That depends on how you generate it. When apple builds wealth, not zero sum; when a hedge fund builds wealth; zero sum. 40% of our economy is financial services now, there's a lot of zero sum wealth creation going on.
Even hedge funds aren't zero sum. They receive dividends on the investments they hold which is a return that is not zero sum.
Of course, the more active a fund is, the farther it gets from zero sum, but it would never be fully zero sum.
Additionally, financial services overall are far from zero sum. There is a great deal of efficiency and market lubrication created by financial services and if you exclude the high frequency traders, you leave a huge majority that is still quite beneficial to people on both sides of the transaction.
> Even hedge funds aren't zero sum. They receive dividends on the investments they hold which is a return that is not zero sum.
Once again, that depends on the trade, short term trades don't make their money from dividends, but from timing the market.
> Additionally, financial services overall are far from zero sum.
Beside the point, plenty of them are zero-sum-never said they were all zero-sum; that exception exist doesn't change the point that zero-sum vs non-zero-sum is a false dichotomy, the real world is both zero-sum and non-zero-sum, depending on the way the wealth is being generated. It's tiresome watching people continually repeat the incorrect mantra that wealth isn't a zero-sum game when quite often, it is.
