[jakubp]

You are wrong about apples and potatoes - the blog post author does mention your story just under different term: utility, which is a standard way to express the notion you touched: the total utility of an apple and a potato in the right hands is higher than utility of them in the wrong hands. So barter increases utility, but economy as a whole isn't any more valuable because of it (externally it'll trade the same). It's also echoed in OP's point about utility of money (and a question whether Amazon actually increases or decreases total utility in the economy).

Bezos claims he created 310 B of value and you say "as shareholder I care about value of the company", but you and other shareholders who own (together) 100% of Amazon didn't get 310 B of value, did you?

That's the thing. Neither did the economy "gain" all this value. If I work for 10 hours and earn a 1000 uSD, my employer didn't create 1000 USD worth of value. We traded my time/effort/exhaustion for money. Maybe there was some actual value created through that work for us or economy/society, or maybe it was meaningless work (and we even stole value from the society by e.g. burning me out).

[dodobirdlord]

> So barter increases utility, but economy as a whole isn't any more valuable because of it

Many things factor into the value of a good, including where it is and who owns it. If the bartering involves the apple and the potato trading places it’s easy to see how value is created, as the value of a good depends on its location and transporting it to a location where it is more highly valued creates value. (Otherwise transportation as an industry could never create value, in which case, why would anyone ever transport anything?)

It’s more rare that ownership will factor into value, but it comes up sometimes. An example is when the whole of something is worth more than the sum of the parts, like buying the last missing piece of a city block so that you can put a full-block development on it.