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Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2007 19:13:56 -0400 (EDT)
To: Daniel Reeves <dreeves &AElig umich.edu>
cc: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: James W Mickens <jmickens &AElig eecs.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: mind the gap

> James, I think you're empirically wrong that wealth creation is anything like 
> a zero-sum game and I'm working on my response!

I think that the basic laws of economics are against you here. Trixie's 
example of market share is a good one. Given a finite number of people 
willing to pay for a service, the wealth acquisition of one service 
provider is often in direct opposition to that of another. Even if the 
customer base is growing, there's no guarantee that there's enough demand 
for multiple businesses to run at their full profit capacity at a given 
moment. There's certainly not enough room for multiple businesses to 
expand at arbitrarily large rates forever. Once the customer base for 
widgets reaches its saturation size, consumers will buy widgets from 
someone who is you, or someone who is not you. If they buy from you, this 
increases your wealth while decreasing that of your competitors, and vice 
versa. I don't think that this is a radical idea. CEOs talk about stealing 
market share from other businesses all the time. Are they fundamentally 
confused about how businesses work?

~j