> Every time anyone creates something more valuable than the sum of its parts, value is added to the system.

I really like this angle, although the value of 'something' can vary for different people.

Nonsense. It doesn't have to be a perfect model to still be a useful one. It's precisely because it's so unintuitive that it's interesting. Your introduction of a positive sum mechanic doesn't invalidate the model. Introducing a $new_value component still begs questions around who gets access to that value - and if the yard sale model holds, even perfectly equal distribution of that $new_value suffers from exponential outcome drift for anything except ridiculously high ratios of $new:$old - and in the real world, value is disproportionately captured by the already wealthy [0].

But hey, internet for you lazy proles, pull yourselves up by your shoelaces etc.

[0] - https://wir2022.wid.world -- The richest 1% captured 38% of all new wealth since '95, the bottom 50% captured 2%.

> value is disproportionately captured by the already wealthy

value is generated using both capital from the already rich, and labour from the poor.

Over time, labour isn't increasing in productivity. It's capital that's increasing productivity, such as by improving labour's efficiency.

With this in mind, why is it that the rich shouldnt be the ones to capture the new/increased productivity? After all, it is their investment that would make such productivity possible. If you had told the rich that their investments would not actually gain them profit (because labour captured the increases that produces the profit), they would not have invested in the first place.

One way to break out of this cycle is for labour to provide something more than unskilled labour and merely using capital to produce goods/services. For example, research and development, knowledge/skill from education, etc.

Labor, both unskilled and skilled, drives all economic growth. Ideas have no value until labor creates the tangible embodiments of those ideas.

That laborers, both skilled and unskilled, tend to be fungible, is the reason that they typically have no individual leverage to earn their fair share of the value created by their efforts.

Laborers end up having to unionize to gain the leverage to claw some additional fraction of the true value of their efforts.

The value distribution pyramid is upside down. Ideas have no value until laborers produce a sellable product.

Management ought to be far more grateful and gracious to those who labor day after day to produce the goods we want and need.

Does it apply better to land/housing or other limited resources?

did you read the article or did you just read the first paragraph? it considers some of the criticisms later in the article.

> 92% of the US including 86% of people without homes in this country have Internet access.

Good point, but...

> We can all make incredibly informed decisions these days.

You need more than internet access to make good decisions. I cannot imagine living without a house or healthcare, eating food picked out of a dumpster behind a supermarket, and then being criticized because I made "less-informed" decisions even though I nominally have internet access at a library where the patrons scowl every time they see me in their peripheral vision.

People won't be able to magically make better informed decisions even with access to the information if they are too busy working three jobs to afford food, rent, or healthcare.

Yes, but value is not created out of thin air, you need capital to create value, i.e. you need to be wealthy.

So you could extend the yard-sale model and include a rule that after each round, each $ will turn into $1.5 with some probability.

Guess what? Now the rich players can't just risk higher stakes in the coinflip games, they will also have more opportunity to introduce more money into the game through value creation.

So that would make the outcome even more extreme than the standard yard-sale model, not less.

However, the outcome of such a system would be that there's more stuff than ever at the yard sale. Things that didn't previously exist.

Therefore, the fact that new options exist at the yard sale is itself a form of wealth.

I think there is a problem with using money to measure wealth. Maybe a better question may be to check how land or housing is distributed among people? If 10% wealthiest decided one day to e.g. purchase land, the effect would be: 1) equity/bonds or whatever they are using to store their wealth would plummet and crash 2) land price would skyrocket. So suddenly they would not be that rich. I think much of the wealth is overvalued currently, it is like with Bitcoin, the price is crazy because not much people are willing to sell.

> We can all make incredibly informed decisions these day. Better informed decisions than ever possible by all the wealthiest royalty in human history, in literally seconds.

And yet there were numerous stock investing experiments in which random choice delivered similar or better results than respected investment specialists.

It's almost as if, at the end of the day, we don't actually make "incredibly informed decisions".

> we don't actually make "incredibly informed decisions".

the original argument differentiates between "can" and "do".

It is a form of "victim blaming" - they could've made good decisions, but because they didnt, the outcomes they had were "self-inflicted".