense of urgently are always changing. There’s also Mother Nature, sometimes gentle and sometimes furious. We live in a world of scarcity with the future uncertain. Where will tomorrow’s dinner come from? How will parents pay for their kids’ college years down the road? How will I pay the light bill next month? Capitalism’s aforementioned complex network of voluntary exchanges — “the market,” for short — is a search process for how best to allocate what we have now in order to obtain what we need and want tomorrow.

Yours is a very shallow reading of Marx. A common, but nonetheless shallow reading. The only thing I can really do is refer [0], sections 5 and 6 starting on page 35 as an answer to such an interpretation.

> From top to bottom, this is a network built on voluntary exchange with no extraction or exploitation.

I mean, this is just preposterous. Are we going to ignore how capitalism developed with enclosure, forcible transformation of the commons into private property, and colonialism? Do you really want to make the claim that, say the Dutch East India Company's involvement in India was based on voluntary exchange with no extraction or exploitation? Or how about today, when the computers we use to write these messages rely on conflict minerals? Give me a break. Your analysis is ridiculous at face value. My only question is how you could type that out with a straight face.

[0] http://digamo.free.fr/mandelik.pdf

No, the central idea of capitalism is the re-investment of the surplus produced, rather than consumption of the surplus, no matter where the surplus came from. The surplus can come from one's own labor, or from a sole proprietorship.

I can tell that you've fallen for Marxist rhetoric.

I've always found this idea that capitalism was "invented" to be so strange.

e.g. When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.

Same story if the lord has a mill and charges people to use it. Or a bridge and charges people to cross it. Technology was worse, so there weren't as many physical forms of capital, but it definitely existed.

Some people seem to have this need to see capitalism as this invention created by bad people. Because to admit now natural and organic it is would be to admit how much enforcement and violence their ideology really demands in order to obtain the real world.

I didn't use the word invention, I used the word development. There was no connotation about naturalness in what I said. Neither did I make a moral judgment on the development of private property. So, why are you imposing on my words an argument that I wasn't making?

> e.g. When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.

Ok, if you want me to be more precise, private property relations, which are very different from feudal property relations. In fact, since property is a legal construct, this aspect of the development of capitalism could be called an invention, and the idea that capitalist forms of property are particularly ""natural and organic"" compared to other forms is quite suspect-- at least without any argument provided for it. As a foot note, one of the processes that developed private property was Enclosure [0] which was by no means nonviolent.

But I'm not going to try to be as precise and rigorous as a history textbook in Internet comments I compose in between compiles. Feel free to believe that capitalism is natural and organic, or read a history book. Idk.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

> When an ancient king had land, and let poor people work the land in exchange for a part of their production, what would you call that? Sure sounds like, "the extraction of surplus value via property relations and wage labor" to me.

There is an extent to which it is true (well, the first part, not wage labor!), but it's a different set of property realtions than the ones which are the defining feature of capitalism.

> Same story if the lord has a mill and charges people to use it. Or a bridge and charges people to cross it. Technology was worse, so there weren't as many physical forms of capital, but it definitely existed.

Feudalism is also a system by which value is extracted by property relationships; a different set than capitalism, and (while some quantity of wage labor may exist within feudalism) not one where wage labor plays a central role.

Capitalism replaced the system of property relations underlying feudalism with a different set.

> Some people seem to have this need to see capitalism as this invention created by bad people.

Traditionally, that's not even how the socialist critics that first identified it viewed it; it wasn't “an invention created by bad people”, but the state resulting from a number of related changes to the model of property driven by a combination of opportunity created by physical and other social technologies and self-interested people seeking their own gain. (This isn't inherently bad, the same people saw socialism the same way, though they saw the class driving and benefiting the preservation of capitalism against further change as narrow and inherently narrowing with the continuance of capitalism.)

I'm not really sure, then, what people you are referring to, since neither capitalism's defenders nor it's main critics hold the view you are attacking.

This assumes the exchange is symmetric, and that enrichment only happens with exchanges. Neither of these are true.

It doesn’t have to be symmetric. If there is $2 consumer and $4 producer surplus, both parties benefit.

And just because enrichment, as you call it, can happen other ways than exchange, does not mean it doesn’t happen via exchange too.

If it is asymmetric, the superficially apparent mutual gain may be illusory, because—while many people think for moral or aesthetic reasons that this should not be the case—there is enormous empirical evidence that the actual experience of utility related to material position is very strongly driven by relative material position, which is often far more significant than absolute material position.

But is that empirical evidence talking about peoples' overall position, or their position with respect to one particular exchange?

That is, it can be true that I feel rich or poor by comparing myself to others, not based on my absolute wealth. It can also be true that I look at any individual transaction and decide whether to make it or not based on whether it makes me better off in absolute terms.

> But is that empirical evidence talking about peoples' overall position, or their position with respect to one particular exchange?

It's about overall position, but the outcome of every particular exchange is a change to overall position; now, if the asymmetry in exchanges were essentially random, this wouldn't matter, but when you have a system with distinguishable classes, and there is a clear relationship between class role and which side of the asymmetry of exchange you tend to fall on across exchanges—say “capital” having the greater gain and “labor” the lesser—then you can end up with a situation where the pattern of exchange, each seemingly mutually beneficial but asymmetrically so, ends up producing more disutility from increasing inequality on one side than utility from absolute gain.

Parent is saying that it's better if everyone gets richer, even if some get more richer than others.

So you're saying that it would be better if everyone was poorer individually, as long as they were more equally poor?

> So you're saying that it would be better if everyone was poorer individually, as long as they were more equally poor?

No, it's not at all that simple; there's both disutility associated with inequality and utility associated with absolute material position; how those net out is more complex than either “everyone getting more is better regardless of distribution” or “more equality is better regardless of how much per everyone gets”.

>So you're saying that it would be better if everyone was poorer individually, as long as they were more equally poor?

Why are you creating this either/or? Are you proposing that if we don't allow people like Gates and the Kochs to hoard billions of dollars that everyone will be poorer individually?

If I fix your bike, and in exchange, you fix my bike, we're both richer in material terms than we were before.

> Is it possible for everyone’s wealth to increase?

Numerically, yes. Psychologically and socially it's completely different.

As inequality rises, people whose wealth increases more slowly are effectively poorer in relative terms.

In real terms this could happen if productivity increased, and was able to lead to increased standard of living for everyone. This probably did happen for some large subset of the population, by some definition of "standard of living."