71–80 of 152 posts
The textbook example of zero-sum thinking is how most people (specially those involved in politics) talk about imports and exports.
Even if you might posit an ecomony-level gain, distributional effects means many may lose. By itself, saying 'not zero-sum' is not an answer for those policy issues but a slogan.
One of my favorites is the economy. People constantly talk about there only being a finite number of resources or money. While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations. It is easy to see when you take the historical perspective, that the vast majority of us are living much better off than those a hundred years a…
Peak urban real-estate, regions with good weather, clean air and water, natural resources, biodiversity etc. might be counter points. Unless we achieve fundamental breakthroughs in natural and physical sciences as well as improve basic economic incentive structures that drive corporate behaviour, our current prosperity might be short-lived. It is difficult to confidently predict how any of these things will turn out…
I see this most clearly in people who will not trade in a board game like Monopoly unless the deal is extremely slanted in their favor. They simply can't understand that people who trade will always beat people who don't, and the easiest way to trade is to trade fairly. If four people are playing a game of Monopoly, and two trade with each other but the other two refuse, now two people are playing Monopoly and the ot…
It's one of my all-time favorites. My favorite 'house rule' was invented by my nephew: He negotiated a % of rent I collected utilizing properties he traded to me.
You might as well give both players who trade a trade point, and award the victory to the player who has the most at the end.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still have a hierarchy and the sum of the individuals within that hierarchy does not need to add to zero. It can definitely be positive. There's many joking examples about governments/lawyers/insert hated group making tasks more difficult or harder. This would be a negative value person and potentially a negative sum hierarchy. Conversely we can see groups of people working together and forming coalitions tha…
That's just the benefit of working as a group though. Bob, Bill, Jill and Joan are already working as a group when Bob and Bill are the bosses. If we make Bill and Jill the bosses we don't inherently gain anything from that. Yes Jill and Joan might work better because they feel appreciated, equally though Bill and Bob could work worse because they've lost something. Hell Joan could still be annoyed because she didn't…
We can also say that everyone provides a positive value to the group. We can also say that certain people in certain positions provide more value to a coalition. None of this is zero sum. Someone being placed in a certain position does not require value being taken from elsewhere. This is not required in a hierarchical job structure.
A zero sum game is one in which where one player gains value that results in another player losing value. Coalition-al games are games where members form groups.
Modern Life is so complex. And in many situations , telling whether they're zero sum, is uncertain, and hard. Look at the debates here for example. So people default to what they already generally know. They know that society is very competitive. The job market is very competitive. The mating market is very competitive. Zero sum games are everywhere. So it's no wonder they have this cognitive bias.
This will be controversial, but this is true everytime there is a pitchfork-inducing "the rich got richer in 20XX" thread. But it's not that the rich stole from the poor in order to become richer (though undoubtedly people will argue this). If I stick a million dollars in an index fund and passively get richer, am I stealing from the poor? Wealth is not zero sum, yet we seem to treat it like it is (in order for poor…
It’s a common fallacy to believe that wealth is zero sum. It’s also a common fallacy to believe that, since it’s not zero sum, gains by one group are uncorrelated to losses by another. If the rich got richer, does that mean they took from the poor? No. But it also doesn’t mean they didn’t . As usual, you have to look at the specifics. The world does have limited resources and capacity for economic growth. In your ind…
Modern Life is so complex. And in many situations , telling whether they're zero sum, is uncertain, and hard. Look at the debates here for example. So people default to what they already generally know. They know that society is very competitive. The job market is very competitive. The mating market is very competitive. Zero sum games are everywhere. So it's no wonder they have this cognitive bias.
One of my favorites is the economy. People constantly talk about there only being a finite number of resources or money. While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations. It is easy to see when you take the historical perspective, that the vast majority of us are living much better off than those a hundred years a…
Resources however increases each year with more people enjoying the benefits.
Modern Life is so complex. And in many situations , telling whether they're zero sum, is uncertain, and hard. Look at the debates here for example. So people default to what they already generally know. They know that society is very competitive. The job market is very competitive. The mating market is very competitive. Zero sum games are everywhere. So it's no wonder they have this cognitive bias.
None of those markets are really zero-sum. People value different things in all of those markets (jobs etc). Zero-sum is an edge case.
The people aiming for a certain position or role mostly care about similar things though.
So don't they play a zero sum game ?
> people tend to assume that if a product is superior in one dimension then it must be inferior in other dimensions. Assuming price is one of the dimensions, this is generally a true statement. Otherwise we'd have a bunch of best-in-class products that are cheaper than inferior competitors. This can occur for products sold at massive scale and with large tooling costs. This dynamic enables the producers of premium pr…
You say this like it's an absurd condition but we can observe exactly this condition all the time, with new manufacturing techniques and labor practices creating better products for less resources all the time.
One place I love to observe this phenomenon is cars, where often even new inexpensive cars are superior in many dimensions to older luxury cars (including passenger amenities). But brand attachment and carefully seeded misleading advertising allows luxury vendors to keep their prices high despite a slower product development cycle.