zero-sum game

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

It was discovered—or, if you prefer, invented—about half a century ago by the founders of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. They made a basic distinction between “zero-sum” games and “non-zero-sum” games. In zero-sum games, the fortunes of the players are inversely related. In tennis, in chess, in boxing, one contestant’s gain is the other’s loss. In non-zero-sum games, one player’s gain needn’t be bad news for the other(s). Indeed, in highly non-zero-sum games the players’ interests overlap entirely. In 1970, when the three Apollo 13 astronauts were trying to figure out how to get their stranded spaceship back to earth, they were playing an utterly non-zero-sum game, because the outcome would be either equally good for all of them or equally bad.

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Within almost any real-life non-zero-sum game lies a zero-sum dimension. When you buy a car, the transaction is, broadly speaking, non-zero-sum: you and the dealer both profit, which is why you both agree to the deal. But there is more than one price at which you both profit—the whole range between the highest you would rationally pay and the lowest the dealer would rationally accept. And within that range, you and the dealer are playing a zero-sum game: your gain is the dealer’s loss. That’s the reason bargaining takes place at car dealerships. Oddly, such zero-sum games are ultimately a tribute to the magic of non-zero-sumness.

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And so it is in all societies: one sure way to elevate your standing is to create something that is widely adopted and praised. There is an irony here. To compete for high-status positions is to play a zero-sum game, since they are by definition a scarce resource.Yet one way to compete successfully is to invent technologies that create new non-zero-sum games. This is one of various senses in which the impetus behind cultural evolution, behind social complexification, lies in a paradox of human nature: we are deeply gregarious, and deeply cooperative, yet deeply competitive. We instinctively play both non-zero-sum and zero-sum games. The interplay of these two dynamics throughout history is a story that takes some time to tell.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

It was discovered—or, if you prefer, invented—about half a century ago by the founders of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. They made a basic distinction between “zero-sum” games and “non-zero-sum” games. In zero-sum games, the fortunes of the players are inversely related. In tennis, in chess, in boxing, one contestant’s gain is the other’s loss. In non-zero-sum games, one player’s gain needn’t be bad news for the other(s). Indeed, in highly non-zero-sum games the players’ interests overlap entirely. In 1970, when the three Apollo 13 astronauts were trying to figure out how to get their stranded spaceship back to earth, they were playing an utterly non-zero-sum game, because the outcome would be either equally good for all of them or equally bad.

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Within almost any real-life non-zero-sum game lies a zero-sum dimension. When you buy a car, the transaction is, broadly speaking, non-zero-sum: you and the dealer both profit, which is why you both agree to the deal. But there is more than one price at which you both profit—the whole range between the highest you would rationally pay and the lowest the dealer would rationally accept. And within that range, you and the dealer are playing a zero-sum game: your gain is the dealer’s loss. That’s the reason bargaining takes place at car dealerships. Oddly, such zero-sum games are ultimately a tribute to the magic of non-zero-sumness.

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And so it is in all societies: one sure way to elevate your standing is to create something that is widely adopted and praised. There is an irony here. To compete for high-status positions is to play a zero-sum game, since they are by definition a scarce resource.Yet one way to compete successfully is to invent technologies that create new non-zero-sum games. This is one of various senses in which the impetus behind cultural evolution, behind social complexification, lies in a paradox of human nature: we are deeply gregarious, and deeply cooperative, yet deeply competitive. We instinctively play both non-zero-sum and zero-sum games. The interplay of these two dynamics throughout history is a story that takes some time to tell.

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Princeton Classic Editions)
by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern
Published 19 Mar 2007

One must realize that the reasons for this are just as good in our present domain of constant-sum games as in the original (and narrower) one of zero-sum games. The reason is this: (42:C) Every constant-sum game is strategically equivalent to a zero-sum game. Proof: The transformation (27:2) obviously replaces the s of (42:3) above by . Now it is possible to choose the so as to make this i.e. to carry the given constant-sum game into a (strategically equivalent) zero-sum game. Second, our new concept of strategic equivalence was only necessary for the sake of the new (non-zero-sum) games that we introduced. For the old (zero-sum) games it is equivalent to the old concept. In other words: If two zero-sum games obtain from each other by means of the transformation (27:2) in 27.1.1., then (27:1) is automatically fulfilled.

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The next chapter starts with a discussion of one-person zero-sum games, for example, patience, then advances to zero-sum two-person games, the discussion being dominated by illustrations from chess, poker, bridge, etc., and not from cartels, markets, oligopolies. The theory now passes on to three-person zero-sum games. It is shown that whereas a one-person zero-sum game is merely a simple maximum problem, the passage from a one-person zero-sum game to a two-person zero-sum game obliterates the maximum problem, and the game is designated by a clear-cut opposition of interest. Similarly the passage to the three-person zero-sum game obliterates the opposition of interest.

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Accordingly we shall call the games with entirely unrestricted (τ1, . . . , τn) general games.2 We have formulated the program of linking the theory of the general games in some way to the theory of the zero-sum games. It will actually be possible to do more: any given general game can be re-interpreted as a zero-sum game. This may seem paradoxical since the general games form a much more extensive family than the zero-sum games. However, our procedure will be to interpret an n-person general game as an n + 1-person zero-sum game. Thus the restriction caused by the passage from general games to zero-sum games will be compensated for—indeed made possible—by the extension due to the increase in the number of participants.1 56.2.2.

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb
by William Poundstone
Published 2 Jan 1993

This result is an important extension of von Neumann’s minimax theorem. The minimax solutions of zero-sum games qualify as equilibrium points, but Nash’s proof says that non-zero-sum games have equilibrium points, too. That is a new result. But there are a few catches. These equilibrium points can have “strange and undesirable properties,” as Philip D. Straffin, Jr., put it (1980). The above example was chosen to show a game where the equilibrium point solution clearly makes sense. Other times, equilibrium point solutions appear less inevitable than the solutions of zero-sum games. In fact, sometimes Nash equilibriums appear to be distinctly irrational.

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People learn how to play games not from the prisoner’s dilemma but from ticktacktoe, bridge, checkers, chess, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble—all of which are zero-sum games. They are zero-sum games because all they have to offer players is the psychological reward of being the winner, a reward that comes at the expense of the losers. This is true even of some games that offer the illusion of being non-zero-sum. In Monopoly, you acquire “real estate” and “cash”—but at the end of the game, it’s just Monopoly money and the only thing that matters is who wins. It’s been speculated that this bent toward zero-sum games reflects the innately competitive nature of our society. I’m not so sure that it’s not just the practical difficulty of packaging a game with stakes that people really care about.

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Of course, White knows this, and tries to predict what Black will do based on what he thinks White will do … Borel and von Neumann realized that this sort of deliberation puts games beyond the scope of probability theory. The players would be wrong indeed to assume that their opponent’s choice is determined by “chance.” Chance has nothing to do with it. The players can be expected to do their very best to deduce the other’s choice and prepare for it. A new theory is called for. ZERO-SUM GAMES “Zero-sum game” is one of the few terms from game theory that has entered general parlance. It refers to a game where the total winnings or payoffs are fixed. The best example is a game like poker, where players put money in the pot, and someone wins it. No one ever wins a dollar but that someone else has lost it.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets
by Michael W. Covel
Published 19 Mar 2007

To me, the results of this wealth transfer are inescapable.”38 Parks argues that the only choice he has been given is to lose. He loses; his union loses. It seems everyone loses in the zero-sum game. Of course, there are winners and he knows that. The zerosum game is, indeed, a wealth transfer. The winners profit from the losers. Parks correctly describes the nature of the zero-sum game, but positions the game in terms of morality. Life is not fair. If you don’t like being a loser in the zero-sum game, perhaps it is time to consider how the winners play the game. Although it might appear that I am defending Soros, I am not. The market is a zero-sum game. Trying to understand Soros’ reasons for denying this would be speculation on my part.

