Like at some point won’t all of the profit be squeezed out of society?
There’s a limit with any particular set of tools and labor, but a universal limit doesn’t exist, no. Profit comes when you take money and use it in a more productive way than letting it sit under your mattress, and there’s no theoretical limit on productivity.
This is a great take
No. They can always print more money. Money is no longer backed by anything other than faith; if people believe money has value, there’s no hard set limit on that value
But people do stop believing money has value, or more specifically, their trust in the value of money can go down - you all over the History in plenty of places that people’s trust in the value of money can break down.
As somebody pointed out, if one person has all the money and nobody else has money, money has no value, so it’s logical to expect that between were we are now and that imaginary extreme point there will be a balance in the distribution of wealth were most people do lose trust in the value of money and the “wealth” anchored on merelly that value stops being deemed wealth.
(That said, the wealthy generally move their wealth into property - as the saying goes “Buy Land: they ain’t making any more of it” - but even that is backed by people’s belief and society’s enforcement of property laws and the mega-wealthy wouldn’t be so if they had to actually protect themselves their “rights” on all that they own: the limits to wealth, when anchored down to concrete physical things that the “owners” have to defend are far far lower that the current limits on wealth based on nation-backed tokens of value and ownership)
You’ve discovered capitalism’s super hidden secret; infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.
It is if you count your profit in terms of percentage of global profit, and then, should that break down, in terms of global wealth.
Similar to how it’s impossible to reach the speed of light, it’s not possible to reach 100% of global wealth unless you’re the only sentient being left alive, but you can get arbitrarily close. And getting closer requires more and more human suffering, as reaching light speed requires more and more energy.
Only time will tell whether the rich will (publicly) switch to this metric because so far, “Newtonian” measurements of profit have been sufficient, and fractions of global wealth generation look piddly by comparison.
[Muse performs “The 2nd Law:Unsustainable” in the background]
How the hell did I miss this? I physically own that album. It’s kinda like orchestral dubstep. 🤘
This article explores that. The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth
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That is probably correct to the phrasing of the question but I don’t think it’s correct to the spirit of the question .
If I have a billion dollars and everyone else has one dollar, I am powerful.
Time moves forward, inflation, whatever.
I have 2 billion dollars now and everyone else has 2 dollars.
Nothing has substantially changed in that scenario.
But even if we only allow me to grow:
Again I have 2 billion dollars now and everyone else still has 1 dollar.
Nothing has substantially changed.
That’s my disagreement. There is a limit. Diminished returns.
The difference between a one bathroom house and a 2 bathroom house is huge. The difference between a 20 bathroom house and a 21 bathroom house is basically meaningless.
You can only be “so” rich and people can only get “so” poor. At a certain point the change isn’t meaningful, but once you pass a a certain threshold it’s worse than meaningless. It becomes worthless
If you have all the money in the entire world and no one else has any money… The money no longer has any value at all. It then becomes pointless and valueless.
I’m not smart enough to point out the exact line. There is a line where the rich can’t be richer in a significant way. Elon musk i think is at the point. He could lose 50 billion dollars or gain 50 billion dollar tomorrow. It wouldn’t impact his life or our life.
Likewise people can only get so poor before the concept of currency breaks down completely. We kind of see a glimpse of that with credit scores. I have bad credit. I don’t care that I have bad credit. I’m not going to own a home anyway. I don’t care if a credit card company sues me because I have no liquidatable property or items. Even my wages can’t be garnished because my child support maxes that out alrwady. My debt and credit score are meaningless. Money itself can get that low as well. If the imbalance gets too far the money becomes worthless.
There is absolutely a limit. There is a line.
Likewise people can only get so poor before the concept of currency breaks down completely. We kind of see a glimpse of that with credit scores. I have bad credit. I don’t care that I have bad credit. I’m not going to own a home anyway. I don’t care if a credit card company sues me because I have no liquidatable property or items. Even my wages can’t be garnished because my child support maxes that out alrwady. My debt and credit score are meaningless. Money itself can get that low as well. If the imbalance gets too far the money becomes worthless.
Fucking real
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No, let me know if you find one though
In case you want a serious treatment, for nominal profit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics#The_Keynesian_multiplier
For real profit, labor productivity must put some limit on it somewhere, but I have never seen anybody look at it.
Either way, “profit” is not something you squeeze out of society. The nominal one can’t be unbalanced, and the real one is hard to even track.
You may get some better answers if think in terms of wealth inequality. But that one won’t appear on the coarse level of the wikipedia article.
I beg to differ, how the modern shareholder capitalism works is nothing but squeezing profit out of society
Technically, money is just a number on a ledger. Practically, there’s a finite amount of wealth in the solar system, much less on earth, significantly less accessible to humans and only a slim amount can be taken from the working class before people start starving. We already have little enough that the population is going to start contracting.
So the limit is when everyone is dead and can’t purchase anything.
Well I’d say it’s when the proletariat revolts, destroying the machine of exploitation, at which gathering further profit is impossible.
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Numbers in ledgers is a description of banking but money and banking are not the same thing.
Alternatively you could be describing money management, keeping a ledger of an account. Money management is the management of money but it is not money itself.
A collection of coins or bills is worth a certain amount and when you add or remove money the amount changes but you do not need to update any accounts.
I’m making a distinction between money as a system of abstracting wealth and what wealth practically means. You’re making a highly disputable philosophical argument about the ontological nature of money instead of engaging with the germaine ideas. Simply put: I don’t consider a physical representation of money to be money in-and-of-itself; I consider each bill to be a part of a grand fragmented ledger. Furthermore, bitcoin is literally a public ledger for which there is no physical exchange of any representation of money. As a final example, the Yap isles famously have a monetary system that has physical Incarnations but no physical exchange among the people of the isles. It’s literally just a public ledger that exists in the minds of those who use it.
Theoretically? I’d imagine it’s equal (or close) to the difference between global money supply and global money supply but I don’t think that’s what you’re asking
One way historic economic systems prevented total market capture by family dynasties was large families.
A big family dividing a concern will eventually sell it, break it up so it can be split.
With smaller families this division will take much longer, and with corporate personhood we are in a new weird self perpetual bureaucratic regimen
Isnt that why there are transnational conglomerates?
absolute or percentage wise. in absolute terms all of the universe. in percent terms nope because like gambling allows for infinite profit. ie guaranteed profit on rolls that will most times not result in any loss.
Yes. It’s when the workers are driven to the point that they cannot do enough reproductive labor and/or they revolt.
There’s an actual limit to profit, they are called profit margins and different industries have different profit margins.
Once one person has all the power, they de facto have all the wealth. Slaves don’t own anything.
