In contrast, if I take out a loan and build a successful business, my intentional actions (successful business) lead to greater money supply than if I had failed at business.

Does that make sense, or am I missing something? I'll admit, the creation of new wealth/money is very mysterious. How to know when it is growing the pie?

Your intentional action is to start a business. Whether or not it will be a successful business and actually "generate wealth" is to a large part dependant an chance.

Also, honestly, "It's not a zero-sum game" is beginning to sound like a religious mantra. Of course you can define "wealth" however your want and for the right definitions, you can certainly pull ever more of it out of nowhere. The set of natural numbers has no upper bound.

However, many extremely relevant kinds of wealth absolutely are zero-sum: There is only so much time in a day, only so much space to live in, only so many natural resources and only so much waste the planet will tolerate. If some class of people control disproportionately amounts of that, it will absolutely reduce the wealth of those who don't belong to that class.

There may be only so much time in a day, but the critical factor in wealth creation is how much you can get done in a day (productivity). You can also figure out clever ways to get more out of what you have (efficiency).

There are many random factors that can cause your business to succeed or fail.

You might have a terrible business idea that would normally fail, but a coincidental event could cause your business to become wildly successful.

You could be a terrible businessperson, but by luck of birth your family has connections that allow your business to succeed through pure nepotism.

You might have a brilliant idea that fails because of a natural disaster, or because someone doesn't like you and decides to bury you in lawsuits.

You might have a brilliant business idea but a competitor springs up and poaches your labor pool.

For example - odds are very good you're healthy. That's lucky! You live in the US - a lucky place to start a business! The internet makes it easy - lucky! You have an education - more great luck! If not, there's a free youtube video on just about anything you need to learn - what great luck!

And who decides what is valued by the marketplace?

It's:

- Politicians through regulation.

- The Federal Reserve Bank by continuously creating new money out of thin air.

- Banks by deciding who can get the newly printed Fed money through loans and who can't (typically based on the value of assets which individuals already have; the result is that rich people get most of the new money through almost 0% interest loans).

- Corporate monopolies by locking out competitors (through lobbying government for beneficial regulations or making it prohibitively expensive for other companies to compete due to price gouging, international tax arbitrage, allowing losses in some sectors to selectively wipe out competitors in other sectors, incentivizing journalists to promote the corporate agenda, etc...)

As a small startup, you can be as efficient as you like. If some corporation doesn't want you to succeed, they can easily drain your coffers and crush you without drawing any attention to themselves. It's not about productivity or cleverness; that has very little value these days. Economic value these days lies in one's ability to control the social narrative and the money supply; it doesn't matter what the reality is.

If you have unlimited money, you can literally pay people to sit on their asses and pick their noses all day; you can even convince them that this is helping the company and therefore the whole economy... The company keeps getting more money year after year so somehow all this nose-picking must be paying off right?

The massive hose of Federal Reserve cash plugged straight into the back of the company is just a minor detail.

And the farmers who feed everyone are fools for accepting this electronic play money in exchange for their useful work.

The Fed also doesn't create demand for products and services. That demand is there, all the time. Right now there is latent demand in the marketplace to extend the human lifespan to 1000 years if possible. There's demand to travel at the speed of light or faster. Whether or not these things are even possible is completely independent of the demand for them.

It's also quite absurd that on the tail end of a decade of a start up boom in the tech industry that you would assert that all these factors make it impossible to succeed today. We are on Hacker News, a site powered by YCombinator, an incubator and investor that has helped make it possible for hundreds of companies to succeed that you claim is impossible. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over $155 billion as of October, 2019. None of these companies existed 15 years ago.

A regulation that mandates, e.g. catalytic converters, creates demand for them. Requiring car insurance, same. Examples abound.

> The Fed also doesn't create demand for products and services.

The Fed(eral reserve) sets monetary policy. It's supply side. By setting interest rates low, it increases demand for credit.

Also, Y Combinator is not popular because it is successful, it is successful because it is popular.

It's no coincidence that Y Combinator operates the most popular technology news link aggregator in the world which all the big corporate tech executives read. This significantly affects the odds of success for startups which join Y Combinator. They choose who wins and it doesn't matter who they choose. If you are selected into YC, it's like winning the lottery.

They should do an experiment; filter out all the obvious scam applications then for all remaining applications (tens of thousands of them probably) run a random number generator to select startups based on keywords that YC likes. I bet the success rate for that batch wouldn't be very different from previous batches.

The people you'd be selling to.

Not at all. I can start a business tomorrow, and if I do nothing or do stupid things with it, the odds of success are zero.

> only so many natural resources

We've literally only scratched the surface. Also, they aren't consumed. Things can always be refined and repurposed, as long as energy is available.