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Larry Harris, chair in Finance at the Marshall School of Business at University of Southern California, gets to the crux of the matter: Chapter 3 • Performance Data “Trading is a zero-sum game when gains and losses are measured relative to the market average. In a zero-sum game, someone can win only if somebody else loses.”31 Another good explanation of zero sum is found in “The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity,” a white paper authored by Harris. In speaking with Harris, he told me that he was amazed at how many people came from the TurtleTrader.com website to his site to download his white paper on zero-sum trading.

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If you are going to win, someone else has to lose. Don’t like these survival-of-the-fittest rules? Then stay out of the zero-sum game. Key Points • Trend followers always prepare for drawdowns after strong periods of performance. • An absolute return strategy means you are trying to make the most money possible. • The fact that markets are volatile is not a problem. The problem is you if volatility scares you. • Trading is a zero-sum game in an important accounting sense. In a zero-sum game, the total gains of the winners are exactly equal to the total losses of the losers. • Trend followers go to the market to trade trends.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
by Brad Feld
Published 8 Oct 2012

The risk of an occasional organ rejection is worth the risk of being completely inclusive, especially as the scale of the startup community grows. PLAY A NON-ZERO-SUM GAME Many people approach business as a zero-sum game: There are winners and losers. This is stupid and counterproductive in the context of a startup community. Startup communities are often a tiny fraction of what they could ultimately become. As a result, there is a huge amount of untapped opportunity. Approaching it as a non-zero-sum game is much more powerful. For starters, fully embrace the notion of increasing returns. The goal of everyone in the startup community should be to create something that is durable for a very long time.

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CONTENTS Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Chapter One: Introduction The Example of Boulder How this Book Works Chapter Two: The Boulder Startup Community Boulder as a Laboratory Before the Internet (1970–1994) Pre-Internet Bubble (1995–2000) The Collapse of the Internet Bubble (2001–2002) The Beginning of the Next Wave (2003–2011) An Outsider’s View of Boulder Chapter Three: Principles of a Vibrant Startup Community Historical Frameworks The Boulder Thesis Led by Entrepreneurs Long-Term Commitment Foster a Philosophy of Inclusiveness Engage the Entire Entrepreneurial Stack Chapter Four: Participants in a Startup Community Entrepreneurs Government Universities Investors Mentors Service Providers Large Companies The Importance of Both Leaders and Feeders Chapter Five: Attributes of Leadership in a Startup Community Be Inclusive Play a Non-Zero-Sum Game Be Mentorship Driven Have Porous Boundaries Give People Assignments Experiment and Fail Fast Chapter Six: Classical Problems The Patriarch Problem Complaining About Capital Being Too Reliant on Government Making Short-Term Commitments Having a Bias Against Newcomers Attempt by a Feeder to Control the Community Creating Artificial Geographic Boundaries Playing a Zero-Sum Game Having a Culture of Risk Aversion Avoiding People Because of Past Failures Chapter Seven: Activities and Events Young Entrepreneurs Organization Office Hours Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Boulder Open Coffee Club Startup Weekend Ignite Boulder Boulder Beta Boulder Startupdigest Cu New Venture Challenge Boulder Startup Week Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Chapter Eight: The Power of Accelerators The Spread of Techstars to Boston and Seattle Techstars Expands to New York Accelerators are Different than Incubators University Accelerators Chapter Nine: University Involvement Silicon Flatirons Some Components of CU Boulder Challenges to Entrepreneurship Programs at Universities Why they Don’t Work in Isolation The Real Value—Fresh Blood into the System The Power of Alumni Chapter Ten: Contrasts between Entrepreneurs and Government Self-Aware Versus Not Self-Aware Bottom Up Versus Top Down Micro Versus Macro Action Versus Policy Impact Versus Control Chapter Eleven: The Power of the Community Give Before You Get Everyone is a Mentor Embrace Weirdness Be Open to Any Idea Be Honest Go for a Walk The Importance of the After-Party Chapter Twelve: Broadening a Successful Startup Community Parallel Universes Integration With the Rest of Colorado Lack of Diversity Space Chapter Thirteen: Myths about Startup Communities We Need to Be Like Silicon Valley We Need More Local Venture Capital Angel Investors Must Be Organized Chapter Fourteen: Getting Started Getting Startup Iceland Started Big Omaha Startup America Partnership Do or Do Not, There is No Try About the Author Index Excerpt from Startup Life Cover illustrations: Silhoueted figure: © Leontura/istockphoto; Silhoueted women and man: © edge69/istockphoto; City Background: C.

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Entrepreneurs in the community need to welcome other entrepreneurs, viewing the growth of the startup community as a positive force for all, rather than a zero-sum game in which new entrepreneurs compete locally for resources and status. Employees of startups need to recruit their friends and open their homes and city to other people who have moved into the community. Everyone in the startup community should have a perspective that having more people engaged in the startup community is good for the startup community. Building a startup community is not a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers; if everyone engages, they and the entire community can all be winners.

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann
by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Published 6 Oct 2021

Sometimes, everyone loses. ‘Zero-sum games are to the theory of games what the twelve-bar blues is to jazz: a polar case, and a historical point of departure,’ says economist Michael Bacharach.62 Von Neumann and Morgenstern knew they had to offer some way of tackling non-zero-sum games if their theory was to say anything useful about ‘economic behaviour’, as their book’s title promised. Towards the very end of Theory of Games, they do. The approach is something of a mathematical sleight-of-hand, lacking the rigour of von Neumann’s earlier treatment of two- and three-player zero-sum games. He introduces a passive ‘fictitious player’ whose only role in a game is to act as a kind of utility bank, losing the sum of whatever the other players win or winning what they lose.

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‘To von Neumann,’ says Leonard, ‘the formation of alliances and coalitions was sine qua non in any theory of social organisation.’ Theory of Games was not the complete guide to strategic behaviour that von Neumann and Morgenstern hoped. The two-person zero-sum game, perhaps the most elegant and immediately applicable part of the book, was rooted in von Neumann’s minimax theorem, first developed nearly twenty years earlier. Non-zero-sum games with an arbitrary number of players were a work in progress. However, von Neumann’s revolutionary work on utility, together with the rigorous description of games and their representations in extensive and normal form, would be the bedrock on which other talented mathematicians would soon build.

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One of the last at RAND to turn game theory to the question of nuclear deterrence was Harvard University economist Thomas Schelling. He conceived of war as bargaining by other means and he set out his new approach to conflict in a 1958 paper.87 ‘On the strategy of pure conflict – the zero-sum games – game theory has yielded important insight and advice,’ he says. ‘But on the strategy of action where conflict is mixed with mutual dependence – the non-zero-sum games involved in wars and threats of war, strikes, negotiations, criminal deterrence, class war, race war, price war, and blackmail; maneuvering in a bureaucracy or a social hierarchy or in a traffic jam; and the coercion of one’s own children – traditional game theory has not yielded comparable insight or advice.’

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

More people began to see the world as a zero-sum game, not just trade relations with other countries, but the domestic economic and political situation as well. In a 2011 study, American whites said they thought many steps had been made towards racial equality in the US, but that this was now linked to a new ‘inequality’ at their expense. The less anti-black bias that whites perceive in society in a given decade, the greater they thought the anti-white bias was. In the very title of the paper, the two psychologists warned that, ‘Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing.’37 If the world is a zero-sum game, and people perceive they are losing it, they will begin to man the barricades and fight back.

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In his intriguing book The Evolution of God, Robert Wright argues that the depiction of God reflects whether the authors’ groups were in a zero-sum relationship with other groups and nations or not. When the neighbourhood is hostile, God is full of anger against outgroups, but in times of peace – when goods cross borders instead of soldiers – his depiction becomes one of religious toleration.1 A zero-sum game is one in which the gains of one side are the losses of another. Football is a typical zero-sum game – every goal is a gain for one team and a loss for the other team, so you win only by defeating the other side. Within each football team, however, the game is non-zero. If your teammate scores it is a gain for you as well, so you benefit by helping each other and cooperating better.

