Sure, okay. What about inflation? If we have 1% of people with 90% of money and assets, either:

A.) The upper class are extremely rich and the rest are desperately poor, or:

B.) The masses have enough money to live comfortably and the upper class has 9x of that growth because that's how percentages work--thus this world has to have many times more total wealth relative to the world in option B. It works if that is feasible considering that world's industry.

But what about when inequality keeps growing as projected, and the 0.1% have 90% of the wealth? Then the 0.01%? For the rest of the people to have a similar quality of life, the total number of assets in the world would have to grow by 10,000x. Otherwise, some people have to get poorer for a perpetually smaller percentage of people to have 90%.

Wealth isn't strictly a zero-sum game, but at a certain absurd point the math doesn't work. At that threshold, cold hard physics kick in and physics is most certainly a zero-sum game. Physics is as zero-sum as it gets. Nature balances her books mercilessly. If wealth inequality is at reasonable levels and there's a reasonable amount of growth, it's perfectly possible for the middle and lower classes to be prosper while wealthy classes obtain much more money than they. But when the wealthy have an extreme majority of all assets--in order to keep the rest of society at a tolerable standard of living you'd be raising the total assets in the world by like ten thousand times. Obviously that wouldn't work. It assumes totally unrealistic rates of growth, which is a recurring issue for our civilization these days. Wealth does become a zero-sum game under specific conditions. Our civilization isn't a perpetual motion machine.

It absolutely is. Western economies have been growing at about 0-4% percent yearly over the last few decades. That means if somebody's wealth grows at a faster rate the money has to come from somebody else. If the US was suddenly full of people like Bezos or Gates I don't think the economy would grow much faster. They would just fight for the same piece of the pie.

Should I just chant this as I drive past the food banks at the people in line?

Is that... is that really your argument? That everything is fine because these people in line at the food bank are able to get free food so that their children don't starve to death? So we can ignore the massive wealth disparity and the vast number of people living in poverty because we don't force them to die of hunger. That's very magnanimous of you. Imagine what they could accomplish with both free food and knowledge of your mantra.

Your first two paragraphs should get an award for most arrogant comment in quite a while.

How do you figure?

You basically told the previous poster that he is an idiot. That's arrogance in my view especially since you are only stating things with nothing to back them up or any coherent thought besides that you are right and everyone else is stupid and not even worth discussing with.

The idea that two different things are in fact different does not require "back up". Wealth inequality and poverty are not interchangeable concepts, but wonderwonder was treating them like they were by appealing to everyone's innate sense that poverty is bad and then conflating that with wealth inequality.

This isn't up for debate. The two things are, by definition, not the same. You may think they are related, but that burden is wonderwonder's (and perhaps yours) to prove, not mine. Two separate concepts are not correlated, causal, or interchangeable until they have been shown to be. Not the other way 'round.

I don't think everyone else is stupid. But people that conflate those two things are either missing something or doing it deliberately (knowing full well they are wrong). Telling someone this is not arrogance, and my comment was perfectly coherent to a great many people if upvotes are any indication. If you want an example of incoherence, look no further than the comment which talked about "driving past food banks" as if that was some sort of "gotcha" about wealth inequality. I think it was lost on wonderwonder that food banks themselves are a great example of wealth not being a zero sum game.

Your starting point was that wealth is not a zero sum game. I replied that it is. If you do some arithmetic and look at growth rates you will see quickly that the economy never has grown beyond certain rates. That means if someone or a whole industry or population group accumulated wealth at a higher rate then the money had to come from someone else. It wasn't "created" out of thin air.

You really should work on your debating style. Phrases like "this is not up for debate" are just bullying to stop a debate you don't want to have. If you are the same at work I feel for the people who have to put up with this.

I’ve dealt with enough people who willfully conflate different topics to know that it is not worth my time to engage on that level and be forced to show repeatedly that two things are different, only to have the other person continue to conflate them. It is not up for debate because it needs to first be shown that there is some relation in order for it to be debated. This is neither arrogance or bullying: it is pragmatism.

Now, as to your comment (which was never the topic of discussion in this part of the thread): if the entire economy grows at 2%, and 0.1% of people’s wealth grows at 10%, the growth of the entire economy can absolutely account for that subset’s gain in wealth. It depends entirely on how big those respective groups are, not purely on “this % is larger than that %”. The money is not necessarily coming from someone else. The growth of the economy is not a fixed rate — if more people produce more good work, the economy will grow more. You also might be forgetting globalism and the fact that the "1%"’s wealth is not necessarily coming from One Place™. For example, Jeff Bezos is wealthy because of AMZN. AMZN operates in many countries all over the world. Therefore, saying “the US is growing at X rate, so Jeff Bezos’ wealth growth rate is too high!” is misguided at best. This is true for many of the "1%" -- they are creating value all over the world, not just in their home country, so it follows that the growth of their wealth is not tied to the growth rate of their home country.

I hope making calculations is not part of your job, because if so I feel for the people that are forced to rely on them.

psst, look at yourself and the way you talk to people, there are several problems here but I'm not one of them. I hope you are eventually able to find whatever you are looking for. Have a good night and optimally a better life.

I plan on having a better life every day, as I work towards that goal and get rewarded for my efforts.

Good luck with your wealth redistribution campaign. I'm sure it'll work out great. Who knows, you might get a life of abundance you did nothing to deserve!

Ad hominem attacks are an extremely poor choice for comments and have no place on this site.

Misusing the phrase "ad hominem" is not constructive and has no place on this site.

Wealth is absolutely a zero sum game depending on how you segment things. Increases in productivity and innovation are not zero sum, but things like land ownership on earth is absolutely zero sum.

That's, at best, extremely misleading; outside of the most extreme absolute deprivation, relative deprivation (or prosperity) appears to be much more of a contributor to experienced disutility (or utility) than absolute deprivation or prosperity, such that, in practice, and modulo alleviating the most crushing poverty (which isn't where marginal gains go in the developed world, even where such poverty still remains) and maintaining illusions which shield the less well off from the prosperity of th well off (consumer-oriented capitalism actively seeks the opposite), wealth is, in practice, zero sum [0] in terms of impact on ezperienced utility, even if it isn't in measures of absolute possessions or consumption.

[0] or, at least, rivalrous, in that for anyone to gain utility from wealth compared to an alternative scenario, someone else must lose; it's not real clear that utility can be meaningfully aggregated across individuals.

What substance?

That comment reads like someone fed a thesaurus of non-words and a copy of the Communist Manifesto into a Markov chain.

Not just that, my God, the Alpine sentence structure!

Repeating something 3 times doesn't make it true.

I am impressed with the level of nonsense in this comment.