When value has been created, almost everyone benefits somehow.
Why? To adhere to your metaphor, you transition from one pie with a particular sharing to a new situation, with a bigger pie and a different sharing. Where, in your reasoning, can you ensure that almost everyone has a bigger slice after the transition?
While I don’t feel capable of making a fully rigorous argument here, my sense is that value, when considered across all possible domains (monetary and non-monetary), is impossible to fully capture when created by any individual.
This includes spillover effects. If we imagine person A creates value and captures some percentage of it, the rest of the value goes to others. But then those others can’t capture all the value flowing to them, either—not only will the original value still trickle outwards to the next degree of separation, but the increase in value will prompt other increases in value on their own, and then those increases in value propagate outwards, and so on.
Perhaps a more technically accurate way to put it would be “it’s impossible to completely prevent value from accruing to any specific individual in the system.”
You seem to argue that the newly created value will be shared between everyone, thus every individual will either gain something or, in the worst case, gain 0.
Then you claim that this worst case is actually not possible, because no group of individuals is perfect at capturing value, I understand this part.
But that’s not really my question, whatever was done to create more value has changed the equilibrium, some people might have lost from it.
To get back to the bridge-building metaphor, building the bridge will hit hard the people who used to move goods and people across the river using boats. It seems to me that your previous point is that these people will benefit at least a little from cheaper goods, now that trading is cheaper, and I agree with this. But they also lost a business, and the boats are now stranded assets.
Why? To adhere to your metaphor, you transition from one pie with a particular sharing to a new situation, with a bigger pie and a different sharing. Where, in your reasoning, can you ensure that almost everyone has a bigger slice after the transition?
While I don’t feel capable of making a fully rigorous argument here, my sense is that value, when considered across all possible domains (monetary and non-monetary), is impossible to fully capture when created by any individual.
This includes spillover effects. If we imagine person A creates value and captures some percentage of it, the rest of the value goes to others. But then those others can’t capture all the value flowing to them, either—not only will the original value still trickle outwards to the next degree of separation, but the increase in value will prompt other increases in value on their own, and then those increases in value propagate outwards, and so on.
Perhaps a more technically accurate way to put it would be “it’s impossible to completely prevent value from accruing to any specific individual in the system.”
You seem to argue that the newly created value will be shared between everyone, thus every individual will either gain something or, in the worst case, gain 0.
Then you claim that this worst case is actually not possible, because no group of individuals is perfect at capturing value, I understand this part.
But that’s not really my question, whatever was done to create more value has changed the equilibrium, some people might have lost from it.
To get back to the bridge-building metaphor, building the bridge will hit hard the people who used to move goods and people across the river using boats. It seems to me that your previous point is that these people will benefit at least a little from cheaper goods, now that trading is cheaper, and I agree with this. But they also lost a business, and the boats are now stranded assets.
How do we know the effect is net positive?