New wealth "creation" is a lie. It only looks that way because of devaluing currency and population growth.

No conspiracy theory beliefs required to see this one. At the end of the day, what we are buying and selling is compute time on our brain CPU cluster. We can reshuffle what gets our attention, and the relative cost of things can change, but ultimately the only way to increase "wealth" is to get more underlying resource: human brainpower.

I see the counter argument coming from a mile away: yeah, but your poor is not your grandfathers poor. You have an iPhone, gramps did not. My counter is again simple: relative value. Electronics were a frontier at the time, and are a commodity now. They are now cheap, and this is compensated by a huge increase in the cost of basics like housing.

> New wealth "creation" is a lie.

Perhaps the bigger issue is old wealth destruction. We live in a world of effectively infinite low cost electronics, clothes and food, but the things which used to be abundant are now actually quite scarce.

Housing is most obvious example here - but the costs of driving (excluding vehicle purchase), childcare, wedding, and energy are now radically higher than ever before. In these areas it feels like we've gone backwards in productivity.

I take some silicon from high-purity quartz in North Carolina. I make CPU chips out of them. Have I not created wealth? Is not the CPU chip more valuable than raw, high-purity quartz?

> New wealth "creation" is a lie.

Wealth is created by taking less valuable inputs and producing something new of greater value. For the HN crowd, that might mean using a little energy and a cheap computer to produce software that provides something even more value than the sum of its parts. Clearly you can create wealth out of "thin air".

Perhaps you mean in the net? Where new wealth is created, equal old wealth must be destroyed? But wherein that aforementioned software was additional value destroyed in order for the net wealth to remain the same?

> It only looks that way because of devaluing currency and population growth.

Not really. While we often measure wealth in currency, which is subject to fluctuations over time, wealth is not the measurement itself. In the same vein, the physical distance you currently know as a kilometre will still be the same distance even if we redefine the kilometre.

Leaving wealth to one side, do you think value creation is a lie?