Building business, later , first answer this

People, and especially billionaires, say that making money is a positive sum game. I don't buy this argument.

Simple logic: if someone owns a 100-acre piece of land, no one else can buy that same land. It's gone, locked under one person's name, and whether it gets sold, and for how much, depends entirely on that person's willingness. So that's not positive sum.

The opposition might argue that valuable things can be created, and that resources keep increasing, as Naval says, knowledge creates resources. But this is an oversimplified way of looking at it, maybe just a way of staying morally comfortable.

Naval's exact argument, as I found it: "Wealth is not finite; it arises from human knowledge, like chemistry or technology, that turns raw, unusable materials into resources, proving that knowledge creation is the ultimate engine of abundance."

But what about timing? What about the speed of transformation, the extent of it, and who controls it?

Say someone discovered 500 years later that a vehicle doesn't need 1 litre of petrol to run 80 miles, 100ml would have been enough. What about all the excess resource wasted up until that point? Who counted that?

When you bring in the concept of usage efficiency, it gets complicated fast. If someone achieved 10x productivity from a resource, but later it was found that 100x was possible, the resource spent achieving only 10x was essentially wasted. And if 1000x turns out to be possible after that, then everything done before it was also wasted, relatively speaking.

Now, how does this wastage make it "not a positive sum game"?

A positive sum game means you don't feel like wealth-building opportunities are limited, that you can build something valuable for society, something not already built.

But here's the problem: if something valuable already exists, why can't I get credit for building something similar? If I try to build it, why don't I have access to the raw materials I need? Why are those raw materials overpriced? Because the person who got there first used the money he earned from those resources to buy even more of them, in bulk, driving up prices. He's using wealth built from resources to acquire more of the same resources, which is fundamentally unfair. It prices out the person who might make even better use of them.

And the cycle continues: once you prove the value of something, someone else does the same thing and holds on, waiting for someone who can use it even better. Then that person does the same.

This isn't positive sum. It's holding onto the illusion that "I know the best use of this resource," while blocking everyone else and accumulating money in the process.

It's an imperfect system. What we actually need is something that minimises the time lag between a resource's current use and its best possible use. And that can only happen if there is one unified intelligence doing the discovering, which is exactly what AI is becoming.