Oh But It Is!
One of my favorite posts to have written on these pages was a message to the first batch of the undergraduate program of the Gokhale Institute. Written in late April, it was a farewell message to the batch.
It was in some ways a frustrating post to write. Frustrating because we barely got to interact with the students in person. Everything shut down at the start of their second semester, and only reopened towards the end of their last semester, and as a consequence, we barely got to spend time with them on campus.
And so the post was all of the things I would have wanted to tell them, but couldn't - at least, not as much as we all would have wanted to. So not because it was an especially awesome idea, or because it was a particularly brilliant explanation of some complicated concept in econ - it is one of my favorite posts because of whom it was written for.
But there is another reason it is one of my favorite posts - because I got to write about ideas I hold dear, and hope that my students will hold dear too. And the idea that I cherish the most is the idea I chose to start the post with:
Life is a non-zero sum game. If I’m wrong about this, my entire approach to life is wrong, so take this advice to heart at your own risk. But to me, it is a fundamental tenet.
I'm not exaggerating about this being a fundamental tenet in my life. If I am interacting with you, we should both be winning. If either one of us is winning at the cost of making the other lose, it ought to be a deeply distressing situation for both of us.
And as a corollary, I don't do well dealing with people who do not have a non-zero sum mindset. Folks who look to win by making other people lose are not people I enjoy hanging out with.
And the trouble with the world today is that it is rather full of folks with zero-sum mindsets, as Tim Harford points out in a lovely essay over on his blog:
Another Stantcheva project investigated “zero-sum thinking”, a topic that seems more abstract, even philosophical, but which perfectly captures the new zeitgeist. There are many ways to describe Donald Trump’s approach to government, or the philosophy of the new Reform party in the UK, but “zero sum” is a useful one.
The zero-sum thinker frames the world in terms of winning and losing, us and them. If one person is to get richer, someone else must get poorer. If China is doing well, then the US must logically be doing badly. Jobs go either to the native born, or to foreigners. In contrast, the centrist dads among us see win-win solutions.
Stantcheva and her colleagues at Harvard’s Social Economics Lab have been asking: what sort of person tends to see the world as zero sum? There are some surprising findings. For example, there are few clearer refutations of a zero-sum mindset than a thriving city, in which people flock to be with others, and the social, cultural, educational and financial opportunities that result. Yet Stantcheva’s research found that urban areas are more prone to zero-sum thinking than rural ones, perhaps reflecting our failure to build new homes.
Zero-sum mindsets are all over, and once you learn to spot them, life can get pretty tough. They're there throughout academia, for example, because learning today isn't about learning, it is about winning. It isn't even about winning, axshually, but about making sure that everybody else loses.
And just in case you think this is hyperbole, note that your happiness with your marks is by definition a function of how much everybody else has scored. Your marks don't tell you how well you have learnt, they tell you how much better (or worse) you are compared to everybody else.
Traffic works much better if you play non-zero sum games, but I invite you to step out of your homes or offices for a stroll, and report back to me your opinion about whether we play non-zero sum games on India's roads. (The reader may choose to exercise discretion and common sense and do this exercise as a thought experiment)
Do you think we use non-zero sum mindsets while entering and leaving a flight? While juggling with trays at the security check-in? While waiting in a queue? At our workplace? With our customers? Our vendors? Anywhere?
The reason Donald has a zero-sum approach to trade is because he (and we) have grown up in a zero-sum world. We have been taught to play zero-sum games, beginning with school, and these lessons have been reinforced at every turn.
Tim ends his column with thus:
The world is full of opportunities for mutual benefit, so zero-sum thinking is a tragedy and a trap. But it is not a mystery. If we want to understand why so many people see the world in zero-sum terms, we only have to look at the fact that our dysfunctional politics and our sluggish economies have needlessly produced far too many zero-sum situations. Fix that problem and maybe economics will one day be cool again.
And for once, I disagree.
Yes, the world is full of opportunities for mutual benefit, and yes, zero-sum thinking is a tragedy and a trap.
Oh, but it is a mystery! (And that explains the title of today's post).
Non-zero-sum thinking is not itself a mystery, but the fact that so few of us have adopted this way of thinking very much is. That the world is a non-zero sum game is a lesson we need to teach, a culture we need to adopt, and a mindset that we need to have. And all of us need to participate in both the teaching and the learning of this most important of all lessons.
Tim says that we only have to look at the fact that our dysfunctional politics and our sluggish economies have needlessly produced far too many zero-sum situations, but I say that this is putting it backwards.
Our dysfunctional politics and our sluggish economies are the outcome of far too many zero-sum lessons that we learn in the world which we have created for ourselves. Make centrist dads great again!
Remember, children, that the rest of what you will learn is secondary to the most important rule of 'em all:
Life is a non-zero sum game.