duncanr

I agree with your post 100%, but I think I'm generalising more than you're thinking I am.

My cards out on the table: I'm not a student of Economics (a deficiency I intend to correct, as time permits).

In terms of evidence, I have none. However, I think I need to be clear as to what I mean when I say 'raw materials'. It's probably a poor phrase to use (I guess it has a well-defined meaning in Economics); I consider even intangibles to be 'raw materials'. As an example, education is the 'raw material' on which 'intellectual property' is built. As a web developer, the LAMP technology stack (for example) is the 'raw material' (along with many others, including education) on which websites are built (and aren't we hackers lucky that people make much of that technology available to us for no cost? There's huge value in those 'raw materials' for us. Most people in the world aren't so lucky). For me a raw material is anything that acts as an input into a process that leads to a monetisable output. Of course, money itself is perhaps the ultimate 'raw material' in this sense, creating an interesting situation where one of the raw materials used to create the desired product is the product itself. Perpetual motion machines may be a physical impossibility, but a perpetually expanding economy apparently is not.

There are certainly many examples of low-resource cities that do very well; at least, low in terms of the amount of stuff that can be dug out of the ground. These are obviously not the only saleable resources or those cities wouldn't exist (I'm not sure about Hong Kong, but didn't Singapore first become wealthy due to its strategic location?).

As to the high-resource locations mired in conflict and poverty, I would suggest that much of this conflict is indeed related to who controls the raw materials. Whilst this may or may not be true, I was more thinking originally about internet posts on economics and 'social justice' in my first comment, which seem to me to boil down to whether ownership of resources (of many types) should be 'more equitably shared' by some 'fairness' metric, or owned only by those able to compete effectively for them (or who just get lucky). Of course there are many threads on what is actually meant by 'more equitable sharing', since all participants seem to feel that their approach is the most equitable without exception :-)

Hopefully I've not led too many people down dead-ends with my rather wooly use of the term 'raw material'.

I think you'll find it hard to find a more representative microcosm of what an unfettered capitalist society would look like than that of an unsupervised classroom...

Would you be happier to say that the utilisation of raw materials 'tends towards' a zero-sum game, then? ;-)

I don't disagree with what you say (although I would argue the likelihood of this theory playing out in practice and over the long term seems low), however this is largely irrelevant to my original point which was that many people who aren't successful (by some measure) will complain that inequities 'in the system' are unfair, and much discussion will ensue because of that.

The kids in the post add value by building more complex structures out of the raw materials, no? Does the author of the article think we have an infinite supply of raw materials? I read the original article as an experiment into control of raw materials rather than an experiment of added value vs. zero-sum.

As much as economists may dislike it, these arguments seem to always boil down to 'who has control of the raw materials'; those that are empowered are happy with the current system, and those that are not empowered are not. The efficiencies of the market, and whether it's zero-sum or not, would seem to be a secondary concern for most participants.

Hrm... in the section "break/continue":

"The symbol 'break' is arbitrary, but is probably a nice choice for YOUR readers." (emphasis mine)

A typo, or evidence that perhaps Steve isn't writing all his own content? (Ok, I'm a pedant, but I don't care ;-)

Strange that RTM's worm is ranked at number 1 with 10k - 100k of damages, whilst ILOVEYOU is number 2 with 5.5 - 8.7 billion. I wonder what their ranking criteria is.

Cliff Stoll tells a story in "The Cuckoo's Egg" about knocking on RTM's door whilst investigating this worm and having the door answered by RTM's room-mate. I've wondered for a couple of years if that was the first sighting of PG in the wild... ;-)