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We are not just traders, we are also tribalists. We cooperate, but to defeat others. Both attributes are integral parts of our nature, but they push in opposite directions. One lets us find positivesum games, where we find new opportunities, new relationships and new exchanges that are mutually beneficial. The other primes us to be wary of zero-sum games, where we think others can only benefit at our expense. This drives a desire to defeat others and block exchange and mobility. This is the battle between ‘open and closed’, so much discussed in the context of populism, nationalism, Trump and Brexit. It is not being fought between two different groups, between globalists and nationalists, or anywheres and somewheres.

The Evolution of God
by Robert Wright
Published 8 Jun 2009

In both scenarios, stories emphasizing interethnic amity—like the book of Ruth—could lubricate the non-zero-sum game in question. And in both cases Israelites benefiting from the game might encourage the telling of such stories. The point isn’t that one of these two theories is necessarily correct. The point is just that they make sense, and that theories that make sense will tend to resemble them. If you want to explain the promulgation of themes of interethnic amity and tolerance, it helps to find people who would have profited from the promulgation, and these will generally be people who are in one sense or another playing non-zero-sum games across ethnic bounds. Regardless of when the story of Ruth emerged and when it was first written down, the decision to include it in the Hebrew Bible came after the exile—after the monotheistic impulse emerged clearly in Second Isaiah, after Yahweh’s condemnation of the Moabites had appeared in Zephaniah (“The remnant of my people shall plunder them”) and in Ezekiel (“I will lay open the flank of Moab from the towns on its frontier”). 36 That “Ruth the Moabite” should in the end be welcomed into the Jewish canon is a tribute to the evolutionary potential of morality.

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Philo partook of Greek culture—theater, horse races, boxing matches—and no doubt had close friends who were Greek intellectuals. 2 The closer friends are, the stronger their need to share a common worldview. This is just human nature: our instincts for playing non-zero-sum games, for maintaining social allies, encourage intellectual convergence, just as our instincts for playing zero-sum games encourage intellectual cleavage when we define people as enemies. And, non-zero-sumness aside, there was the problem of cognitive dissonance. Philo believed that all of Judaism and large parts of Greek philosophy were true, and so long as they seemed at odds, he couldn’t rest easy. 3 But his mission went beyond rendering them compatible.

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Globalization, for all its dislocations, entails lots of non-zero-sumness. You buy a new car, and you’re playing one of the most complex non-zero-sum games in the history of humanity: you pay a tiny fraction of the wages of thousands of workers on various continents, and they, in turn, make you a car. A popular term for this is interdependence —they depend on you for money, you depend on them for a car—and interdependence is just another name for non-zero-sumness. Because the fortunes of two players in a non-zero-sum game are correlated, the welfare of each of them depends partly on the situation of the other. You could look at other parts of the economy—consumer electronics, clothing, food—and find similarlyfar-flung chains of interdependence.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

In some non-zero-sum games, all players benefit if they cooperate. More people playing more complex non-zero-sum games create emergent effects like vibrant cities, bodies of knowledge, architectural masterpieces, marketplaces, and public health systems. Wright wrote that “cultural evolution has pushed society through several thresholds over the past 20,000 years. And now it is pushing society through another one.”85 The world has not and is not likely to become a happy-all-the-time, win-win enterprise. Starkly competitive zero-sum games coexist with increasingly sophisticated non-zero-sum games. We band together to bring down the big game and then fight over how to divide it.

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Wright avoided using the word “cooperation,” because the research he cites covers instances in which participation in non-zero-sum games is not consciously cooperative. I have used the term “smart mobs” because I believe the time is right to combine conscious cooperation, the fun kind, with the unconscious reciprocal altruism that is rooted in our genes. The technologies of mobile communication and pervasive computation could elevate to a new level the non-zero-sum game-playing Wright chronicles. Recall from Chapter 2 that a zero-sum game is winner-take-all. For every winner, there has to be a loser. Games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma have more subtle gradations of reward and punishment.

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He tested his hypothesis by putting a mirror near a predator in an aquarium. Lone sticklebacks reacted in a TIT FOR TATlike manner when observing what their mirror image did; that is, when they darted forward or backward spontaneously, they repeated the action after seeing their image. Later, when discussing zero-sum games versus non-zero-sum games, I’ll point out the ways that cooperative and competitive behaviors are nested within one another. Recall the first public goods, where early hunters may have cooperated in order to bring down game but reverted to more competitive strategies such as dominance hierarchies when it came to allocating that meat (although one of the oft-quoted observations about the emergence of food sharing is that “the Inuit knows that the best place for him to store his surplus is in someone else’s stomach”44).

Smarter Investing
by Tim Hale
Published 2 Sep 2014

Before we begin the process of establishing which approach has the greatest chance of success, you need to be aware of the zero-sum game that actively trading investments represents in aggregate. Understanding the zero-sum game As we unravel the chances of success from adopting either a passive or an active approach to your investing, you need to make sure that you understand the game that is being played by active investors in aggregate who are trading securities between each other. It is a zero-sum game, assuming that we ignore for the moment the significant issue of costs, where one investor’s gain is another investor’s loss.

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Factoring in the costs of investing, it becomes a significantly less-than-zero-sum game. If you buy a share at a certain price believing it will rise faster than the market, and it does, you win and the person who sold it to you loses – you cannot both be right. Take a look at the simple market in Table 4.1, which consists of just two investors, me and you, and two shares, ABC plc and XYZ plc. As you can see, the combined returns over one year of our two-stock market must be the market return. You win and I lose relative to the market. The same applies for all investments. So, if you sell equities and buy bonds, again it has to be a zero-sum game before costs.

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After all, many people gamble on the lottery, despite the odds that a thirty-five-year-old man buying a lottery ticket on a Monday has a greater chance of dying than winning the jackpot! For some reason, we hate to be considered average. We seem to aspire to want to be winners, which is fine if it is winning an egg and spoon race, but dangerous in the less-than-zero-sum game that we play as investors. In investing, there is nothing wrong with being average if by average you mean achieving the market return for your buy-and-hold portfolio, as you will see. The problem with many investors is that they are attracted to active management because they have not thought through the issues clearly, and have not seen or read the evidence that exists that helps them to decide which course of action is likely to be best for their investing health.

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners
by Larry Harris
Published 2 Jan 2003

If you want to design a new market, or if your business depends on trading in a successful market, you must understand why—and how—people trade. Trading is a zero-sum game in an important accounting sense. In a zero-sum game, the total gains of the winners are exactly equal to the total losses of the losers. Trading is a zero-sum game because the combined gains and losses of buyers and sellers always sum to zero. If a buyer profits from a trade, the seller loses the opportunity to profit by the same amount. Likewise, if a buyer loses from a trade, the seller avoids an identical loss. Successful traders must understand the implications of the zero-sum game. To trade profitably, traders must trade with people who will lose.

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Ananth Madhavan commented on early drafts of the book and supplied many bibliographic references. I have greatly appreciated having him as a colleague at USC. Finally, Jack Treynor was instrumental in helping me appreciate the importance of the zero-sum game in trading. Most principles of market microstructure somehow involve properties of zero-sum games. Several generous sponsors provided financial support for this project. I received “angel financing” from the New York Stock Exchange (Dick Grasso, Billy Johnston, Jim Cochrane, and George Sofianos), the Jefferies Group (Frank Baxter), Mellon Capital Management Corporation (Bill Fouse and Tom Loeb), Bernard L.

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In general, they can profit if the price impacts of their buying and selling are not exactly opposite to each other. Since dealers may trade when bluffers want them to trade, dealers must be highly disciplined to avoid losing to bluffers. Trading is a zero-sum game when gains and losses are measured relative to the market average. In a zero-sum game, someone can win only if somebody else loses. On average, well-informed speculators and bluffers win, and poorly informed traders and foolish traders lose. Informed traders can profit only to the extent that less informed traders are willing to lose to them.

Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns
by Michael W. Covel
Published 14 Jun 2011

See trend following T computers’ role in, 87-88 conversion to, 155 critics’ responses to, 193-196 during market crashes, 97-98 Taleb, Nassim, 91 explained, 235-236 technical analysis, types of, 35-36 history of, 221-231 Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits (Schabacker), 226 luck versus skill, 189-190 Technical Analysis of Stock Trends (Edwards and Magee), 226 morality of, 109-110 market predictions versus, 194 Index performance statistics, 15-23 philosophy of, 41-43 as reactive technical analysis, 36 reasons for continued success, 185 robustness of, 85 U–V unexpected events, winners and losers, 91 unpredictability in trend following, 81-82 value investing, defined, 12 rules of, 201-202 W–Z scientific method in, 134-135 Walsh, Mark J., 17 statistics in, 137-140 Ward, Anthony, 109 tips for, 239-241 Watts, Dickson, 227, 239 unpredictability in, 81-82 When Genius Failed, 216 “Trend-Following Methods in Commodity Price Analysis” (Donchian), 230 trend-following traders, net worth of, 15 trends, defined, 39 Tropin, Kenneth, 5, 15 The Truman Show (film), 162 Truth of the Stock Tape (Gann), 226 Tullis, Eli, 143 TurtleTrader.com, origins of, 155 TurtleTraders, 199 Twenty-eight Years (Clews), 224 The Twilight Zone (television program), 26 Twitter, 169 275 winners and losers crowd mentality, 117-120 during market crashes, 97-98 Efficient-Markets Hypothesis, 101-102 hatred of trend following, 109-110 unexpected events, 91 zero-sum game, 95 winning trades, percentage of, 85 Wired (magazine), 97 Wyckoff, Richard D., 226-227 zero-sum game, 95 This page intentionally left blank Press FINANCIAL TIMES In an increasingly competitive world, it is quality of thinking that gives an edge—an idea that opens new doors, a technique that solves a problem, or an insight that simply helps make sense of it all.

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However, the winners always seem to be missing from the after-the-fact analysis. The press and the public are only fascinated with the losers. Everyone is oblivious to the other side of the story: the winners and why. The academics locked away with job security tenure always come up short in their analysis: “It’s a zero-sum game. For every loser there’s a winner, but you can’t always be specific about who the winner is.”2 Not true. Bear markets cause events more than events cause bear markets. John W. Henry made a fortune going short the Nikkei, while Nick Leeson and Barings Bank were long. That’s a major winner right there.3 My political science background allowed me to see that; others should be able to see it too.

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Those with poor strategies are forever being cycled and recycled into the markets, giving continuous opportunities to capitalize on their missteps and take their money. And with so many people playing Isn’t history littered the big money game with such awful strategy, the with surprises? next surprise win for trend following traders is right around the corner. This page intentionally left blank The new normal is always the old always. Zero-Sum In a zero-sum game, someone can win only if somebody else loses.1 On any given market transaction, the chance of you winning or losing may be near even, but in the long run, you will only profit from trading because you have some persistent advantage (read: mathematical edge) that allows you to win slightly more often than losing.2 If you have ever played poker or studied edges in gambling, the words ring true: To trade profitably in the long run, you will know your edge, you will know when it exists, and you will exploit it when you can.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
by Hubert Joly
Published 14 Jun 2021

Many companies, Best Buy included, have a system of scorecards and rankings to measure and reward performance. Rankings are everywhere. Being the best is even in Best Buy’s name. It is a disease—one that, according to psychologists, feeds a growing and self-defeating quest for perfection.7 The problem is, the idea of being the best implies that the world is a zero-sum game. There is room for only 10 people or companies in the top 10. You can only become number one by knocking off someone else. And then what do you do when you become number one? There is nowhere else to go but down. Of course, there is competition, and competition is important. But competition against oneself, or doing better tomorrow than we did yesterday, takes us much further than obsessively measuring ourselves against others.

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Traditionally, strategy is articulated around being the best or first in a category, the way GE always strove to be number one or two in its market segments. I have done this too. When I was CEO of Carlson Wagonlit Travel, I wanted us to overtake American Express’s corporate travel business for the number-one spot. But winning a race against another company cannot and should not dictate strategy. Such ambitions create zero-sum games that narrow strategy and execution. Also, they are not particularly inspiring, meaningful, or fulfilling. Imagine you are responsible for the strategy of a health and life insurance company. If your purpose is defined in terms of profits, then your best strategy is about making sure your customers use your services as little as possible.

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We maximize performance not by choosing between stakeholders, but by embracing and mobilizing all of them. We choose employees and customers and shareholders and the community. If, like me, you were trained to put profits first, you might dismiss this as overly optimistic. I will not say it is easy, but reframing zero-sum games can be done. Here are some ways Best Buy did it. Delighting customers After we formulated Best Buy’s noble purpose, it quickly became apparent that we had a lot more work to do. Something was missing: most employees did not grasp what it concretely meant for them and their work. Unless they could, the company’s noble purpose would fail to become reality.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

To that end, we present examples of the three main classes of games: normal-form games, in which players choose from a discrete set of actions (typically two); sequential games, in which players choose actions sequentially; and continuous-action games, in which players can choose actions of any magnitude or effect size. These examples introduce the main concepts, help us to understand later models, and add value in their own right. The remainder of the chapter has four parts. We begin by covering 2-by-2 zero-sum games. In a zero-sum game, each of two players chooses among two actions. No matter what actions the players choose, the amount won by one player is exactly offset by the losses of the other. We use zero-sum games to define the basic terminology of game theory, to distinguish between strategies and actions, and to introduce the concept of iterated elimination of dominated strategies. We then study the Market Entry Game, a sequential game, in which an entrant competes against an existing firm, and we replicate that game many times to create what is known as the chain store paradox.

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In the third part, we consider an effort game in which individuals choose effort levels to win a prize of a fixed amount. Increasing effort improves a player’s chances of winning the prize. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the value of game theory models generally. Normal-Form Zero-Sum Games In this section we analyze two-player normal-form zero-sum games. In both games, each player chooses an action and receives a payoff that depends on the player’s own action and the other player’s action. In addition, the players’ payoffs sum to zero. In the first game, Matching Pennies shown in figure 21.1, each player chooses one of two actions: heads or tails.

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A budget relocation could be zero-sum in monetary terms but positive or negative sum in terms of human happiness or fulfillment. We should always explore whether a proposed policy change creates a zero sum game. For example, many people argue for school choice—giving parents the ability to choose the school their child will attend—because it increases competition. Market logic suggests that by being forced to compete, schools have incentives to improve quality. However, schools only have an incentive to improve quality if excess capacity exists. Otherwise, school choice can create a zero-sum game among the students. Imagine a city with 10,000 students and 10 schools each with a capacity for 1,000 students.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
by Matthew Syed
Published 19 Apr 2010

How about giving GPs a precious opportunity to “hit lot of balls”? How about a well-designed booster course handing GPs an opportunity to make as many diagnoses in one weekend as they would normally make in a year? Sure enough, when GPs were put through this kind of course, their diagnostic accuracy soared. Zero-Sum Games Sport is, to use the jargon of economics, a zero-sum game: if I win, you, by definition, lose. This may seem rather obvious, but it has weighty ramifications. Suppose that I am a top sprinter, and I go away and adopt the principles of purposeful practice and, as a result, reduce my time by 10 percent. When I come to run my next race, I will zoom past many of my competitors.

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Anders Ericsson, “The Path to Expert Golf Performance: Insights from the Masters on How to Improve Performance by Deliberate Practice,” in Optimizing Performance in Golf, ed. P. R. Thomas, 1–57 (Brisbane, Australia: Australian Academic Press, 2001). “I never hit a shot”: Jack Nicklaus with Ken Bowden, Golf My Way, 79. Sport is, to use the jargon of economics, a zero-sum game: For an introduction to zero-sum games and other aspects of game theory see Robert Gibbons, Game Theory for Applied Economists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4. MYSTERIOUS SPARKS AND LIFE-CHANGING MIND-SETS “Camp was real competitive”: This is one of a series of fascinating interviews Marlo Thomas conducted for her book The Right Words at the Right Time (New York: Atria, 2002), which shows how chance events can have a huge influence on personal development.

