You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for (e.g., 16th century Mercantilism).
Go into the woods and turn a tree into a chair. Where did that value come from? Will it run out?
The problem is when a company makes x, ceo takes 0.1x in compensation, while everyone else on the payroll combined also takes 0.1x in compensation just because they didn’t show up to work with the same provenance as the ceo. For a company, there is very much a fixed pile of money that every employee competes for.
I don't see how it's inherently wrong for a CEO to take 10% of revenue and employees split 10%. And why do companies have a fixed pile: shouldn't an effective CEO grow top-line revenue? What if employees are splitting twice the revenue compared to a year ago? (If the company isn't growing, replace the CEO for someone who earns their 10%.)
Money-making inequality, on its face, doesn't seem different than artistic inequality. Should I be angry that Warren Buffet gets 20% annual return on his investments while index funds only do 8%?
Stories of countless species hunted to extinction show that this is not what happens.
Let's look at the physics(?) of the economy: where does wealth actually come from? It's either from transforming things into more useful things or increasing efficiency of processes. There are limits to both of those things.
We live on a planet that's in a rough equilibrium in terms of both matter and energy.
So we have a finite maximal amount of value that we can extract from a constant amount of matter - which means that overall wealth is limited - we're just moving it around and at a finite rate at that - somebody is getting a bigger slice of this pie than the others.
There may be a finite limit on potential wealth but it’s effectively limitless for human planning purposes.
(For the trees, we can certainly mismanage our resources; it doesn’t mean it’s a priori impossible to create a growing and sustainable form of wealth.)
Actually a pretty decent amount over the life cycle of a person. After all those things require a functioning civilisation that educates properly to begin with.
The internet is mostly a means of making communication more efficient - that was one stupidly inefficient process ripe for an upgrade.
So yeah, no additional wealth really - just much less losses.
The internet and other tech doesn't create new wealth? Why has the size of the economy grown exponentially since the industrial revolution?
If wealth were fixed, as population in increased we'd be getting vastly poorer worldwide (1.6 billion in 1900 -> 7 billion people today). Have we gotten 5x poorer on average?
(These facts are easily googleable.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=world+gdp+per+capita+over+ti...
I’m not saying local deviations don’t exist - I can lose my job - but globally wealth has been growing continuously and poverty is being eradicated. This is only possible with wealth creation. Look up Hans Rosling’s work.
Either you care and the 'allocation' is unfair.
Or you don't care, which means that the market doesn't work since you caring is what is supposed to allocate resources fairly, and it is still unfair.
Thinking "someone earned money which would have gone to me otherwise" is like thinking "someone got in shape and that physical fitness would have gone to me otherwise".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation
When I deposit $1k in the bank and you take a $500 loan, $500 is created out of nowhere. You are using my deposit yet I still have a balance of $1000 on the books.
Uber created a lot of wealth. Some got more than others. Is that objectively bad if the wealth didn't exist before?
...there is. not in the sense of "money" but in the sense of "wealth" and ownership of private property. Wealth is not "created" it is diverted. If wealth grows in one place it's because it shrank in another.
Unless you believe that growth and resources are infinite, like many capitalist economists.
Potential wealth is ‘finite’ because humans are finite but there’s no practical limit. (Just like there’s no practical limit to how much art can be made. If art isn’t being made it isn’t because there’s only so much creativity to go around.)
You described one of the only scenarios in which wealth is "created" and the only reason it's created is because it derives "free" energy from the sun. But that is just one of the economic inputs of the seed, and there are many more (the labor to water it, the water to grow it, the land on which it grows).
The sun's energy in this case is a small portion of the actual economic inputs the seed requires. And those economic inputs are diverted from somewhere else. They do not appear out of thin air.
So yes, I agree, we should harness the sun's energy, or other "free" energy sources, as economic inputs.
That doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of wealth already exists and is not created out of thin air, but diverted.
We take natural resources, often plentiful, apply labor + skill, and get a more valuable product. We're wealthier as a result.
Yes, natural resources are finite, but not the limiting reagent for most things. There's a zero-sum game in that land used for farming is not available for an entertainment complex. But we have so much used for "nothing" that switching it to "something" is a giant increase in wealth. You can buy an acre in Kansas for a month's worth of minimum wage work. Las Vegas was built in a desert surrounded by hundreds of miles of wasteland. Did turning land, earth, trees, and iron ore into Las Vegas add zero value? (Not saying it was the best use of resources, just that assembling buildings improved the value of the raw materials.)
As a counterexample, consider melting down a car into slag. Are you less wealthy with your charred steel than a working car? Of course -- charred steel is less valuable. The number of atoms is the same. In other words, is an assembled watch worth the same as a pile of gears? Are you indifferent to the two?
If wealth were fixed in the earth, we must be getting poorer as the population grows. A few thousand years ago we had 1M people on earth. Were those peasants 7000x wealthier than us?
In regards to your watchmaker: a pile of gears might be marginally useful to a few, but a working watch will be valuable to many. Has the watch created wealth? No, because the people who were not buying watches are now not buying something else in order to buy the watch. The creation of the watch did not add the dollar-value of exactly one watch to everyone's wealth, allowing them to spend money on the watch. The wealth was diverted! The creation and selling of the watch certainly did create societal value but it did not create wealth, it merely diverted wealth from some other purchase each watch-buying customer would have made and sent it to the watchmaker.
My point is that the overwhelming majority of transactions are diversions, not creations, of wealth.
To your very original point: "You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for"
I suppose my argument should be changed to: Perhaps amount of wealth is not currently fixed (as defined by the shrinking number of resources one could use to create wealth), but those who create wealth (and not just merely divert it) are generally already very wealthy and are generally the only ones who have the means to create this wealth due to extremely high barriers to entry.
So, I would say theoretically, you're correct: there is a growing pool of wealth. But practically, any normal, everyday person cannot go around creating new wealth...they can only hope it is diverted to them by someone who already has wealth.
You may enjoy the elephant curve: https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-wo...
The very rich and moderately poor have seen wealth increase while the top quintile (E.g. many Americans) have seen wealth stagnate. Globally we’re richer on average but not everyone participated. Clearly it’s best if we can lift all boats and not certain subsets.