The Profit Paradox: Heroes or Villains? 💰

Are the rich heroes or villains? The answer lies in following energy, not money. Get 20% off Brilliant's annual Premium: https://brilliant.org/ArtOfTheProblem. End your software chaos and try Odoo for free on me: https://www.odoo.com/r/uW5.

Long before dollars, euros, or even gold coins existed, there was only one currency that mattered: energy. Every living thing on Earth, from the first single cell to modern civilization, has faced the same challenge: capture more energy than you spend getting it, or die. That difference between energy gained and energy spent is where profit begins.This video traces profit from its origins in cellular metabolism through photosynthesis, animal life, human agriculture, fossil fuels, and the industrial revolution, to our modern economy.

A key idea in this video is THE BOUNDARY TEST:
This is a new idea I had while working on this video. Draw a boundary around what you're analyzing. If the activity increases total usable energy at every scale you examine: from individual to ecosystem then society, it's creating value. If it only looks profitable when you keep the boundary narrow, it's extracting value. This simple test reveals which forms of profit build the future and which ones consume it.

We examine how rising energy costs, renewable transitions, and thermodynamics constrain economic growth. By understanding profit as a physical phenomenon rooted in energy rather than just finance, we can see what's really happening…

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REFERENCES:
Tim Morgan - Surplus Energy Economics: https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
Garrett Relation on energy and GDP: https://en.everybodywiki.com/Garrett_relation
Jevons Paradox and the rebound effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Social evolution as computation: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.08861
Metabolic scaling across evolution: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1007783107

0:00 Introduction: The Wealth Debate
0:45 Energy: The Currency of Life
2:33 Photosynthesis: Life's Greatest Innovation
4:19 Animals & Storing Energy
6:20 The Boundary Test: Creating vs Transferring Energy
10:42 Human Intelligence & Energy Breakthroughs
12:02 Money: A Portable Claim on Energy
13:31 Good Profit vs Bad Profit
15:21 The Mismatch: Infinite Claims, Finite Energy
17:09 Can We Ever Have Enough?