There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year
That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".
> This isn't a zero sum game
It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)
> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor
You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem
I'll try to illustrate this with an easy example. There's a finite amount of gold that humans have mined, and thus available for use. We could even say that there's a finite amount of gold on Earth, that is available. But these are different things. If we do no more mining, we have a fixed amount of gold. If we mine more, we get more. Total gold available for use, increases.
The analogy extends. As our technology advances, more gold becomes available to be mined, and eventually we could even transmute gold. There's more resources in our solar system than we could conceivably use in the next billion years (even with exponential growth in use), so it can be treated as infinite (over these bounds).
This is especially important as we build... software. It is similarly effectively infinite within our bounds. We are rapidly building better hardware, increasing computing power and memory. This is a positive sum game.
The same is true about the economy in general.
You're right!
> If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
We just disagree about what needs to be conceptualized. I believe you just missed the context of what I was writing about. I'm not giving the example as a way to teach you, I'm giving it so that we can make sure we're aligned in what we're talking about. I agree, there's a really limited amount of gold. But it is important to recognize that we mine more, and the amount of gold increases. I was trying to clarify this with my mention of time. But that's no different from when you say "a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation". All I'm saying is that the hands on the clock continue to tick forward...
IF IT WAS ZERO SUM, then it would be even more important to discuss allocation, not less. In an extreme case, let's assume we have enough resources to make everyone in the world live at a middle class level. It is finite. But there are an infinite number of ways in which we may allocate these resources. I think it would definitely be a problem if we were allocating it in ways that some people could buy a private jet every day for the rest of their lives ($100bn easily does this), while others are can't eat at least one meal every day. That's not a lack of resource problem, that's an allocation problem.
What's your math background. You can formalize what we're talking about with game theory. We're talking about stuff you'd learn in an introductory course. Economics courses discuss a lot of this at length too. But you should try to draw from both the applied econ side as the more theoretical math side. Least you get trapped by naive models, or at least not recognize their limitations.
CS and math should be a solid basis here. To be honest I don't remember at all where I picked this stuff up - a lot of it comes from random disjoint fields like optimization theory, graph theory, etc. which impinge on econ all the time, although I couldn't tell you a definitive book on the subject(s)
There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year
That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".
> This isn't a zero sum game
It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)
> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor
You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem