The world is not a zero sum game. But adjusted to a 3% annual growth rate, it _is_ a zero sum game. In other words, the growth rate is not arbitrarily large. On top of that, the finance industry is dedicated to capturing the 3% growth, and it's very successful at it. Thanks for making the world a better place, but chances are you won't see much personal gain from it.
It would be zero sum game when there's no more place for new people to be born and no resources to feed them. The current state of being is that there are plenty resources just wasted because of very technical reasons and finance industry is very successful at making ones rich virtually for nothing, while others starve (that is money isn't used to unify measuring of value, as it was initially intended, but more like making money is orthogonal to producing value).
Yeah, I know, it sounds like advocating communism. But what can I do if it so much naturally better in it's essence! And we would be pretty close to making it almost possible already, if not for that "pragmatic" ideology some people are spreading.
That's true only if you reduce "progress" to "GDP growth". As much as economists see prices of goods (e.g. houses, transportation, iPhones) falling as a bad thing, it's actually the true indicator of progress.
Aggregate deflation is not a positive for an economy. It's nice that some sectors are more accessile than previous centuries, esp. food and clothing, but that doesn't mean that deflation in every sector indicates forward momentum.
IIRC, deflation would be caused by a very fearful and therefore finacially conservative population.
