Capitalism is 100% a zero sum game and capitalists love to try to pretend that it’s not
The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.
If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes
So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
>The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they "can’t count them" and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
The article explicitly addresses this:
The fact that Capitalism is non-zero-sum doesn't mean it is necessarily positive-sum. An economy that gets out of balance can produce very negative results (which are still non-zero). Cons of capitalism: — Can not be relied on to provide adequate social services, including healthcare and education. — Can be expected to run at a cost to externalities like the environment. — Can produce products that are detrimental to well-being.
Based on your other comment [0], it seems you have a bad-faith axe to grind against this site.
Steel man: GP could be using "capitalism" to refer to the distribution of capital - financial markets - rather than the entire system. Financial markets are zero-sum as they don't produce anything and their consumption (wages, electricity, etc) is paid in by their users. They can influence wealth creation asnd destruction but that isn't part of the market itself.
I'm replying without having read the entirety of the text you've referred to by Proudhon, but it looks interesting—thanks.
Some raw thoughts of mine if I may (feel free to add seasoning):
You mention that capitalism is definitionally zero-sum, and you seem to be facing quite a bit of resistance. I've had similar thoughts (perhaps still premature) that capitalism is zero-sum, but only (?) under a strong definition of "zero". I've not fleshed out my thoughts completely, but I suspect there are intangible/abstract dimensions along which we maintain some kind of equilibrium, regardless of what we do. "Do" here is quite abstract, but as a first approximation in the realm of economics, it might refer to any act of investment, compensation, or labour. (I may be abusing some technical terms in economics here—not my home turf.) A separate question could then emerge as to how significant these intangible/abstract dimensions are.
Actually, I'm not even sure that this is specific to the context of capitalism. However, whether something is a zero-sum game would seem relevant to systems obsessed with objective quantification, and where that quantification is heavily involved in steering moral views (or decision making), and I view capitalism as one of them.
It’s definitely not specific to the context of capitalism
capitalism however makes transactionalism the explicit structure such that it cannot coexist with any other type of ownership regime by function
That is to say, if you look at anarcho socialist philosophy it can theoretically coexist with other philosophies inside the same state and action space
Historically however, we have not found a stable equilibrium for the lived reality of our experience such that we could map it cleanly onto some discreet and identified philosophical framework
So neither anarcho-socialism nor capitalism is a sustainable equilibrium point due to the constraints of a human biological substrate
Claiming that “it could” or “can” or “is the best we can do” are all beside the point, because they ignore the intractable fundamental fact of separating human systems from all other systems
Every possible game is zero sum because the universe isn’t creating more matter or energy, it’s just moving around. How we move it around is the problem to solve and anyone using weak justifications with bankrupt epistemological foundations is just wasting everyone’s time.
I don't believe capitalism is a zero sum game. Capitalism is not the holy grail, but when combined with laws that balance the uneven distribution of the wealth it _creates_, and laws that protect resources and cleanliness, it turns out it is the best system we as a human species employed so far. I'm open to be proven wrong.
If you read Prudhon thoroughly you’ll understand that his critique is that the entire concept of capitalism is based on the concept of property (undisputed) and the concept of property is an entirely made up mythical thing (disputed)
By pillaging and conquering nations that have abundant resources through violence and coercion
Like this is the entire history of capitalism and it’s not even close
the fact that other organizations (USSR, China) do the same thing (horde property and then use consolidated resources to enforce economic heirarchy) but don’t call it capitalism doesn’t make it any less true
They can say “communism” all day but if the functional properties of the system of the Russian Federation or CCP are that Property control is limited to a small group of elites who then use those resources to create a command economy that is purely capitalist philosophy.
> By pillaging and conquering nations that have abundant resources through violence and coercion
That's pretty much backwards. The industrial revolution was the first time in human history where people could get rich on a very large scale via some way other than pillage and conquest. If you think "capitalism" started in the late 18th century and is essentially coterminous with industry (which is quite nonsensical since you had forms of capital as far back as ancient farming societies, but that's the way many scholars choose to use the term) that's exactly what let us choose something that was not plunder and conquest.
The hording and eliteness is not a property of the capitalistic system. It might be an unwanted side effect. Imperialism, greed, urge to expand control, subordination of others are unfortunately human traits. You might attribute that behavior to any system, why single out capitalism?
Because capitalism explicitly encodes transactionalism into the social structure by alienating labor from the fruits of the labor.
There’s no period of time where that has not been true for some portion is society, but we reached a point to which there are no places where that is not true.
Certainly some people know better than some other people, and I see nothing in the guidelines that say otherwise, or say that one cannot say so ... expertise is a thing. OTOH, I think there are several aspects of your comment that go against the guidelines. (Perhaps my pointing that out does as well.)
Of course, one can dispute specific claims, with facts and argumentation.
That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no.
Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe
Nothing is free
energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process
No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that
Let's stop at the first half. If I pay somebody to dig a ditch. Period. End of story. Let's assume I'm not clinically insane and I actually needed that ditch for something. Is the sum still zero?
Just because pointless things are possible doesn't mean not pointless things are not possible.
Nothing is free, but the service isn't free either. It's not free because people find it valuable, so valuable they're willing to pay for it. More than the cost of food needed to compensate energy spent. Way more in most cases. Is the sum still zero?
You’re describing positive-sum outcomes in subjective preference space.
I’m describing conservation laws in physical state space.
Preference gains don’t violate thermodynamics, but they also don’t escape zero-sum reality once you include energy, ecology, and time.
You’re doing what I’m complaining about separating Economics from ecology - there’s a very firm reason why climate changes the most important topic of our decade is because we have to merge our lived experience with the work experience and kill this embedded dualism that somehow human environments are different than the rest of the universe.
It’s like you’re trying to do control theory without energy constraints.
"Everything in economics is zero-sum because the resources on the plane are finite" is an unimaginative undergraduate-level position that adds nothing of substance to the discussion.
If you want to have a constructive conversation about pricing environmental externalities then by all means, but you need to drop this "I'm smarter than you" attitude if you want better reactions to your comments, especially if you're just going to aggressively post lukewarm takes and then insult people.
"Everything in economics is zero-sum because the resources on the plane are finite"
This is literally the position of the field of ecology and the field of cybernetics
I live day-to-day inside of that world because that is the real world
the fact that few others live live day-to-day inside the field of ecology and Cybernetics is precisely the problem I’m pointing out
the fact that you want to deny this means that you’re ignoring the intersectionality between climate change, social and structural dynamics, industrial production, financial production, Infrastructure and all this other stuff as though they are separate they are not separate
Is pure projection to say that it’s reductive for me to demand an accounting for all possible externalities in order to have a coherent system
I’m telling you to do 10 to 100 times more work in evaluating any of these actions structurally then is currently happening and you’re trying to induce that I’m collapsing the problem into some kind of single state variable and I’m saying no you need thousands of more variables to be tracking in your head at all time and on ledgers at all time then we currently do because all of these externalities have been dumped into the ocean and nto the atmosphere effectively
When the global food supply collapses and there’s blight and drought and famine because we overextended resource extraction without identifying the long-term effects of that literally no other argument is going to hold sway
Ah, so you indeed are doing the extremely reductionist view of economy that completely ignores services. And then calling capitalists wrong. While not even talking about the same subject as capitalists. This is lalala I can't hear you with extra steps.
I'm very open to a serious discussion. But only if it's actually serious. I don't consider reducing economy to thermodynamics to be serious.
Any statement about any economy is meaningless if you're ignoring services. Especially when discussing the totality of an economic system, such as the question whether capitalism is zero-sum. I am happy to hear actual arguments how the value of services always, necessarily, by definition comes at the cost of some environment somewhere. I'm not happy to hear arguments that dismiss existence of services entirely.
I was sure you were a troll yourself after that hole digging line. My bad.
The only reason people work is that they can have food so that their thermodynamic process of biology maintains consistent - if you do not account for this then you have not even begun to think about an economy
I have a degree in econometrics
that has nothing to do with reality
economists are totally completely capitulated to capitalism as a religion
there is no other possible thing that institutional economics talks about
so if your entire point is that you wanna stay within the frame of institutional economics then like I said there’s nothing else to be said here
If you really wanna go fully into this then you can read my paper that pulls all of it together:
Not GP author. I'd like to continue the conversation though. However, be warned that my view is actually closer to reducing the economy to thermodynamics. I don't intend to overturn every single point you've made, but I hope this doesn't preclude a productive discussion.
> Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.
I think it's very hard to fall back on services being positive-sum on a gross basis (i.e., 0 inputs, positive outputs) to justify that it is positive-sum on a net basis.
What kinds of services actually consume no resources? I could agree that, in isolation and on a marginal basis, a particular exchange of services for money might deplete a negligible amount of (physical) resources, but when you consider the operation of the entire industry (supposing a mature industry, i.e., that there is an industry to speak of), can it really be said that the entire industry consumes no resources? A prototypical counterexample is any service that relies on physical equipment: I would view that physical equipment always incurs wear and tear, and this is potentially substantial for sufficiently large industries. The wider umbrella here are all the other various externalities of the service.
(A good rebuttal to the physical equipment counterexample is actually where we've mastered the materials science well enough that, miraculously, the wear and tear outlasts the lifetime of anyone involved and hence where the equipment feels impervious to wear and tear... I resort to time horizons, which is another aspect of "scale". Something like GDP [growth] tries to normalise for time scales, but sadly I see this as falling prey to the same shortcomings as any kind of prediction activity.)
Personally, I consider it reductionist to try and measure every transaction with a currency value and then aggregate for a GDP. (The next key phrase in this train of thought is "Goodhart's law", which happily also gets addressed in the OP site [0].) However, I do also appreciate that this is a really fundamental paradigm in modern implementations of capitalism to attempt to uproot.