To say that something isn’t zero sum in this sense is a rather weak statement. If any combination of actions by people result in at least one person being worse off and no one else being better off, or in at least one person being better off and no one else being worse off, than some other combination of choices, that is sufficient to conclude that it isn’t zero sum. (This isn’t a necessary condition, only a sufficient one. But a Pareto difference (terminology?) implies a difference in the sum of utilities (assuming that there is a sensible way to add the utilities) without assuming a particular way to add utilities between persons, so I think it is easier to justify conceptually.)

That many things involving multiple people are not zero sum, in this sense, is obvious. (Punching a stranger in the face for no reason decreases the utility of the stranger without increasing one’s own. Well, for most people anyway?) It doesn’t imply that there are no limits to how good outcomes can be.

That a given thing is not zero sum is often something that would be sufficiently trivial as to not be worth saying, except that people talk about the thing as if it is zero sum.

If things were constrained to be on the Pareto frontier, then, while possibly still not zero sum, there would I think be less reason to point out that things aren’t zero sum even if they weren’t.

Pointing out that things aren’t zero sum is often, I think, effectively a call to take into account whether options would move closer to or further from the Pareto frontier, and not just pretend that things are always on the Pareto frontier and try to move along the Pareto frontier.

Now, if, within a certain context, the maximum distance it is possible to be from the Pareto frontier is negligible, then in those cases exclaiming “care more about the distance to the Pareto frontier!” wouldn’t seem to make much sense, and perhaps even sometimes justice requires putting more emphasis on where on the frontier we are closest to than how close we are to it, even if it means non-negligible difference in closeness to the frontier.

But, generally speaking, Pareto improvements are good and important, and forbidding people from taking actions that result in global Pareto improvements (I don’t just mean “if you only consider these people, then among these people it is a Pareto improvement”, but rather things that are Pareto improvements when considering everyone’s interests) is usually bad.

Zero-sum games are not limited to two player games.

Here’s a mental shortcut: as long as the objective of the game is to bankrupt all other players (i.e. to own all of the money), the game is zero-sum. No other details matter. It’s a cake-cutting game where everybody wants all the cake.

http://landlordsgame.info/rules/lg-1904p_patent.html

However:

> Borrowing: A player may borrow from the “Bank" in amounts of one hundred dollars, and for every one hundred dollars borrowed the " Bank" takes a mortgage on one or more of the borrower's lots, the total value of which must be at least ten dollars more than is borrowed. For every one hundred dollars borrowed from the "Bank" a bank mortgage is placed upon the property on which the loan is made, and the player puts his note in the "Bank," paying upon each note five dollars (interest) every time he receives his wages. One player may borrow from another, giving a mortgage on any property he may own and making the best bargain he can as to interest, terms of payments &c. The player loaning the money places his individual, mortgage on the top of the borrower's deed to show that he has a mortgage on that property, Should a loan be repaid before passing the beginning-point, the borrower saves the interest.

But there are a few variations... This one looks closer to "modern" monopoly - I can't seem to locate the "two rulesets" referenced by Wikipedia though (one "pro" one "contra" monopoly - in the second everyone supposedly benefits from created value).

http://landlordsgame.info/games/lg-1906/lg-1906_egc-rules.ht...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)

> Magie created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/11/secret-...

[edit: here are the combined rules with rules for "prosperity" https://landlordsgame.info/games/lgp-1932/lgp-1932_rules.htm... ]

Yeah of course because you have full control of what happens to your business.

Your competitors, big corporate monopolies, regulators, investors, fickle cultural trends, politics, timing, your wealthy friends or family members and your own health have no impact at all on your business' chance of success.

If your health is so bad that you die, that's insurmountable.

If regulations are so rigid that the government forbids you to open your business, that's insurmountable.

If a corporation sets up shop next door and sells everything you sell at half the price, that's insurmountable.

Then also milder combinations of all of the above can be insurmountable.

Most businesses will fail, and most businesses are built on loans of some kind rather than bootstrapped.

Rent-seekers will try to profit from this because they will claw back their "investment" in the form of collateral - preferably physical, but IP as a last resort.

If businesses succeed, rent-seekers will profit from their "investment" with an aggressive term sheet that gives their return priority over returns for the people who did the work.

At the same time, rent-seekers will be investing in property. If there's a run of successful businesses in an area they will gain by increasing rents and speculating on property prices.

This is basically just asset inflation - very good for rent-seekers, very bad for people who need access to limited resources like housing and health care.

This isn't even getting into the costs of externalities.

The picture as a whole is a lot more complicated than "My business succeeded and now I'm making money, so there's no zero sum here."

For many types of businesses, option 1 isn't a tenable option. Outside of the tech industry, the margins are lower and there is not a large network of VC angels for things like restaurants, farms, retail stores, home services, etc.

