Everyone can be rich, because it's a positive sum game. You having a computer doesn't take it from someone else. Every person on the planet can have one.

It's not a fixed pie. We are growing the pie. Most people in "developed" countries are rich from a historical perspective. We have shelter, running water, cheap and plentiful food (so much that we waste over 30%), electricity, microwaves, refrigerators, pocket computers and so on. There's no reason this can't come to the entire world and continue to improve for all.

Sure, if you define the word rich as "owns more than a naked caveman" then everyone is rich in the world I suppose.

But you are just playing words games.

but if you define rich as "having more than your fellow human beings", then you cannot ever have everyone be rich. But that definition is not what most people would use.

I'd maybe define a rich person as "someone who is capable of working but does not need to labor ever again in order to have a comfortable amount of food, water, shelter, and medical care."

Everyone probably cannot be rich like this unless we invent some sort of frighteningly advanced automation to take care of our basic needs.

> unless [the exact scenario Naval is talking about]

Good example of "all or nothing thinking" here. "Toiling every day on the backs of humans for our every need" OR "Frighteningly advanced automation" — reality is higher fidelity than that.

We're already SO far towards the latter scenario (washing our clothes magically with the press of a button), painting it as a dichotomy only serves to highlight how out of touch with reality the immutable scarcity worldview is.

Or is it? Being rich is a moving target. The same as being successful.

Allocation of land is indeed a fixed pie. Say being rich is everyone having an 1-acre SFH lot with a view of the ocean. No matter what sort of monetary system we place, there is hard limit to the number of lots that could exist. Some people will have to live further inland.

No amount of toasters will change the fact that some people will have to live inland.

> No amount of toasters will change the fact that some people will have to live inland.

That's why we have global warming.

Believe he addresses this criticism thusly...

“ At the same time, deep down many people believe they can’t make it; so they don’t want any wealth creation to happen. They virtue signal by attacking the whole enterprise, saying, “Well, making money is evil. You shouldn’t do it.”

But they’re actually playing the other game, which is the status game. They’re trying to be high status in the eyes of others by saying, “Well, I don’t need money. We don’t want money.””

Just saying "disagree with me? Then you are just playing a status game" isn't a criticism, it's just making stuff up.

The world is full of evidence that one of,if not the biggest factor on people's wealth is the wealth of their parents. It's incredibly hard to escape povity.

No that’s money. You need to read the article. He freely admits you can’t win that game.

He didn't seem to explain how you get wealth without first having money (I admit I didn't finish it)

Define rich? I've always loved the quote:

    Some people are so poor, all they have is money ― Patrick Meagher 

You can be rich and have poor taste, rich and alone, rich and never have the simple experiences of everyday 'poorer folk'.

I think "Everyone can be rich", extremely depends on your definition of rich.

And that definition not only varies from person to person but also due to geography and other factors.

It varies most over time.

The very next sentence explains what he means:

> But the reality is everyone can be rich. We can see that by seeing, that in the First World, everyone is basically richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago.

> We can see that by seeing, that in the First World, everyone is basically richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago.

And we can also see that those riches in large part rest on the poverty of people who happen to be outside the first world, even for basic necessities like food and clothes.

Externalising the poverty doesn't make it not exist.

> Externalising the poverty

poverty isnt some conserved property that needs to be "externalized" to make the developed world rich.

It may not "need" to be[0], but the externalisation of poverty is precisely how the particular quality of life that the lower classes in most developed countries enjoy is maintained - from the workers that make their fast fashion to the ones that assemble (or mine raw materials for) electronics that they cannot afford themselves.

0. At some point in the not-so-far-off future we will get around to automating all of these things, but until then people have become too deeply entitled to commodities produced by other people that are paid poverty wages.

That’s the whole point of the article. Wealth-rich and money-rich are not the same thing.

I have access to pretty good healthcare (both privately And publicly). I have access to museums, and the internet, and I have a fire brigade and ambulances if I have some sort of accident. All of these things are wealth that we’ve built as a society and only tangentially related to how much money I personally have.

Exactly. You also have access, presumably, to a warm home in the winter, aren't suffering from pests and predatory animals, you can learn or be entertained in a million of ways. The fact that people can't perceive all of that as an incredible blessing says more about them than anything else.

Exactly. So many people think being "rich" is having the mansion, Ferrari, and the yacht. Those are just highly-priced, luxurious products that people buy to status-flaunt most of the time (I know so many here in Florida). We live in the greatest time humanity has ever seen in terms of abundance, and survivability.

Not in the physical world but maybe in the digital world where material scarcity is a fixable imposition and attention can be artificially constructed.

If wealth is status, which the two are often linked, then everyone cannot be rich.

Read the article - he intentionally breaks apart wealth which is non zero sum, and status, which is.