Well, it is. Thermodynamics. Earth is pretty much a closed system, except for the sun.

So for example if you invest $100 in a farm and get a return of 10%, where does that come from? The nutrients in the soil, the effort expended by the workers, and the power of the sun to turn seeds into food. All value comes either from finite resources in the ground (nuclear, oil, ...), from solar power, or from human effort (work, innovations, etc.)

So can you trace back Nvidia's incredible 10000% return on investment to any of these sources? Which ones?

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Footnote7341 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Economic value isnt a physical resource being depleted....

	▲	ptx an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But it seems this "economic value" is often created by depleting actual physical resources (e.g. people's health, clean air and water), usually resources belonging someone other than the person capturing the "value".

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chungy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Money is created all the time. It is not a zero-sum game.

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someguyiguess 2 hours ago | parent [-]

When money is created, the total amount of money in circulation increases, decreasing the value of each unit of money overall. It’s called inflation.

	▲	simianwords 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No it’s not fixed like that. Total prosperity of world has increased inflation adjusted over 100 years. Why? Surprised basic stuff is now being questioned.
	▲	YetAnotherNick 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's not that simple. Of course there is inflation but in the long run in history, real money has increased massively. We have give opportunity of education to almost everyone, abolished slavery, given food and basic medicine to almost everyone. 100 years back having all of these sounded like a perfect world.

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simianwords 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If it’s a fixed pie why do we have more collectively now than 200 years ago?

Value also comes from technology which you seem to suspiciously remove