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Much of the resistance to genetic enhancement seems to hinge on a kind of squeamishness, the idea that it is both a little creepy and a little presumptuous to interfere with the fabric of human DNA. But this squeamishness is surely misplaced. After all, the human genome is the product of an arbitrary process of evolution. Is it not time to embrace any safe genetic intervention that can improve lives or reduce suffering? Zero-Sum Games Suppose there was an enhancement that engineered immunity to the common cold. This is an enhancement that would make my life go a lot better. As someone who regularly suffers from colds, I would love to take advantage of any technology that helped me avoid my annual bout of sniffling and shivering.

A Beautiful Mind
by Sylvia Nasar
Published 11 Jun 1998

But when there is more than one agent but not so many that their influence may be safely ignored, strategic behavior raises a seemingly insoluble problem: “I think that he thinks that I think that he thinks,” and so forth. Von Neumann was able to give a convincing solution to this problem of circular reasoning for games that are two-person, zero-sum games, games in which one player’s gain is another’s loss. But zero-sum games are the ones least applicable to economics (as one writer put it, the zero-sum game is to game theory “what the twelve-bar blues is to jazz; a polar case, and a point of historical departure”). For situations with many actors and the possibility of mutual gain — the standard economic scenario — von Neumann’s superlative instincts failed him.

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43 It must have become obvious to Nash fairly early on that “the bible,” as The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior was known to students, though mathematically innovative, contained no fundamental new theorems beyond von Neumann’s stunning min-max theorem.44 He reasoned that von Neumann had succeeded neither in solving a major outstanding problem in economics using the new theory nor in making any major advance in the theory itself.45 Not a single one of its applications to economics did more than restate problems that economists had already grappled with.46 More important, the best-developed part of the theory — which took up one-third of the book — concerned zero-sum two-person games, which, because they are games of total conflict, appeared to have little applicability in social science.47 Von Neumann’s theory of games of more than two players, another large chunk of the book, was incomplete.48 He couldn’t prove that a solution existed for all such games.49 The last eighty pages of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior dealt with non-zero-sum games, but von Neumann’s theory reduced such games formally to zero-sum games by introducing a fictitious player who consumes the excess or makes up the deficit.50 As one commentator was later to write, “This artifice helped but did not suffice for a completely adequate treatment of the non-zero-sum case. This is unfortunate because such games are the most likely to be found useful in practice.”51 To an ambitious young mathematician like Nash, the gaps and flaws in von Neumann’s theory were as alluring as the puzzling absence of ether through which light waves were supposed to travel was to the young Einstein.

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“The fundamental idea is that in a two-person zero-sum solution, the best strategy for both is … The whole theory is built on it. And it works with any number of people and doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.”18 Gale recalls Nash’s saying, “I’d call this an equilibrium point.” The idea of equilibrium is that it is a natural resting point that tends to persist. Unlike von Neumann, Gale saw Nash’s point. “Hmm,” he said, “that’s quite a thesis.” Gale realized that Nash’s idea applied to a far broader class of real-world situations than von Neumann’s notion of zero-sum games. “He had a concept that generalized to disarmament,” Gale said later. But Gale was less entranced by the possible applications of Nash’s idea than its elegance and generality.

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less
by Michael Hyatt
Published 8 Apr 2019

If they play until “winner takes all,” that winner will take $500—no more, no less. Nothing anyone does throughout an entire night of card playing will create more money; all they have to play with is the original $500 from beginning to end. Time is just like that. It’s a zero-sum game. There’s only so much to go around because, as we saw in chapter 3, time is fixed. It can’t flex. You and I only get 168 hours each week. If time, and therefore your calendar, is a zero-sum game, we must realize saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else. Even if we hate saying no, we must understand that every yes inherently contains a no. For example, if someone asks to meet with me for breakfast at 7:00 a.m., I can’t say yes to that without saying no to my morning workout.

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Saying no may sound impossible today, but it’s easier than you think. Few things will energize you and your productivity more than the powerful little word no. Now let’s learn how to use it. Understand Time Dynamics Poker isn’t known for creating wealth; it’s more of a transfer of wealth. It is what’s commonly called a zero-sum game. Each player brings money to the table, and that’s all the money there is for the game. If five players each bring $100 to bet, then the stakes of the game are $500. That’s it. Throughout the course of the game, each player will control a different portion of that $500, but at any given moment, the sum of everyone’s holdings will be $500.

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Besides, if he did make a mistake, he knew he had plenty of other marble to work with on his way to creating a masterpiece. So, don’t be afraid to grab a chisel and get to work. You’ll never truly thrive as long as you’re carrying around the dead weight of your Drudgery, Disinterest, and Distraction Zones. Saying No to New Requests Once you understand that time is a zero-sum game, acknowledge the trade-offs you’re making, filter your commitments, and create your Not-to-Do List, it’s time to start saying no. Depending on your current list of tasks and commitments, not to mention the new ones that come flying in fast and furious every day, you’ll probably have to get comfortable saying no a lot.

The Internet of Money
by Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Published 28 Aug 2016

We are forced to use that currency in all of our interactions. We don’t have a choice — until 2008, that is. We now live in a slightly different world, but a lot of the old paradigm persists in our thinking. In a world where your currency is a monopolistic nation-state artifact that is constrained by geography, it’s a zero-sum game. The currency is the flag, is the nation-state. It is the expression of the economic value of your state. It defines your interactions in a world of geopolitics, in a global struggle for domination among nations. It’s not up to individual choice. It has nothing to do with the individual, except for that one individual whose face is on the currency — up until recently here in Canada, some old white lady named Elizabeth. 7.2.

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How will altcoins compete in a world of cryptocurrencies as we move into the future? Will there be hundreds of altcoins? If there are hundreds of altcoins, what does that mean for the value of each of the altcoins? How do they compete? That was the wrong way of thinking about it. I saw currency as a zero-sum game, just like it had been imposed on my worldview from the nation-states that created currency. Then, I started thinking of currency as an application. And then, I started thinking of currency as a means of expression. You see, money, at the very root of it, is a language. It’s a language we use to express value to each other.

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Really all of these things are forms of expression, and that comes back to the original point: that currency, in the end, is really a form of language. It’s a language by which we communicate our expectations and desires of value, and now that we can do it on such a massive scale, now that everyone can create currency, our choices will really matter. We’re past the zero-sum game. This isn’t about nation-states anymore. This isn’t about who adopts bitcoin first or who adopts cryptocurrencies first, because the internet is adopting cryptocurrencies, and the internet is the world’s largest economy. It is the first transnational economy, and it needs a transnational currency.

The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 1976

Do we assume, in real life as well as in psychological experiments, that we are playing a zero sum game when we are not? I simply pose these difficult questions. To answer them would go beyond the scope of this book. Football is a zero sum game. At least, it usually is. Occasionally it can become a nonzero sum game. This happened in 1977 in the English Football League (Association Football or 'Soccer'; the other games called football-Rugby Football, Australian Football, American Football, Irish Football, etc., are also normally zero sum games). Teams in the Football League are split into four divisions. Clubs play against other clubs within their own division, accumulating points for each win or draw throughout the season.

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Referee Ron Challis watched helpless as the players pushed the ball around with little or no challenge to the man in possession.' What had previously been a zero sum game had suddenly, because of a piece of news from the outside world, become a nonzero sum game. In the terms of our earlier discussion, it is as if an external 'banker' had magically appeared, making it possible for both Bristol and Coventry to benefit from the same outcome, a draw. Spectator sports like football are normally zero sum games for a good reason. It is more exciting for crowds to watch players striving mightily against one another than to watch them conniving amicably.

