Once upon a time, when we were hunter-gatherers, life was poor, nasty, brutish and short (to quote Thomas Hobbes). But life was also very simple: Whatever had been hunted or gathered by a tribe had to be divided among them. The berry you received could not be eaten by somebody else; the piece of meat between your teeth was no longer available to the others.

In such situations, whatever your gain was another person’s loss, and you could only become richer by making someone else poorer by the same amount. The total wealth effect on society from your own increasing affluence was precisely zero. Wealth was a zero-sum game.

Fortunately, we have long left the days of hunting and gathering behind. Our economy looks quite different now – and we are all much better off than our Stone Age ancestors. However, because humanity used to live rather primitive lifestyles for so long, thinking about wealth as a zero-sum game seems to be deeply wired in our DNA.

Thus when we see people who made fortunes in business, our instinct is to believe they must have stolen their wealth from someone else. We have even coined a term for this alleged class of people: “robber barons”.

Such thinking ignores what really happens in our economy today. Far from just moving wealth around, modern economies are all about creating wealth. This should be fairly obvious by just comparing, say, a shopping mall to a Stone Age cave. It does not come intuitively though.

Modern economies create wealth by trade and division of labour. In this way, whenever two parties engage in mutually voluntary exchange (of goods, services, land or whatever), they must both anticipate to be better off by the exchange. A jacket may be bought for $200 because it is worth at least $200 to the buyer and at most $200 to the seller. The point is: Both the buyer and the seller will be better off thanks to the transaction.

In this way, an entrepreneur like Bill Gates did not get rich by ripping anyone off. On the contrary, he made us all a bit better off by providing us with an operating system and office software that we wanted to buy.

Economics is about creating wealth. It has nothing to do with zero-sum games of times past. The only zeroes we have added over the centuries are the ones to average per capita incomes.

This concludes our Insights campaign on economic literacy from A to Z – for now. In the future, Insights will occasionally feature economics quick bites in our new ‘The Friday economist’ column. Stay tuned.