Comment by slt2021

Comment by slt2021 7 days ago

politics, especially international geopolitics is a zero-sum game. The game of competition for limited resources and markets. Because resources are limited, the pie is fixed, and this makes it zero sum game.

Although there is a way to frame political alliances as a win-win when two parties increase their share at a cost of some other third party losing theirs.

Because of that, the arguments will always be straw-man, because people want to win resources, not to argue in good faith.

Any political issue can be framed in terms of zero sum game, if you look at the whole picture

Vegenoid 7 days ago

This is incorrect. There are few physical resources that we have reached the limit of, such that one entity’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. There are also a great many things of value that aren’t simply raw resources, for which the pie will never be fixed, because the pie is made by humans and can be made bigger or smaller.

This zero-sum narrative is only true in a world of no growth, where all resources are being fully utilized to maximum effect. That is very far from the world we live in, where there is enormous room for additional extraction, creation, and efficient utilization of resources.

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slt2021 7 days ago

the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy.
Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.
You may be conflating win-win with debt-based growth, where economy can grow at the cost of running fiscal deficit and accumulating debt. Sure the economy and market can grow, but the debt will also grow and the inflation will cancel out the nominal growth

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- hnaccount_rng 7 days ago
  
  We use about 1 part in 10000 of the sun's energy deposit on earth... No, we are _really_ far away from preservation of energy being a limiting problem
  
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  slt2021 7 days ago
  
  yes, the only way to increase economy without stealing from someone else is technological advancement and efficiency improvements (which amounts to R&D spend = $$$$)
  
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- Vegenoid 6 days ago
  
  Again, the law of preservation of energy only makes things zero sum between entities if all the energy is already being used at maximum efficiency, which it isn't.
  For a simple example, consider farming, where plants are used to harness the energy of the sun and capture it in a form useful to humans. Yes, there are inputs that go into it, but the output is more valuable (economically and otherwise) than the material input, because the plant also captured a bunch of solar energy that would have otherwise done nothing useful for anyone's economy. My economy has now grown, without having to take or go into debt from some other economy.
  Even in a scenario where I do take on debt to get the materials/water/whatever, the value that is created is greater than the debt taken on. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't do it.
  Humans create value by harnessing more energy and using it more efficiently for things that humans (and therefore economies) value. This is an ongoing process, with a long way to go.
  
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alwa 7 days ago

I guess I can interpret the strongest form of your argument to suggest that resources and markets have a specific level of economically relevant supply at any specific time, which I suppose is an empirical claim that’s true. I feel like recent days’ trade policy earthquakes might operate along a similar line of reasoning: there’s only so much, “they’ve” been getting better off, which means they’ve been “taking” from the US, so the US is taking back.

In the same sense it’s true that there are only so many bushels of seed corn left after the winter. At the moment, we can squabble over how to divide the fixed supply. I could take all the corn, eat half, keep the rest for myself to plant this season. Or, if I’ve already got enough to plant all my land, and you’ve got more land and nothing else to do, I could invest some of my leftover corn with you and we can all have double the harvest in a few months… when the supply will have dramatically expanded, assuming I don’t treat it as a zero-sum game right now. Or I could focus on “winning” right now, and we’ll both be poorer after the harvest than we would have been otherwise.

While I agree that you could frame most any political issue in zero-sum terms, I feel like the blind spot is the same: it tallies the score based on assumptions fixed in time, and it takes a pessimistic view of cooperative potential, of humans’ power to influence the constraints themselves.

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slt2021 7 days ago

the zero sum will always be true because of the fundamental law of physics: Law of preservation of energy / Law of preservation of matter.
Everything in the economy thats worth producing/consuming costs energy and labor. Energy and labor is not free.
Any free lunch one can have in the economy is only possible in nominal terms, when your economy/market grows, but your sovereign debt and fiscal deficit also grows and in real terms, after inflation there is no real growth.
if you look at the core, the bottom of the economics it is just pure physics: The flow and exchange of energy and materials, labor and capital. The fight is over a distribution of the flows between various factions

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- alwa 7 days ago
  
  Aren’t we so, so, so far from physical limits though? To the point that we speak of likely energy reserves in terms of centuries of consumption at current levels, even if we only get around to proving the next couple decades’ worth at a time?
  If Musk et al get their wishes, and we become “spacefaring civilization” or whatever—aren’t the conceivable physical limits of known reality so far away as to be irrelevant?
  And isn’t the story of the industrial era one of compounding productivity per unit of labor?
  
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goatlover 7 days ago

That's not how economics works. The pie is not fixed, it tends to grow over time as there's more trade between countries and their economies get bigger. The global economic pie has increased a massive amount over the past century.

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slt2021 7 days ago

the trade has increased because jobs have been offshored, corporations have been running labor cost arbitrage and making a profit from a difference in labor cost in US vs elsewhere

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- freeone3000 7 days ago
  
  And as with most arbitrages, costs have lowered as a result. It means a piece of technology with thousands of individual parts can be in your hand for $200. Labor efficiency differences have resulted in an explosion of value-for-dollar for the American consumer.
  
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