Damien Cave, Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out? NYTimes, March 1, 2025. The lede: “Zero-sum thinking has spread like a mind virus, from geopolitics to pop culture.” Zero-sum thinking: “...the belief that life is a battle over finite rewards where gains for one mean losses for another.”
Later:
But nowhere is the rise of our zero-sum era more pronounced than on the world stage, where President Trump has been demolishing decades of collaborative foreign policy with threats of protectionist tariffs and demands for Greenland, Gaza, the Panama Canal and mineral rights in Ukraine. Since taking office, he has often channeled the age he most admires — the imperial 19th century.
And in his own past, zero-sum thinking was deeply ingrained. His biographers tell us he learned from his father that you were either a winner or loser in life, and that there was nothing worse than being a sucker. In Trumpworld, it’s kill or be killed; he who is not a hammer must be an anvil.
Mr. Trump may not be alone in this. Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China have also displayed a zero-sum view of a world in which bigger powers get to do what they want while weaker ones suffer. All three leaders, no matter what they say, often behave as if power and prosperity were in short supply, leading inexorably to competition and confrontation..
Until recently, the international order largely was built on a different idea — that interdependence and rules boost opportunities for all. It was aspirational, producing fourfold economic growth since the 1980s, and even nuclear disarmament treaties from superpowers. It was also filled with gassy promises — from places like Davos or the G20 — that rarely improved day-to-day lives.
Deep history:
Zero-sum thinking probably seemed to make a lot of sense for our evolutionary ancestors, who were forced to compete for food to survive. But the mind-set has lingered and researchers have become more interested in mapping its impact.
The most recent work in the social sciences builds on the findings of George M. Foster, an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley. He did his field work in Mexico’s rural communities where he was the first researcher to show that some societies hold “an image of limited good.”
In 1965, he wrote that the people he studied in the hills of Michoacán view their entire universe “as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply.”
From the recent past:
The last time zero-sum thinking guided the world, Europe’s colonial powers of the 16th to 19th centuries saw wealth as finite, measured in gold, silver and land. Gains for one translated to losses for another and empires levied high tariffs to protect themselves from competitors.
Mr. Trump has romanticized the era’s tail end. “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” he told reporters last month. “That’s when we were a tariff country.”
In fact, the United States is far richer now in household income and economic output. But of greater concern may be Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the historical context. Economists say the mercantilism and great-power rivalries of that imperial age hindered wealth creation, advanced inequality and often led to the most complete zero-sum game of all: war.
Possible causes of zero-sum thinking:
Economic inequality fosters such a belief about success. But zero-sum Americans may not really be squabbling over taxes, college, jobs or wealth.
Jer Clifton, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who oversees extensive surveys of primal world beliefs, told me the current backlash may be rooted in a zero-sum conviction about something deeper: importance.
Many Americans seem to fear that if some other group matters more, they matter less. “In 21st-century America, the more common, driving fear is not food or resource scarcity, but not enough meaning,” Dr. Clifton said. “We are a people desperate to matter.”
On the bright side, “studies have found that people can be taught to see situations as nonzero sum with deliberation and guidance.”
There's more at the link.
Back in 1999 Robert Wright published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which covers the evolution of human society from human origins to the present. He now has a substack of that title, Nonzero. I discuss Wright’s ideas in a number blog posts, and Nonzero specifically in: Cultural Evolution and Human Progress, from 2010, and A quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists [#DH digital humanities], from 2019.
* * * * *
Bonus, from the article: “Mr. Smithson said he often told students in his classes to see him as their opponent so they would collaborate with one another, not compete.”
Damien Cave says "But of greater concern may be Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the historical context. Economists say the mercantilism and great-power rivalries of that imperial age hindered wealth creation, advanced inequality and often led to the most complete zero-sum game of all: war."
ReplyDeleteTo which Eric Hamilton [1] would add; "But there is another lasting effect of the attack, hidden deep in the genes of Syrian families. The grandchildren of women who were pregnant during the siege — grandchildren who never experienced such violence themselves — nonetheless bear marks of it in their genomes. Passed down through their mothers, this genetic imprint offers the first human evidence of a phenomenon previously documented only in animals: The genetic transmission of stress across multiple generations."