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It seems that many people, perhaps without even thinking about it, would rather do down the other player than cooperate with the other player to do down the banker. Axelrod's work has shown what a mistake this is. It is only a mistake in certain kinds of game. Games theorists divide games into 'zero sum' and 'nonzero sum'. A zero sum game is one in which a win for one player is a loss for the other. Chess is zero sum, because the aim of each player is to win, and this means to make the other player lose. Prisoner's Dilemma, however, is a nonzero sum game. There is a banker paying out money, and it is possible for the two players to link arms and laugh all the way to the bank.

Heads I Win, Tails I Win
by Spencer Jakab
Published 21 Jun 2016

In fact, the questions come from readers or audience members at speaking engagements who are fairly financially savvy. Having a good idea of what long-run returns have been for stocks and bonds, they find the numbers impossible to reconcile with how little a typical investor makes. The explanation is that we’re all players in something called a zero-sum game. That dud investment, high fee, or unfortunate timing that caused you to lose money or earn less than you might have didn’t send the foregone dollars to money heaven. They went somewhere else—into the profits of a large financial services company or the pockets of an investor who usually doesn’t make those errors.

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Multiply that shortfall by the $23 trillion or so that Americans have stashed in retirement accounts and you begin to understand that the eye-popping compensation on Wall Street isn’t conjured out of thin air. They at least owe you a thank-you card. As financial types put it, investing is a zero-sum game. I compare it to a poker room in a casino where players’ money gets redistributed. There’s a reason I’m not using the example of a friendly neighborhood game of five-card stud. Unlike your buddy’s basement, the casino is a business and takes a “rake,” or a small cut, of every pot in order to pay the dealer, its overhead, and of course earn a profit.

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If I were a smart guy like Mauboussin and convinced that there’s such a thing as investment skill, I would relish the day when those waters became a puddle and nearly everyone just stuck their money into an index fund. With so much less competition, I would assume that I could run circles around the crowd and really be “the greatest investor of our time,” the way Bill Miller was described before it all unraveled. Or would he? I explained in the introduction to this book that investing is a zero-sum game. The only way that a handful of truly great investors such as Warren Buffett can beat the market consistently is because the majority of people, each with just a fraction of his money, do so poorly. But if nearly everyone just owned corporate America in equal measure, they wouldn’t live in Lake Moneybegone any longer.

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
by Costas Lapavitsas
Published 14 Aug 2013

Transactions of loanable capital, as was argued in Chapter 5, involve the advance of value against future claims which continue to be traded. Profit emerges for counterparties in the first instance as a share of the loanable capital initially traded – that is, it derives from a zero-sum game. If the attached claims were validated out of future flows of value, however, the zero-sum game would become a preamble to drawing profits out of surplus value, or future income. If, on the other hand, the claims were not validated, profits from the initial trade would remain a share of someone else’s loanable capital. The economic relations involved in this complex process are analysed in the rest of this chapter; suffice it here to state that they are integral to all financial trading.

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For Steuart, ‘profit upon alienation’ belongs to the latter type, it constitutes ‘relative profit’. Steuart’s analysis contains manifest error, as Marx pointed out in Part 1 of Theories of Surplus Value, since it identifies capitalist profit in general with ‘profit upon alienation’.10 That is, Steuart considered capitalist profit generally to emerge from a zero sum game in exchange. For Marx, in contrast, capitalist profit is already contained in ‘real value’, not least as part of the ‘normal labour required for production’. Nonetheless, Marx was impressed by Steuart’s argument that the profit of one party in circulation could be the loss of another. This would be a type of profit that differed qualitatively from the flow of surplus value created in production through the exploitation of workers.

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They comprise the gist of the notion of ‘financial expropriation’, proposed elsewhere as an integral aspect of financialized capitalism.15 At core this is an exploitative relationship representing the direct appropriation of personal money income, or of loanable capital and plain money that belongs to others. But it is different from exploitation at the point of production and rests on a zero sum game between the counterparties to financial transactions. More complexly, it could also be an intermediate step to appropriating a share of the flow of surplus value, as is shown below. The social foundations of financial expropriation lie, in part, in the non-capitalist character of personal income.

Capital Ideas Evolving
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 3 May 2007

Alpha plays an active role in the way David Swensen has * Joanne Hill, a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, has made the case that alpha is not a zero-sum game. See Hill (2006). bern_c12.qxd 3/23/07 170 9:10 AM Page 170 THE PRACTITIONERS organized the Yale portfolio. Alpha is the focus of attention in most of what follows in this book. As we shall see, the widespread struggle to earn a return above what the market earns, after adjustment for risk, has become increasingly sophisticated and elaborate. Nevertheless, the search for alpha is a zero-sum game. Total alpha in excess of or lower than the return of the market as a whole is an impossibility, because the return on the market is the return on the market, no more and no less.

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Providing these services does not require predictions of macro forces or cash f lows, which is what beta and alpha predictions are bern_c09.qxd 3/23/07 112 9:06 AM Page 112 THE THEORETICIANS all about—and alpha and beta are the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. As Scholes describes it, “Omega has a nice ring to it. Best of all, omega is not a zero-sum game, like the search for alpha. We are providing a service, not seeking an edge in processing information. Simply put, people at our end of these transactions are paid for taking risks others do not want to carry.” Scholes likes the contrast of the last letter with the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, but his reasons for choosing omega were more serious.

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To Scholes, then, omega symbolizes the role his firm takes in seeking out opportunities where assets are underpriced because someone, somewhere, is attempting to transfer a risk to the market. Although Scholes explicitly excludes considerations of alpha and beta in the management of his hedge fund, and although he claims the search for omega is not a zero-sum game, the roots of his strategies are still deeply imbedded in the basic structures of Capital Ideas. Risk, in all its manifestations, is the central consideration in everything his fund undertakes, and the risk/return trade-off is basic to all decisions. He makes little use of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, but assumptions of market efficiency explain why he insists the investments in his fund are not based on “mispricings” but, rather, on value created by investors seeking to shed risks by making it profitable for others to assume those risks for them.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy
by Robert A. Sirico
Published 20 May 2012

Such advances are possible only because of the dynamism of the market economy and the businesses that make it go. Many people miss the extraordinary power and value of ordinary business because—while far from being card-carrying Marxists—they have nevertheless inherited Marx’s understanding of business and markets, usually without even realizing it. Marx portrayed economies as zero-sum games, particularly when it came to the relationship between those with invested capital and the workers these capitalists employed. I mean, really—Marx just didn’t spend a whole lot of time celebrating the wealth-generating efforts of the entrepreneur or skilled manager. In his analysis, if anyone was creating new wealth, it was the poor laboring stiffs down in the trenches baking the bricks or planting the crops, not the rich guys in the offices who never broke a sweat.

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What’s missing from these contexts isn’t manual labor or a good work ethic. What’s missing are the entrepreneurs and the economic freedom necessary to channel all of this human energy into more efficient, creative, and productive labor. It’s easy for politicians to miss this fact because politics is a zero-sum game where the object is to divide up a static amount of pre-existing power and goods. The phenomenon of lobbying is a great instance of this because it is little more than a parasite on expansive government. Lobbyists only lobby those who have the power to influence things that will affect those they represent.

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Success in the political system is based not on economic prowess but on political acumen. Markets are very different. Consider the difference in atmosphere when you walk into a Hallmark card shop versus a post office. The incentives for advancement in government occupations are not the same as those for achieving success in private enterprise. The market is not a zero-sum game. Markets are dynamic; they grow; the people who work in them aim to please the customer, not the power holder. In a market economy where the rule of law is enforced, businesses don’t thrive by robbing others. They are successful when they have the foresight to anticipate the wants and needs of others and provide goods and services to customers at prices they are willing to pay.