One way through which I can appreciate that capitalism is non-zero-sum is: across multiple different dimensions/axes/facets of measurement (currency value may be one of them), transactions incentivised by capitalism are not "zero" on all of them simultaneously. Under capitalism, it is that the transaction is positive by currency value which incentivises its own execution.
But there are lots of service industries where an undue focus on the currency value pushes us towards undesirable outcomes (necessarily on some axis besides currency value or GDP). For instance, some services are just innately incompatible with commercialisation. (Arts and culture comes to mind as one. Basic research is another.) When you attempt to offer/conduct these services under capitalism, you invariably need to moderate/regulate/limit the offering due to capital constraints. As in everything, moderation is sensible, so the next question is: are there enough people with enough influence thinking about whether we've gone too far? In a system where garnering influence is highly positively associated with accumulating capital, the answer seems self-fulfilling...
EDIT: I just realised that the "G" in "GDP" is "gross", for being gross of depreciation ("wear and tear"). This is a pretty big revelation for me, since it probably sheds some light on why I think GDP gets undue focus. Nevertheless, I think the principle of what I said above still stands.
Your argument would at most prove that you can't have a positive sum. But it doesn't say anything about not having a negative sum.
We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy.
The sum doesn't have to be zero.
And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory.
> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain
Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.
Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?
Humans can’t convert sun energy into biological energy. We aren’t plants.
However we eat plants and we eat the things that eat plants. So do you consider plants and animals part of your environment or not?
Is the basic requirements for having an economy being a set of humans in a society that has language and culture and exchange?
There’s no free lunch
Human activity takes from the non-human environment.
Under an abstracted society which you could call capitalism if you like these resource extractions are done with no view to externalities and we know this because even in a basic undergraduate economics degree you will be told companies do not price externalities and there are no pricing mechanisms for externalities outside of Reactionary measures historically
Again I’ll reference here the entire history of ecology and cybernetics has tried to make this abundantly clear that these are all connected and the fact that you seem befuddled about these connections tells me everything I need to know about this conversation
If anyone wants to know why the human race is doomed it’s because of precisely what this article describes:
Individual property owners having no desire to be part of a unified community in order to address an externality caused by a corporation exporting pollution.
That’s it. You can’t fix that which means independent human organizations can’t form that aren’t focused around direct financial benefit to the individual.
Texas is what the global mean aspires to be. My mom visited my extended family in Australia and Canada (we’re originally from a third world country) and came back ranting about how “poor” those countries were and how “nobody can get rich.” What she meant was that they don’t have big mcmansions on two acres everywhere and a doctor or lawyer or engineer only makes a comfortable salary instead of a $500k+.
Yes. Your average Bangladeshi would rather live in a McMansion in texas driving an SUV than in a cramped apartment in NYC. More of my cousins live in Texas now than in Queens, which is the “first hop” for many immigrants.
First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.
These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
I (mis)attributed an element of pre-destination to the word emergent that apparently doesn't map to the word properly used.
That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage.
It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination).
This is true, though the people that actually push the field forward do know enough about every level of abstraction to get the job done. Making something (very important) horrible just to rush to market can be a pretty big progress blocker.
Jensen is someone I trust to understand the business side and some of those lower technical layers, so I'm not too concerned.
And if you're writing machine code directly, you're still relying on about ten layers of abstraction that the wizards at the chip design firms have built for you.
Humans are still the current best at doing everything humans want to do
The ultimate goal is to transfer all possible human behavior into machine behavior such that they can simulate and iterate improvements on it without the constraints of human biology
The fact that humans are bad to each other means that we’re going to functionally encode all the bad stuff also and so there is no solution to fixing it if the best data that we can get is poisoned.
Like everything it’s a problem with humans not machines
It’s revisionist at best and totally epistemically broken to try and somehow “fix” the bias because all you’re doing is introducing a new bias
The only possible solution is to create new human data because we’re behaving in ways that are good for society this is literally the only possible future that still includes humanity.
I personally do not believe humans can do this and so I’m building something that tests that empirically.
Well if he wasn't already contributing some percentage to the "right" people ahead of time, and saying the "right" things ("autism, something, something, vaccines, something something, persecution, ..."), he wasn't very good at what he did.
Despite the great post-sentencing opportunities for monetary re-justicing, insurance still works better when paid for up front.
Yeah it’s been happening here but nobody cared until recently.
Remember Elian Gonzalez? There’s thousands of these kind of cases every year they just don’t get the spotlight. Removals aren’t even at an all time high (which is already insanely high).
It’s good that people are starting to finally see it at least.
I’m wondering if anything meaningful will change because the people on the ground in migrant settlements and family support aren’t seeing more help, that’s for sure.
The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game
There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.
If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes
So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
reply