...
“We think our work is relevant to many forms of violence, not just refugees. Domestic violence, sexual violence, gun violence: all the different kinds of violence we have in the U.S,” said Mulligan. “We should study it. We should take it more seriously.”
...
[1.] "Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover"
Eric Hamilton
February 27, 2025
https://news.ufl.edu/2025/02/syrian-violence-epigenetics/
The above article ends with;
"That resilience and perseverance is quite possibly a uniquely human trait.” [1.]
Seren Dipity adds that "resilience and perseverance" is a multidimensional feature, AND BUG, both allowing humans to flourish, and allowing humans to endure oppression and war, which promulgates Condorcet waves, and which may prove or bolster... Arrow's impossibility theorem: "Our goal is to prove that the decisive coalition contains only one voter, who controls the outcome—in other words, a dictator." Wikipedia
In "Introduction: Mind-Culture Coevolution" (William L. Benzon 2003 In Memory of David Hays) Benzon says "Instead, he found it necessary to rate each culture unit on eleven different aspects: Population, Polity, Class, Legal, Commerce, Craft, Religion, Settlement, Subsistence, Cognition, War. Much of the book is devoted to explaining how he did this and to providing individual profiles for each of the 379 culture units encompassed in the work.
"Though Hays himself did not do so, one way of interpreting this situation is that cultural complexity is inherently multidimensional."
SD: Then each culture unit has a genetic thread through time, space, culture, where "Violence alters human genes for generations" [1.] giving rise to Concert waves and Arrow's impossibility theorem, due to predisposition of future generations transfering genes and epigentics and therefore affecting culture, feeding foward and again effecting zero-sum decisions and promulgating noise, wealth condensation and chaos and Condorcet waves, and which may prove or bolster... Arrow's impossibility theorem, due in part to the inherently multidimensional cultural complexity, as Hayes and Bezon note.
Seren Dipity, re "A drop in zero-sum thinking, America and beyond" suggests an evolition of game theory:
"Quantum game theory is an extension of classical game theory to the quantum domain. It differs from classical game theory in three primary ways:
- Superposed initial states,
- Quantum entanglement of initial states,
- Superposition of strategies to be used on the initial states.
~ Wikipedia
Quantum game theory also needs pure sortition and total informarion transfer- knowledge - to be diffused throughout the socio/econ/political idea space, to finally deliver a lasting peace.
Peace. Seren Dipity. 2025.
"The genetic transmission of stress across multiple generations."
DeleteSigh......
Would you elaborate on "Sigh..." at some point please Bill. Because the Smaug's & Sauron's are evaporating wealth, suffocating society, only to consense it on the other side of King Trump's Third Riech Rein imo.
Delete"Deep under London’s Threadneedle Street lies an intricate network of tunnels holding the world’s second-largest depository of gold.
"The Bank of England’s nine heavily fortified vaults hold hundreds of tonnes of the precious metal valued at more than £200 billion ($252 billion)." [Elon's cave is bigger].
...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jpmorgan-gold-banks-trump-tariffs-london-new-york-b2698797.html
fn.WC - Wealth Condensation.
Simple, for me:
i) "Wealth condensation is the tendency of newly-created wealth to end up in the hands of those who are already wealthy. It results because wealthier citizens tend to have more money available for investment in wealth-creating opportunities than poorer people. Wealth condensation is a phenomenon that occurs in all free-market economies. Defenders of the wealth condensation argue that investors are the ones responsible for creating new wealth, and therefore, should receive most of the benefits. Opponents argue that the system tends to disproportionately reward those already in favorable positions."
https://spiegato.com/en/what-is-wealth-condensation
WC math for thee:
ii) "Wealth condensation in a simple model of economy
"A quantitative way to measure this 'wealth condensation' is to consider the so-called inverse participation ratio Y 2 defined as (10) Y 2 = ∑ i=1 N w i 2. If all the w i 's are of order 1/N then Y 2 ∼1/N and tends to zero for large N. On the other hand, if at least one w i remains finite when N→∞, then Y 2 will also be finite"
Jean-Philippe Bouchaudnet al 2000
Wealth Condensation, unless managed by intial conditions - meaning changing the rules before the fools give over the gold- will imo, perperuate instability, dictators, third term reich or no, powering future Condercert waves, and prove Arrow's impossibility theorem.