The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth With Less Work
by Richard A. Ferri
Published 4 Nov 2010

This makes risk-adjusted portfolio comparisons easier and faster. Beta is elegant, logical, and simple, and it has been applied extensively over the decades in finance and business valuation. In summary, there’s only one market risk and one market return. No excess return or excess risk exists in the market. This makes all non-market risk a zero sum game. For every non-market risk winner there must be a non-market risk loser. However, no one invests for free. After fees and expenses, most non-market risk takers (i.e., active fund investors) must underperform the market by the costs they incur. It’s simple arithmetic. During 1964, Sharpe applied beta in his revolutionary Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science.

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A certain number of managers will outperform the market due to randomness, and there’s no telling when their luck will run out. Even if Alpha did indicate skill, that’s history. There’s no way to know which managers will show skill in the future. Chapter 7 explains why past performance is not an indicator of future returns. Alpha is always a zero sum game across the investment industry before fees and expenses. The cost of acquiring relevant investment information, analyzing the information, and making trading decisions is expensive. Even if active managers are correct on their analysis, the cost of active management often overwhelms whatever alpha they find.

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To be successful, an investor must rotate money into mutual funds that represent asset classes or market sectors before the superior performance occurs and out of the sectors prior to poor performance. These tactical shifts in allocation can be large or small depending on an investor’s strategy and conviction. Market timing strategies are a zero-sum game in the marketplace. The financial markets don’t earn any more or any less return just because one person is buying and another is selling. If one investor buys in at the right time it means another investor must have sold at the wrong time. There is academic precedence that points to measurable losses for investors who frequently trade their accounts.

Derivatives Markets
by David Goldenberg
Published 2 Mar 2016

When it is positive (negative) to the long, it is negative (positive) to the short. This is what is usually meant when people say that (naked) forward positions are a zero sum game. Your gains are my losses and vice versa. Of course, this assumes the long and short are holding naked forward positions. If they were hedgers (holding explicit or implicit spot positions at time t) as well, then those positions need not constitute a zero sum game. That is, their overall positions in spot and forwards can be win-win for both the long and the short! Unfortunately, a lot of the popular discussion simply drops the word ‘naked’ in its zero sum description and extrapolates to derivatives markets in general.

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Futures Contracts 7.5.8 Cross-Hedging, Adjusting the Hedge for non S&P 500 Portfolios 7.6 The Spot Eurodollar Market 7.6.1 Spot 3-month Eurodollar Time Deposits 7.6.2 Spot Eurodollar Market Trading Terminology 7.6.3 LIBOR3, LIBID3, and Fed Funds 7.6.4 How Eurodollar Time Deposits are Created 7.7 Eurodollar Futures 7.7.1 Contract Specifications 7.7.2 The Quote Mechanism, Eurodollar Futures 7.7.3 Forced Convergence and Cash Settlement 7.7.4 How Profits and Losses are Calculated on Open ED Futures Positions PART 2 Trading Structures Based on Forward Contracts CHAPTER 8 STRUCTURED PRODUCTS, INTEREST-RATE SWAPS 8.1 Swaps as Strips of Forward Contracts 8.1.1 Commodity Forward Contracts as Single Period Swaps 8.1.2 Strips of Forward Contracts 8.2 Basic Terminology for Interest-Rate Swaps: Paying Fixed and Receiving Floating 8.2.1 Paying Fixed in an IRD (Making Fixed Payments) 8.2.2 Receiving Variable in an IRD (Receiving Floating Payments) 8.2.3 Eurodollar Futures Strips 8.3 Non-Dealer Intermediated Plain Vanilla Interest-Rate Swaps 8.4 Dealer Intermediated Plain Vanilla Interest-Rate Swaps 8.4.1 An Example 8.4.2 Plain Vanilla Interest-Rate Swaps as Hedge Vehicles 8.4.3 Arbitraging the Swaps Market 8.5 Swaps: More Terminology and Examples 8.6 The Dealer’s Problem: Finding the Other Side to the Swap 8.7 Are Swaps a Zero Sum Game? 8.8 Why Financial Institutions Use Swaps 8.9 Swaps Pricing 8.9.1 An Example 8.9.2 Valuation of the Fixed-Rate Bond 8.9.3 Valuation of the Floating-Rate Bond 8.9.4 Valuation of the Swap at Initiation 8.9.5 Implied Forward Rates (IFRs) 8.9.6 Three Interpretations of the Par Swap Rate PART 3 Options CHAPTER 9 INTRODUCTION TO OPTIONS MARKETS 9.1 Options and Option Scenarios 9.2 A Framework for Learning Options 9.3 Definitions and Terminology for Plain Vanilla Put and Call Options 9.4 A Basic American Call (Put) Option Pricing Model 9.5 Reading Option Price Quotes 9.6 Going Beyond the Basic Definitions: Infrastructure to Understand Puts and Calls 9.7 Identifying Long and Short Positions in an Underlying CHAPTER 10 OPTION TRADING STRATEGIES, PART 1 10.1 Profit Diagrams 10.2 Eight Basic (Naked) Strategies Using the Underlying, European Puts and Calls, and Riskless, Zero-Coupon Bonds 10.2.1 Strategy 1.

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This includes a discussion of the difference between hedging stock portfolios with forwards and hedging with futures; 11. an entry into understanding swaps, by viewing them as structured products, based on the forward concept; 12. the difference between commodity and interest rate swaps, and a detailed explanation of what it means to pay fixed and receive floating in an interest rate swap; 13. understanding Eurodollar futures strips, notation shifts, and the role of the quote mechanism; 14. discussion of swaps as a zero-sum game, and research challenges to the comparative advantage argument; 15. swaps pricing and alternative interpretations of the par swap rate; 16. a step-by-step approach to options starting in Chapter 9 with the usual emphasis on the quote mechanism, as well as incorporation of real asset options examples; 17. an American option pricing model in Chapter 9, and its extension to European options in Chapter 11; 18. the importance of identifying short, not just long, positions in an underlying asset and the hedging demand they create; 19. two chapters on option trading strategies; one basic, one advanced, including the three types of covered calls, the protective put strategy, and their interpretations; 20. a logical categorization of rational option pricing results in Chapter 11, and the inclusion of American puts and calls; 21. neither monotonicity nor convexity, which are usually assumed, are rational option results; 22. partial vs. full static replication of European options; 23. working backwards from payoffs to costs as a method for devising and interpreting derivatives strategies; 24. the introduction of generalized forward contracts paves the way for the connection between (generalized) forward contracts and options, and the discussion of American put-call parity; 25. the Binomial option pricing model, N=1, and why it works—which is not simply no-arbitrage; 26. three tools of modern mathematical finance: no-arbitrage, replicability and complete markets, and dynamic and static replication, and a rule of thumb on the number of hedging vehicles required to hedge a given number of independent sources of uncertainty; 27. static replication in the Binomial option pricing model, N=1, the hedge ratio can be 1.0 and a preliminary discussion in Chapter 13 on the meaning of risk-neutral valuation; 28. dynamic hedging as the new component of the BOPM, N>1, and a path approach to the multi-period Binomial option pricing model; 29. equivalent martingale measures (EMMs) in the representation of option and stock prices; 30. the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) as a guide to modeling prices; 31. arithmetic Brownian motion (ABM) and the Louis Bachelier model of option prices; 32. easy introduction to the tools of continuous time finance, including Itô’s lemma; 33.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns
by John C. Bogle
Published 1 Jan 2007

In a market that returns 7 percent in a given year, we investors together earn a gross return of 7 percent. (Duh!) But after we pay our financial intermediaries, we pocket only what remains. (And we pay them whether our returns are positive or negative!) Before costs, beating the market is a zero-sum game. After costs, it is a loser’s game. There are, then, these two certainties: (1) Beating the market before costs is a zero-sum game. (2) Beating the market after costs is a loser’s game. The returns earned by investors in the aggregate inevitably fall well short of the returns that are realized in our financial markets. How much do those costs come to? For individual investors holding stocks directly, trading costs may average 1.5 percent or more per year.