The classic example would be farming equipment. Sure, you could save for 10 years to buy an International Harvester Combine. Or you could borrow money to buy the Combine today, your efficiency goes up 10x and you pay off the loan with the higher profits you reap. Then, if you want to expand your farm, you might likewise save for 10 years to buy another plot of land...or you could borrow money today and buy that land and use leverage to grow quicker. The loan created wealth by enabling the farmer to become more productive.

And if they are speculating and the market goes south, they will lose their investment.

It’s not like there isn’t risk involved.

The people working 90 hour weeks and barely able to make rent apparently aren't working hard enough.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/617390/us-millionaire-ho...

What you're saying is that the majority of people have a net worth

So working harder than the majority of people will still mean you end up with a tiny net worth, the fear of bankrupcy from medical bills at any point in life, the fear of losing your home (if you're lucky enough to get a home in the first place)

America is a country where cops arrest 6 year old girls for the crime of being black. The american dream? Hah. Look at the american reality.

1 in 30 'make it'. 29 in 30 don't, and life is hell for them.

It's a probability game. The action of buying a property increases wealth proportionate to the risk of someone landing on it, hence that intentional action increases wealth as a function.

That doesn't make the game zero sum, especially when you add in the variable income bits of passing go or mortgaging properties.

Wealth is stuff that people want. You create wealth by creating stuff that other people want. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html has a long version of this explanation.

The last 200 years have seen a dramatic transformation as we have found ways to efficiently create more wealth, with the result that we all have more stuff that we want than pretty much anyone used to. Both new kinds of stuff (effective medicine, gadgets like washing machines, electronic devices...) and the kinds of stuff we used to have (food, potable water, etc...).

And yet, people still emotionally fall prey to the old fallacy that more for thee means less for me. The truth is that there is no society on record that has managed to lower inequity without major disaster such as war or plague. And also no society on record that has managed to increase the prosperity of the poor without seeing income gaps rise.

(Read Enlightenment Now for a lot more detail on both of these phenomena.)

Or, as Margaret Thatcher put it, "...he would rather that the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich." (See https://speakola.com/political/margaret-thatcher-on-socialis... for the full quote.)

P.S. Just because this also bothered me: inflation doesn't happen during the game. Land itself does not increase in value during the course of the game, it only increases with direct capital expenditures. Example: if no one buys "Park Place" for 90% of a game, it does not increase in cost the cost for the player who eventually buys it[1], that cost is fixed throughout the game.

[1] Despite its marginal utility (i.e. value) for each player increasing as the game goes on. In that example, it's nice because utility increase whether you have Broadway (I think thats the other piece) or not (preventing someone from building on it is a strategy too).

The thing is, supply and demand seem not to matter in the housing market. If you land on Park Place you can't shop around for alternatives.

This might be retconned by saying that most housing is occupied and that's where you found a vacancy, but it's still pretty artificial. If the other houses are occupied then why isn't anyone getting any income from them?

That doesn't make Monopoly any more zero-sum. You're not generally limited by the supply of hotels. If I build a hotel where there were four houses before, the total capital stock has increased, not stayed constant.

> You're not generally limited by the supply of hotels

A strong strategy in Monopoly is leveraging the fact that houses and hotels _are_ in limited supply. There are only 32 houses available and you can't build a hotel unless you have 4 houses on each property in a set. If you end up with 3 monopolies with 4 houses on each property the game is pretty much over because nobody else is able to invest in anything.

Of course this would pressure the house hoarder into building hotels... Except each other player gets a set of dice, and on rolling anything higher than a 4, his hotel construction is thwarted by decree of the community's zoning board. UNLESS he's making deals under the table, increasing number he has to roll under to get approval from the zoning board.

And so on, and so forth.

I think you're talking about profit here. If you're going to take the metaphor seriously I think you'd have to assume income is coming in if the houses are maintained. Your profit is the money you take from the other players. If you land on Park Place, you specifically need Park Place, and you're forced to pay a premium. As the property owner you're waiting for those premiums to overtake the initial outlay used to build the houses.

Actually this just sounds like the California housing market where NIMBYs perpetually prevent housing stock from increasing, which is of course a result of central planning, not a free market mechanism, LOL!

Capitalism is not exactly equal to "free market". There's still a hell of a lot of market under socialism.

I'm just pointing out that you have to regulate SOMETHING. Regulating nothing = people amassing wealth and buying political influence = those current power holders regulating everyone else so the current power holders just continue to win. Then you don't have your "free market" anymore. It's inherently unstable.

In my opinion, the wealthy should have no more political power than the poor. But of course the wealthy have an outsized ability to influence politics. So they can work to repeal or nullify the very laws meant to reduce their influence - it's a fight that will never end and requires working and poor people to constantly be aware, organizing, and participating in politics to have any chance at all.

Or maybe one day, in my dream world, the rich and powerful will realize hey it's not so bad to have a workforce that is educated and healthy and has enough money in their pocket to buy the things we produce without taking out loans! And then we all leave in peace and harmony...

