A quick google search of this question gives a resounding answer: "No,
IDIOT!"
The reason given for why the economy isn't zero sum is "wealth creation", a nebulous ill-defined concept which I'm not entirely sure exists, at least not in the way it's usually touted. A common explanation of why
wealth creation ensures a positive sum world usually sounds like this:
Human ingenuity created something out of nothing which made all of our lives better. Hooray! Your average prole has access to technological wonders that Henry VIII and Louis XIV could only dream of. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed in a Honda Civic.
This conveniently ignores what it
costs, and to me seems motivated by ideological adherence to the American religion of
Fordism.
Many free market ideologies tend to have a big blind spot (no pun intended!): roads. Never mentioned is the incredible expenditure on road infrastructure by governments, AKA taxpayers, who have to both build and maintain them in order for there to be anything to drive on. In the US this amounts to something like 218 billion annually, and since many states are expanding their highway systems, building and maintenance costs only rise. Many cities in the US, especially small, remote and poor ones, have
exhausted their budgets trying to maintain this infrastructure, and very crucially it comes at the expense of mass transit systems, which extremely few cities in the US manage to invest in. The budget for roads and transit both have to come from the limited coffers of the department of transportation.
How car-centric planning changes cities can be seen in this photo of Houston. But it's happened all over the country.
Accomodating motorists with parking lots and ever increasing lanes ends up destroying dense, efficient, functional plans and turns them into stripmall wastelands. Sprawl becomes inevitable, wasting valuable real estate (a finite resource) and increasing travel times between locations as well as congestion.
The congestion question is an important one, because the average US worker spends about an hour a day commuting to and from work. That's an hour of unpaid work-related activity that comes directly out of their free time. As congestion has increased the time commuted has gone up
27% since 1980. Unlike a long commute on a train, the driver has to pay attention to the road, whereas a transit commuter can read, watch something on his phone, shitpost on agora road etc. So the quality of the time spent in this type of commute should also be taken into consideration.
The
cost of car ownership and maintenance has continued to rise, and since so much of US infrastructure all but requires a vehicle, these effects are felt disproportionately based on income. Not all jobsites will be serviced by transit, and walking isn't really an option.
Many newly manufactured cars are designed in such a way that they require expensive specialized repair.
Emissions are well understood as a pollutor, unless you for ideological reason decide to believe that it's impossible for the burning of billions of tons of fuel to have any effect on the atmosphere. There are types of emissions that are less widely perceived. For instance, CO
2 forms carbonic acid that ends up in the ocean,
raising its pH level. Tire wear accounts for
6 million tons of microplastics pollution annually, accounting for almost 80% of the microplastic pollution in the ocean.
Lastly, the world's crudes oil reserves are a cost as well, since they're a finite resource, indispensable to our modern way of life. Around 2006-ish people were introduced to the idea that we might have reached peak oil production. This turned out to not be the case, since deregulation of fracking and horizontal well drilling meant the US could not only continue but increase its fossil fuel extraction. But this doesn't disprove the idea of peak oil, there's only so much in those wells, even if change in regulation allows for new (and riskier) types of drilling. A debate very much like the one 15 years ago is going on currently, but it seems inevitable that at some point we will reach the point where the energy cost of extracting oil exceeds the value of the energy extracted. Free marketists will say that the market will compensate for this by making oil extremely expensive so we'll be able to continue extracting it, which is probably true, but inexpensive reserves of efficient fuel is the entire basis of modern civilization, so crisis seems inevitable.
Now I'm not writing all of this because I hate cars (although I pretty much do), it's just one example of how facile the idea of
wealth creation is, at least in this common example. It seems that the invention of the internal combustion engine has "created wealth" by:
1. forcing taxpayers to invest gargantuan sums of money in infrastructure, in many places at the expense of public transit
2. forcing citizens to cede their communities to accommodate motorists through car-centric urban planning
3. taxing worker's limited leisure time by making them commute using this infrastructure
4. taxing worker's money with ownership and maintenance costs
5. taxing future generations with catastrophic environmental problems
6. depleting the world's only reserve of fossil fuel
Has wealth really been created here? Or are we in actuality all left footing a large bill? Some people got rich off of these developments of course, but collectively there seems to be a pretty hefty price tag. The convenience has come with a great deal of
inconvenience, and the wealth has been saddled with considerable
costs. There's an idea that the pie can continue to grow infinitely, but ours is a world of limits. We don't live in minecraft.
That the economy is "positive-sum" and works for everyone's benefit seems dubious when you take into account the
wealth transfer happening
under everyone's noses right now. Not only is the wealth of billionaires growing,
but so is their number. And for the first time since statistics of this kind have been recorded, more are getting their wealth by
inheritance than by
wealth creation. And of all the
wealth created, it seems a
record amount is going to the richest anyway. This is happening during a
cost-of-living crisis and what's widely being called the
Death of the Middle Class. Could the two possibly be connected? As pointed out in the Gospel of Matthew
"For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away." We're told that one person's gain doesn't come at another person's loss, but everyday experience, going all the way back to the time of Matthew the Evangelist and beyond, seems to paint a different picture. Free market absolutists like Hayek consider losses to be as important to the economy as gains, they're two sides of the same coin according to him.
Am I going crazy here? Are we all being gaslit? In a world of finite resources and where increase in the money supply always results in inflation it just seems inevitable that one person's gain has to occur at someone else's loss. According to every google result, this is a profoundly ignorant and even outright dangerous sour grapes attitude but I'm not so sure...
