I’d agree if there was any semblance of a power balance or history of successful outcomes for the vast majority over the long term.
All people point to are the infinitely rare (over represented here by multiples) first few employees of a huge start up - and even that is getting rarer for anything but the first 100 employees at most.
When was the last big employee millionaire event like Microsoft or Google or Amazon - over 20 years ago for all but Google (19)? That’s an entire career.
I don’t recall a wave of new millionaires from Snap, AirBnB or Uber IPO in the same way. Maybe I’m totally wrong here and just missing these groups - seems all the spoils went to the VCs.
Give me example of any non-zero sum game, and I can prove that under the hood it is actually a zero-sum game.
The trivial proof is that profit/revenue pool available for Corporation is limited, and the main question is how that profit pool is to be divided among Labor (employees) and Capital (investors/shareholders).
The fundamental laws of mass/energy preservation equally apply to money - you can't create money out of thin air, it has to be taken from someone else (customer) and then redistributed (among suppliers/labor/investors/shareholders/tax man)
This is how we have a CEO making $100b from a single company stock which would be impossible if it were a zero sum game.
Hype which is even more rarefied air, can create so much money without taking anything from the customers. Silicon Valley VC's create valuations for companies out of thin air and then triple it even without anyone ever seeing that money.
Attention which is unlimited in a way is a new form currency, which is why you see platforms being built up to get more eyeballs.
The rule you mentioned comes into play when taking into account players in the game i.e any game where you can add more players is guaranteed to become zero sum.
In real world situations where cooperation is needed, we mostly have a non zero sum game.For ex - https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/project...
But, the problem can be reformulated as zero-sum in terms of time: Time is the ultimate scarce and zero-sum resource, you cannot create time, only redistribute.
The more time we spend with the loved ones, less time we have for other things like hobbies and work. Company wants people to spend maximum time on work and worker efficiency (so called "career growth"), and less time on personal life etc. For corporation - worker's attention is absolutely zero-sum game and they want maximum of worker's attention, on top of 9-5.
That's why they create more employee love by throwing benefits, free food and snacks, corporate parties so that they spend less time on personal matters and work more toward the company's goals.
Question is how to slice a pie between Labor and Capital?
Now we know that IT is a growing market, and next year pie will be bigger, much bigger. That's why Capital needs Labor to cooperate along and work as efficiently as possible to capture maximum slice of pie for the Corporation next year and the year after.
That's why they give variable compensation and give sense of ownership. Just by giving out 0.1% of shares, Capital is able to extract max value form Labor and make their pie grow at 30-40% per year.
Absolutely killer deal for Capital.
That's how zuckerberg et al become billionaires, while employees who created the money making machine are mere (multi)millionaires.
you join stage B startup and get 0.01% of company as ISO options, but you do the 100% of the work required to make product and grow company from $10M valuation to $10B valuation. Three orders of magnitude growth for Capital, while Labor get 1/1000 of that growth
The whole system seems to exist for short term profits.
It is absolutely zero sum for any measure that matters over periods that are impactful to individual and familial human flourishing
This capitalist rationalization of greed-based markets, loves to pick whatever timeline for measurement which fits their criteria.
It is unambiguous that wealth and power accumulation will persistently concentrate into the smallest number of hands in absence of collective structural countermeasures.
So the default state of large scale capatalist systems follows power law in both wealth and power distribution. It’s a mathematical reality that is shown over and over and over to repeat itself
