If we're looking at how many pies there are in the world-- yes, that's zero sum.

But if we're considering utility-- how useful stuff is to me-- it is far from zero sum.

If I produce lots of wheat, being able to trade some of it for my neighbor's beef makes both of us richer.

Your example proves my point

You have a fixed amount of already acquired property

You do specified labor on that

You exchange your labor + property for someone else’s labor + property

That’s commerce and has nothing to do with the question I’m talking about, which is: How you acquired the property in the first place is the ethical question.

What’s unethical is if your a neighbor was struggling to survive and instead of caring for him out of your property and labor, you convinced him to trade your excess money for a portion of his property in perpetuity.

So no, there is no more uncaptured “pie.” It should have never been caputured in the first place - it’s equally everyone’s right

If I develop and produce a fertilizer which doubles yields for a particular crop, that's uncaptured pie. Plain and simple.

Hehe hmm I think fertilizer might drain the soil faster though right?

Can your zero sum hypothesis explain the following amazing video from Hans Rausling, economist, on rising prosperity?

https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo

The world is trivially not zero sum. If it were zero sum we would all be living worse off than medieval peasants

Without (yet) having an opinion here, that's not necessarily true: resource consumption is adding value to the system at a level that might offset population growth?

Who cares about population growth? We know human population will stabilize pretty soon. Malthusian arguments are meaningless when the very premise of unlimited population growth is false.

Every “win-win” most certainly produces side effects, usually unmeasured, which leads to naive statements like “it’s not zero sum”.

We may no longer be peasants (hard to prove), but a large number of extinct species and ecological disasters would like to argue the “not zero sum” point.

If the world were zero sum, that means no new value has been created for humanity, ever. The world population has grown ~22x since 1400s. Are we now splitting our meager peasant loaves of bread 22 ways?

Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer. Just state what you actually are, which is anti-human.

What he said that "its hard to prove if we are still peasants" is wrong. But you cannot argue that we human have benefitted at the cost of nature? Also,

>Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer.

Is also not true. Having a 1km lawn is excess. Flying solo on a private plane to visit an office halfway across the world for 1-2 days every other week is excess. No sane person arguing for this position is claiming that people who can barely find food every day is living in excess and must suffer degrowth. It is the privileged that needs to degrowth and redistribute their excess wealth. Do you really think that the Earth can sustain had every single person on Earth lives like the ultra wealthy? Or even as the middle-class American with single unit home in the suburb? We would probably annihilate almost all of "interesting" flora/fauna and be left with chickens and cows if that at all. Maybe that's a perfectly reasonable trade? AFAIK humanity must take priority over every other being AFAIC.

> What he said that "its hard to prove if we are still peasants" is wrong.

I think this depends on how you classify peasant. If we can agree that it's about income inequality, and not quality of life, then there was a study done comparing income inequality in the late eighteenth century to current day, which concluded that "Incomes were much more equally distributed in colonial America than in America today, or in other countries in the late eighteenth century". https://www.nber.org/papers/w18396

Ultimately it depends on the specifics and the dates we are comparing. I don't think people fully realize how significant income inequality really is today.

Why does income inequality matter? Why does it matter that some people are way, way richer than the other. This correlates with poorer quality of life, sure, but income inequality itself is not really that important. Calling the modern middle-class human a peasant is quite misguided imo. It is important to acknowledge that we have fared much better than our ancestors.

Is it a problem, say, if we all achieved nirvana but some achieved better nirvana? Must we rebel against them too?

It matters a lot since wealth translates to power and influence.

> Calling the modern middle-class human a peasant is quite misguided imo.

The modern middle class is shrinking fast. About 17%. Most people are either low income or poor.

> It is important to acknowledge that we have fared much better than our ancestors.

Look, we generally live much longer these days, so I think that's a decent measurement that we're far better off in aggregate compared to the middle ages. However life expectancy has actually been decreasing recently in many places, and we have some really big global problems to solve if we don't want that trend to continue. If that trend does continue though, then it becomes very hard to say we're better off than our ancestors.

> Is it a problem, say, if we all achieved nirvana but some achieved better nirvana? Must we rebel against them too?

Probably yes. Most people aren't zen. It's in our nature to measure our status among our peers, and probably responsible for most people's wealth and their drive to do better. Better is always relative. Before arguing the morality of this, you'll need to also defend the morality of billionaires (what's the point really?).

> If the world were zero sum, that means no new value has been created for humanity, ever.

This statement is straight up false. Obviously you gain and lose value, and are interested in whether it's a net gain or loss. It's worth nothing that a gain or a loss here is only anecdotal to our own human experience so far and without accounting for potential debts (externalities) still owed... like global warming, monoculture, antibiotic resistance, nukes, etc. You're attempting to make a rule in an extremely non-scientific manner, and making a ton of assumptions to boot.

> Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer. Just state what you actually are, which is anti-human.

I've never even heard of this Degrowth ideology... My ideology, if you can call it that, is simply taking responsibility for our actions instead of making up a bunch of buzzword horseshit. I'm not advocating for anything but the basic admission that it stinks when we fart. This "not zero sum" statement is as much a fantasy as religion is. I'm not asking you to stop farting or to save a whale. Just stop polluting my ears / eyes with corporate doublespeak.

We’ve strip mined the earth, decimated humanity, are globally hopeless (look at birth rates) and individual alienation has never been wider spread

Suicide is quickly becoming the leading cause of death

I’m not sure we’re any better off now holistically

> strip mined the earth

So... If you are complaining about destruction of habits for animals, and global warming, then yeah. If you are complaining about us extracting minerals... Rocks don't have feelings, they don't get a vote. If we could mine them without polluting and destroying ecosystems, not only we probably should, but we should start thinking on how to also mine asteroids and stuff.

> decimated humanity

How did we do that? There are more people now than in any previous point in history. There are a lot of people suffering, but quality of life by numbers is probably a lot better now than it has ever been.

> globally hopeless (look at birth rates)

So is population growth a good thing cause it shows people are happy, or a bad thing cause it means we won't have enough resources? I prefer us to have a stable population for the long run, at least until we can get to space.

> individual alienation has never been wider spread

How informed do you think illiterate peasants used to be?

What is happening, is that the American empire is in a state of decay right now. But the world is bigger than just the Western cultural world. Yeah, it might suck to not get getting all the fruits of imperialism that the US and European countries used to get. It makes the imperialist countries poorer not to have that. But for the formerly colonized people, their life gets better.