As time passes, human beings capture energy and use it to do work, and - against all thermodynamic probability - in doing so they locally reverse the inexorable entropy gradient of the universe and create value, by arranging atoms in useful structures, constructing useful or amusing arrangements of information, or transporting matter or information from one place to another where they might be more useful.

This means that the world tomorrow is a little bit better, in some ways, than today. It contains a bit more utility.

And we keep making more people and finding more useful ways for them to spend their time and our collective efforts make it look like that trend of arranging matter and data into ever more useful forms will continue into the future.

(Of course, we do need to consider that this growth trajectory does rather depend on us not screwing up and breaking the systems that sustain us and enable us to continue surviving and thriving, so please don’t take this as a naive assumption that infinite growth without consequences is just inevitable)

But basically, if there’s always more work to do, and more value to create, and more benefits to distribute, every day…

… surely any model that is based on a static pie that can only be cut up so many ways is in flat denial of reality, and falls at the first hurdle.

Take land for instance. There's a finite amount of land on earth. If 8 billion today own all of the land there is on earth, and in 2060 there's now 13 billion people, how are these 5 billion new people going to own land (when all of it is already owned by the other 8 billion)? For the 5 billion new born people to acquire land, means some previous owners must lose ownership of some of their land. Put it another way, if we divided land equally amongst all human beings, with every birth, the amount of land per person will decrease, which means the sheer birth of humans makes us poorer when it comes to the amount of land we each individually own.

Heck you can apply this to most anything. Take iron. If all the iron on earth has been mined and been used to construct steel buildings and cars, and I want to make a new car made of steel, then I would have to dismantle an existing car or building in order to acquire the material to do so. Only reason this doesn't happen today, is because there's still more iron that we can mine out of the ground; I'm not yet forced to "mine" it out of my neighbor's car.

What I wrote hardly supports your guess about my model of the economy. I merely claim that zero-sum-games appear more pervasive to me than most people are willing/able to admit/recognize.

So no, I don't think "the economy amounts to a zero sum game" is all there is to my model of the economy. But maybe you correctly infer more about my mental model than I myself know about it, who knows.

> ... thermodynamic probability ...

Since you appear to be familiar with thermodynamics, you'll be able to follow my reasoning easily:

Every aspect of society/economy that can be expressed by an equation in a useful way, can be thought of as a zero-sum-phenomenon. Why? Because every ordinary equation can be restructured as a zero-sum equation.

Example: Y = a * X + b^2 * Z ... can be written as: 0 = a * X + b^2 * Z - Y

> ... so please don’t take this as a naive assumption that infinite growth without consequences ...

To my mind, the mere combination of "infinite growth" and "without consequences" sounds naive, to be honest.

> ... surely any model that is based on a static pie that can only be cut up so many ways is in flat denial of reality, and falls at the first hurdle.

Well, I never claimed that the pie that gets cut up - and this methaphor for the economy is ironically equivalent to the term "zero-sum-game" - be static.

How the size of the pie develops over time (grow, shrink, remain the same) is completely separate from the question of how the pie gets cut up. The pie always gets cut up, thus there's always at least this very basic zero-sum-game.

And there are many more subtle zero-sum-games.