See John Quiggins Rank Dependent Utility and more...
"The three party system"
by JOHN Q on FEBRUARY 29, 2016
JQ: "So, we are seeing the emergence of a three-party system, which is inherently unstable because of the Condorcet problem and for other reasons.". crookedtimber
"John Quiggin says:
FEBRUARY 15, 2025 AT 5:33 AM "... In particular, I think Trump will steal all elections from now on, whether or not he is in a position to win them fairly"
johnquiggin.com/2025/02/11/how-to-dispense-with-trumps-us/#comment-265650
Republicans are allready fundraising for Trump’s ‘Third Term’ Reich. And a bill already up for "Arrow's impossibility theorem"
... "By Pareto, the entire set of voters is decisive. Thus by the group contraction lemma, there is a size-one decisive coalition—a dictator.
...
"We will prove that any social choice rule respecting unanimity and independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) is a dictatorship. The proof is in three parts: ..." Wikipedia
H.J.Res.29 -
"Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to provide that no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times.119th Congress (2025-2026)"
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-joint-resolution/29/text?s=1&r=2
“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.”
~ Malala Yousafzai
Peace. SD.
Although RDU and prospect theory are being superseded they imo provide a stepping stone toward quantum game theory, merchantilism, economic model evaluation and a lilly pad toward new paradigms.
ReplyDelete"The crucial idea of rank-dependent expected utility was to overweigh only unlikely extreme outcomes, rather than all unlikely events. Formalising this insight required transformations to be applied to the cumulative probability distribution function, rather than to individual probabilities (Quiggin, 1982, 1993).
The central idea of rank-dependent weightings was then incorporated by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky into prospect theory, and the resulting model was referred to as cumulative prospect theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank-dependent_expected_utility
Qnd! As Serenditpity would have it... the next arricle to pop into myexistence due to my wanderings...
ReplyDelete"Physicists uncover evidence of two arrows of time emerging from the quantum realm
"What if time is not as fixed as we thought? Imagine that instead of flowing in one direction – from past to future – time could flow forward or backward due to processes taking place at the quantum level. This is the thought-provoking discovery made by researchers at the University of Surrey, as a new study reveals that opposing arrows of time can theoretically emerge from certain quantum systems.
...
https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/physicists-uncover-evidence-two-arrows-time-emerging-quantum-realm
Serendipity indeed.
SD.
Bloody War Serendipity!
ReplyDeleteAnd bonus nominative determinism... Robert Graves! Don't blame me, it is just serenditpity.
"From Good-Bye to All That, poet Robert Graves’ 1929 account of his experiences in World War I:
"Beaumont had been telling how he had won about five pounds’ worth of francs in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show: a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here."
"In 2003, the Journal of Political Economy reprinted this paragraph with the title “Optimal Risk Sharing in the Trenches.”
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/02/28/fair-and-square-2/
"Good-Bye to All That is an autobiography by Robert Graves which first appeared in 1929, when the author was 34 years old. "It was my bitter leave-taking of England," he wrote in a prologue to the revised second edition of 1957, "where I had recently broken a good many conventions".[1] The title may also point to the passing of an old order following the cataclysm of the First World War; the supposed inadequacies of patriotism, the interest of some in atheism, feminism, socialism and pacifism, the changes to traditional married life, and not least the emergence of new styles of literary expression, are all treated in the work, bearing as they did directly on Graves's life." ..." all phases bearing witness to the "particular mode of living and thinking" that constitute a poetic sensibility.[1]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-Bye_to_All_That
SD.