Where did you get the land to grow your seed? Where did you buy the bricks to build your house? And the fence to keep the deer away? What of the police and army to keep people from killing you and taking your seedling? The water to nourish it?

You described one of the only scenarios in which wealth is "created" and the only reason it's created is because it derives "free" energy from the sun. But that is just one of the economic inputs of the seed, and there are many more (the labor to water it, the water to grow it, the land on which it grows).

The sun's energy in this case is a small portion of the actual economic inputs the seed requires. And those economic inputs are diverted from somewhere else. They do not appear out of thin air.

So yes, I agree, we should harness the sun's energy, or other "free" energy sources, as economic inputs.

That doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of wealth already exists and is not created out of thin air, but diverted.

It's helpful to separate natural resources (land, woods, oil, etc.) from wealth (valuable possessions).

We take natural resources, often plentiful, apply labor + skill, and get a more valuable product. We're wealthier as a result.

Yes, natural resources are finite, but not the limiting reagent for most things. There's a zero-sum game in that land used for farming is not available for an entertainment complex. But we have so much used for "nothing" that switching it to "something" is a giant increase in wealth. You can buy an acre in Kansas for a month's worth of minimum wage work. Las Vegas was built in a desert surrounded by hundreds of miles of wasteland. Did turning land, earth, trees, and iron ore into Las Vegas add zero value? (Not saying it was the best use of resources, just that assembling buildings improved the value of the raw materials.)

As a counterexample, consider melting down a car into slag. Are you less wealthy with your charred steel than a working car? Of course -- charred steel is less valuable. The number of atoms is the same. In other words, is an assembled watch worth the same as a pile of gears? Are you indifferent to the two?

If wealth were fixed in the earth, we must be getting poorer as the population grows. A few thousand years ago we had 1M people on earth. Were those peasants 7000x wealthier than us?

Fair points in regards to my response. However, I believe part of your argument is still predicated on endless resources. Agreed, there are vast many (ever-shrinking) resources we can use while the population is growing, however at some point we will reach an equilibrium where there is no more vacant land and the creation of new wealth (barring space exploration, at least for this argument) will cease.

In regards to your watchmaker: a pile of gears might be marginally useful to a few, but a working watch will be valuable to many. Has the watch created wealth? No, because the people who were not buying watches are now not buying something else in order to buy the watch. The creation of the watch did not add the dollar-value of exactly one watch to everyone's wealth, allowing them to spend money on the watch. The wealth was diverted! The creation and selling of the watch certainly did create societal value but it did not create wealth, it merely diverted wealth from some other purchase each watch-buying customer would have made and sent it to the watchmaker.

My point is that the overwhelming majority of transactions are diversions, not creations, of wealth.

To your very original point: "You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for"

I suppose my argument should be changed to: Perhaps amount of wealth is not currently fixed (as defined by the shrinking number of resources one could use to create wealth), but those who create wealth (and not just merely divert it) are generally already very wealthy and are generally the only ones who have the means to create this wealth due to extremely high barriers to entry.

So, I would say theoretically, you're correct: there is a growing pool of wealth. But practically, any normal, everyday person cannot go around creating new wealth...they can only hope it is diverted to them by someone who already has wealth.

Thanks for taking the time to clarify, I mostly agree with your updated version. Global wealth can grow but is not necessarily (or often) distributed, and not everyone is in a circumstance to grow it on their own.

You may enjoy the elephant curve: https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-wo...

The very rich and moderately poor have seen wealth increase while the top quintile (E.g. many Americans) have seen wealth stagnate. Globally we’re richer on average but not everyone participated. Clearly it’s best if we can lift all boats and not certain subsets.