Completely agree. It's frustrating, because with words like "capitalism" and "socialism", why use words at all? Nobody means the same thing -- yet most people want the same thing -- it's really frustrating. I view it as a really important failure of science and philosophy. And a great opportunity for simulations in the service of empirical morality.

Which reminds me: Adam Smith's advisor wrote a whole tract on "Moral Computation" back in the early 1700s

And there's the reason why, in my original post at the beginning of this sub-thread, I used neither of those terms, in order to communicate more precisely.

Centrally planned economies are inferior to freer economies, whether the top-down controls are imposed by democracy or autocracy; both create economic inefficiencies. History has borne that out repeatedly.

But of course, that statement disregards non-economic externalities like environmental impacts, and one may want a central power to map non-economic externalities onto economic costs through e.g. taxes and fines for polluting because the economic inefficiencies incurred are worth the tradeoff (like having clean water/air). Then the market can price those non-economic externalities accordingly, once the market is appropriately regulated.

I hear about some part of a company requesting another part do some market research on some topic, and then just entirely disregard the results, when the market research department could have used that effort and time and money to do some other more useful market research that would have actually been used, and I wonder whether there could be some way to make sure that the requests to another department that something be done, have appropriate costs in some sense.

If one was better off by not requiring some other department do some work that doesn’t actually get used than if one does produce such a requirement for them, then presumably one would try to be less likely to produce such requirements, which seems desirable.

Is there a realistic feasible way to do this? I don’t know.

It seems better to take internal functions and open them up to outside customers, as the cloud computing companies do.

There are a few things that I believe only work in a moral way when they are taken out of the hands of capitalist pursuit-of-profit dynamic:

* Healthcare: What does the demand curve look like when your alternative is death or a painful, limited life?

* Pollution/Environmental damage control: Without regulation the chemical company owner has zero incentive not to dump their leftovers in the creek.

* Access to quality education: Equality of opportunity

* Access to housing: Simply a question of morality. In the US at least, we have so much goddamn money and so much goddamn land and the ability to build giant buildings on that land. No one should be homeless.

Also players selectively mortgaging properties will destroy overall wealth in the game.

Early in the game the expected value of a trip around the board is positive because of low rents of undeveloped properties and the net gain from Chance and Community Chest, plus passing Go. Cash flow into the game is positive as a whole.

Later in the game, when property is developed you're going to be paying bigger rents. This is going to cause players to mortgage or sell houses to pay the big rents (also their own liquid cash supply is likely lower from developing their own properties), each of which is a money sink since you don't get full value for these. This causes money to exit the game, eventually leading toward bankruptcy.

However, this requires that players actually get to develop their properties. If the game hits a lock due to no one trading and no one getting a natural monopoly, the game can go pretty much indefinitely.

Yeah, I once played with someone whose strategy was "Never trade". In an act of desperation, I offered him $1,000 for a light-blue property, and he refused. The game lasted for nearly an hour before I quit out of extreme boredom.

A typical 4-player game of Monopoly should only last around 30 minutes, but people often have terrible strategies or play with ridiculous house rules that constantly inject money into the game, prolonging it. A lot of people don't even know that the house rule they're playing is even a house rule because it's what they were taught when they first learned to play.

That's the right strategy for strong play. You should never trade property for mere money. If you absolutely have to, trade property for property if the trade gives you a monopoly, or if (in a more-than-two-player game) doing so gives you a net increase in the number of groups for which you hold at least one property (so you can block anyone from getting a monopoly in those groups without trading with you).

It's not an especially fun strategy, either for you or the people you're playing with.

Money itself is of value only if it can be used to buy stuff. The assets in Monopoly are fixed - more and more money chases the same assets, meaning that the real value of that money remains the same.

Zero-sum.

We have not used up all the fixed resources yet - which is why we can keep growing, but we soon might as the population grows and the rich take as much as possible.

Please explain how iron has been "used up".

In real life however, these disparities are only a problem if people leverage them against others.

Isn't this nearly always the case though? Absent external constraints?

I'd argue that the most fundamental lesson of capitalism is that markets magically allow individual self-interest to contribute to the collective benefit

Ok, fun facts: Adam Smith got his PhD in a department of moral philosophy. His first book was about why people are nice to each other: I feel good if you feel good, I feel bad if you feel bad.

His second book, "Wealth of Nations", was also about why people are nice to each other. He described capitalism (aka market economies) as the basis for large-scale moral action. Markets and trade naturally support collective benefit.

Adam Smith wasn't extreme -- his point was to promote "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" -- a phrase coined by Adam Smith's PhD advisor, Francis Hutcheson.

[1] trading game simulation: https://youtu.be/CsRLVZTYpGo?t=313

[1] trading game simulation: https://youtu.be/CsRLVZTYpGo?t=313