Folk economics says that the world is zero sum and that if one person becomes rich it means someone else has become poor. Unfortunately, the bulk of the population believes in folk economics. Real economics says that production and trade are positive sum. If I cut down some trees and build a house from them, I haven't deprived anyone else of a house, I've made the world richer by one house. If you dig up iron ore and turn it into steel, you've made the world richer by that amount of steel. As we work to produce things, the world becomes richer and richer. When we trade with others, if the trade is voluntary, both sides always benefit. If I hand a baker $5 for a loaf of bread, and he accepts the money, I necessarily wanted the bread more than the $5, and the baker necessarily wanted the $5 more than the bread. After the transaction, both parties are better off than when they started. The wealth compounds as we turn our labor and raw materials into knowledge and machines that let us produce ever more with less labor and often less material. No one in ancient Rome could have produced a steam locomotive, the knowledge and the tools needed did not exist. No one in Victorian England could have produced an iPhone; the knowledge and the tools needed did not exist. As we get better and better tools and knowledge and save up more and more capital and invest it in better machines and more information, we accelerate the pace at which we can improve things. The economy has grown exponentially over the last 250 years, not linearly. We have thousands of times the wealth per capita of people a few hundred years ago, not slightly more. And we owe all of this to the fact that production and trade is not a zero sum game. In a society where people trade freely and respect each other's property, you can only become rich by increasing the wealth of the world and trading the things you created with others who want what you've made more than they want the money they got by in turn making things themselves. In other words, every wealthy person is a public benefactor, even if they didn't intend to be, because they've produced things others have wanted more than they wanted the things they traded to get them. Unfortunately, most people do not understand the source of the wealth of the modern world. They believe, incorrectly, in the folk economic version of things where wealth comes from depriving others. In a democracy, this belief is dangerous, because it leads people to support extremely bad policies, policies that could end the engine that has raised all of us out of extreme poverty since the industrial age began.