Zero sum game means for someone to benefit someone else must be worse off, but a positive sum game doesn't mean that everyone must benefit. It only opens the possibility that the total sum can go up, but that can still be because every time one player gets 10 points another player loses 3.
Many people don't realise. America has been exporting inflation around the world while China has been exporting deflation through cheaper goods. China is the main reason for World's prosperity.
And China was able to scale up the mass manufacturing of cheap goods because rich western companies dumped their money into China to capitalize that manufacturing. It's all interrelated
When you boil it all down, the economy mostly is about ownership and use of resources, and those are naturally limited. So if we're talking about doing well in terms of having greater claims to the world's resources, then it essentially is zero sum.
The primary sector is only a very small part of the economy though. Prices for raw materials are low because it's easy to mine etc vast quantities nowadays and there is a lot of competition in global commodities. Most minerals are found in a LOT of places all over the world.
Land. Total value of it is about 25 trillion in the US alone I believe. If I'm not wrong, globally stock markets are around 100 trillion (and that will include a lot of assets in the form of land).
25 trillion is just 1 year worth of GDP. With interest rates of 5%, that's only further evidence for my point.
Edit: as an exercise, consider the land value of a typical office, and compare to the annual income of the part of the company based there, and the personal income of the employees who work there.
Most parts of the global economy are. If you're selling cars for example, there's a fixed amount of drivers on the road you can sell cars to, so if you're VW, you're now competing with cheaper cars from Asia for those same drivers.
You can't create new drivers out of thin air to expand the market demand for cars. Once the market is saturated, without having any moat, you enter in a race to the bottom.
And that's what Germany's economy is discovering right now and why Europe's share of global GDP has been declining for the past 20 years.
If other countries are doing better, they will want to buy status symbols as well. This is how Germany profited from China developing in the first place. As long as markets continue to develop, chances will continue to appear.
Also, we shouldn't care about Europe's share of global GDP. We should care about how the poor people in our countries are doing. Like I said, we should maintain or improve our quality of life. Producing cars is just a means to an end.
I think what you're really getting at is that the more efficient a market it, the closer to the Pareto frontier it is, and things become competitive instead of cooperative there.
This is exactly where manufacturers like SAIC, BYD, and Dongfeng are winning. Building cheaper cars than were previously available and selling them in countries where "premium" brands like BMW, Toyota, Ford, Fiat, Volvo, GM, etc... don't try very hard to compete.
Head to any country without a domestic auto industry to protect and see what new cars people are importing. Sure there will be some rich people buying the brands you recognize, but call an UberX and they're going to show up in a Chinese brand you've never heard of. Or some zombie brand like MG.
