[Xirdus]

That's a very reductionist view of economy. For starters, it ignores the entire services sector, which is like half of GDP of most developed capitalist countries. Services are an extremely clear example of positive sum - no resources disappeared from the world, as much money was gained as was spent, but on top of it somebody got something of value.

[AndrewKemendo]

You should read about Baumol cost disease if you want to understand why what you just said is totally misguided

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

If I pay somebody to dig a ditch and I pay somebody else to fill it in was something of value created? Unequivocally no.

Whether or not that allowed somebody to survive and feed their family is entirely orthogonal to the question of the zero-sum nature of the universe

Nothing is free

energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain that would’ve otherwise gone to some other mechanical process

No free lunch theorem describes this mathematically and you can go all day reading about that

[Xirdus]

Let's stop at the first half. If I pay somebody to dig a ditch. Period. End of story. Let's assume I'm not clinically insane and I actually needed that ditch for something. Is the sum still zero?

Just because pointless things are possible doesn't mean not pointless things are not possible.

Nothing is free, but the service isn't free either. It's not free because people find it valuable, so valuable they're willing to pay for it. More than the cost of food needed to compensate energy spent. Way more in most cases. Is the sum still zero?

[eru]

Your argument would at most prove that you can't have a positive sum. But it doesn't say anything about not having a negative sum.

We CAN needlessly increase entropy without that benefiting anyone. It's easy.

The sum doesn't have to be zero.

And, of course, once you agree that the sum can go negative. Then we can work on trying to avoid that. Game theory doesn't actually care all that much about any finite offset. Whether the maximum we can reach is 0 or ten quadrillion, it's all the same to the theory.

[cowpig]

> energy comes from somewhere and you have to eat food which takes from the environment, that somebody else can’t eat or some other process can’t utilize, so by a function of your existence you cost energy to maintain

Your assertion that "energy comes from somewhere" seems to be borrowing a concept from thermodynamics and apply it, at the scale of the entire universe, to an opinion about the properties of economic/political system.

Our planet, as a system, is unequivocally energy-positive. We are inundated with energy from the sun. Does that mean capitalism is positive-sum on Earth?