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Applying that figure to the annual return of 9.1 percent earned over the past 25 years by the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index, your annual return has likely been in the range of 7 percent. Result: investors as a group have been served only about three-quarters of the market pie. In addition, as explained in Chapter 7, if you are a typical investor in mutual funds, you’ve done even worse. A zero-sum game? If you don’t believe that return represents what most investors experience, please think for a moment about “the relentless rules of humble arithmetic” (Chapter 4). These iron rules define the game. As investors, all of us as a group earn the stock market’s return. As a group—I hope you’re sitting down for this astonishing revelation—we investors are average.

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As a group—I hope you’re sitting down for this astonishing revelation—we investors are average. For each percentage point of extra return above the market that one of us earns, another of our fellow investors suffers a return shortfall of precisely the same dimension. Before the deduction of the costs of investing, beating the stock market is a zero-sum game. A loser’s game. As investors seek to outpace their peers, winners’ gains inevitably equal losers’ losses. With all that feverish trading activity, the only sure winner in the costly competition for outperformance is the person who sits in the middle of our financial system. As Warren Buffett recently wrote, “When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsize profits, not the clients.”

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin
by Eric Voskuil , James Chiang and Amir Taaki
Published 28 Feb 2020

Bitcoin’s widespread use would prevent states from effectively levying the inflation tax [373] . State attacks are therefore expected, and analogous attacks are commonplace [374] . It is practically inevitable that states will subsidize attacks, but even the possibility invalidates the theory. Miner Business Model Miners play a zero sum game [375] within a positive sum [376] economy . They compete with each other, not the economy. Rising utility is the reflection of a positive sum and a natural consequence of trade . It has been argued that blocks mined in a period of rising price produce outsized returns for miners, at least until the difficulty adjustment .

…

To do this hash power must be distributed broadly among people so that it becomes difficult to co-opt . However pooling pressures inherent in the consensus work against this objective. As such the characteristic is termed a flaw, though no way to eliminate the flaw has been discovered. Zero Sum Property Bitcoin mining is a zero sum game [426] . On average the chain grows by one block every 10 minutes, with the full reward controlled by its miner . Miners compete to achieve this reward and will, apart from pooling pressures [427] , each average a number of rewards proportional to hash rate . The difference between a miner’s cost and this reward over time is the interest on capital invested in the mine.

…

* * * [10] https://libbitcoin.info [11] https://bitcoincore.org [12] Chapter: Dedicated Cost Principle [13] https://www.dtu.dk/english [14] https://twitter.com [15] https://libbitcoin.info [16] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Cryptoeconomics [17] Chapter: Inflation Principle [18] Chapter: Savings Relation [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Taaki [20] Chapter: Foreword [25] https://libbitcoininstitute.org [26] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation [27] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exemption-requirements-501c3-organizations [28] Chapter: Value Proposition [51] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises [52] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [53] Chapter: Inflation Principle [54] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [55] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [56] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [57] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_geometry [84] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [85] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [86] Chapter: Hearn Error [87] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity [88] Chapter: Value Proposition [89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal [90] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [91] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [92] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [93] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [94] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [95] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [96] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [98] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [100] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [101] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [102] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [103] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [104] http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm [105] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [106] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [107] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [110] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [111] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [112] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [115] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [116] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [117] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [118] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [119] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [120] Chapter: Reservation Principle [121] Chapter: Blockchain Fallacy [122] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [123] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance [124] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rage_quit [125] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [126] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [127] Chapter: Inflation Principle [128] Chapter: Lunar Fallacy [131] Chapter: Hearn Error [132] Chapter: Value Proposition [134] Chapter: Other Means Principle [135] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [136] https://www.imf.org [137] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [138] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [139] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [140] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [141] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [142] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [143] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [144] Chapter: Hearn Error [145] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [146] Chapter: Public Data Principle [147] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [148] Chapter: Other Means Principle [149] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [150] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz [151] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [152] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/1075 [153] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [154] https://www.asicboost.com/patent [155] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [156] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [157] Chapter: Public Data Principle [158] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [159] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [160] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [161] Chapter: Value Proposition [162] Chapter: Other Means Principle [174] https://coinweek.com/bullion-report/bitcoin-vs-gold-10-crystal-clear-comparisons [175] Chapter: Stability Property [176] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [177] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [178] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [181] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [182] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer [183] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [184] Chapter: Social Network Principle [185] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics)#Directed_graph [186] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) [189] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [190] Chapter: Public Data Principle [191] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [192] Chapter: Cockroach Fallacy [193] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain [194] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography [195] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software [196] Chapter: Prisoner’s Dilemma Fallacy [201] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [203] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [204] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [205] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [206] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [207] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [208] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market [209] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177 [210] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [211] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [212] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [213] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_surface [214] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [215] Chapter: Centralization Risk [216] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [217] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [218] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer [220] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [221] Chapter: Scalability Principle [222] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [223] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [224] Chapter: Value Proposition [225] Chapter: Other Means Principle [226] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [227] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [229] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [230] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [231] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [232] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [233] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [234] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [235] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [236] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility [237] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [238] https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-money/html/p/81 [246] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [247] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_controls [248] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [249] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081616/understanding-taxes-physical-goldsilver-investments.asp [250] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [251] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [252] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_rate#Parallel_exchange_rate [261] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [262] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [263] Chapter: Reservation Principle [264] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [265] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [266] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [273] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [274] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [275] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [276] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [277] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [278] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [279] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [280] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [281] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [282] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Federal_Reserve_System [283] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org/pages/discount-rates/current-discount-rates [309] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [310] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/16/how-tight-jeans-almost-ruined-americas-money [311] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/business/sweden-cashless-society.html [312] Chapter: Fedcoin Objectives [313] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona [314] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [315] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard [316] Chapter: Value Proposition [320] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_return [324] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [328] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [329] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/default.htm [330] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [331] https://www.coindesk.com/uasf-revisited-will-bitcoins-user-revolt-leave-lasting-legacy [332] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [337] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [338] Chapter: Stability Property [339] Chapter: Qualitative Security Model [340] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [341] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [342] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [343] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [344] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [345] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [346] Chapter: Efficiency Paradox [347] http://primecoin.io [349] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox [351] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [352] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [355] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function [356] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [357] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value [358] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value [359] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake [360] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [361] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [362] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [364] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [365] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Step_function [366] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicprofit.asp [367] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [368] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [369] Chapter: Proof of Work Fallacy [370] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [371] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring [372] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [375] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [376] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win-win_game [377] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory [379] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [380] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [381] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [382] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [385] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [386] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [387] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [388] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [389] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [390] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/big-in-venezuela/534177/ [391] Chapter: Relay Fallacy [392] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [393] Chapter: Balance of Power Fallacy [394] https://www.federalreserve.gov [395] Chapter: State Banking Principle [396] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement [397] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [398] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Note [399] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [400] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102 [401] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund [404] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [405] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [406] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [407] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [410] Chapter: Zero Sum Property [411] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf [413] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [414] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [416] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility [418] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [419] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam [420] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [423] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [424] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [425] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [426] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game [427] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [428] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system [429] Chapter: Proximity Premium Flaw [430] Chapter: Variance Discount Flaw [431] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale [432] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy [433] Chapter: Threat Level Paradox [434] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-definition-of-bitcoin [435] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [436] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [437] Chapter: Brand Arrogation [438] https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core [439] https://libbitcoin.info [440] Chapter: Maximalism Definition [441] Chapter: Custodial Risk Principle [443] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function [444] Chapter: Risk Sharing Principle [446] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [447] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [448] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [450] Chapter: Utility Threshold Property [451] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [452] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law#Reverse_of_Gresham's_law_(Thiers'_law) [453] Chapter: Fragmentation Principle [460] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [461] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [462] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [463] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [464] Chapter: Network Effect Fallacy [465] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [466] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [467] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [474] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [475] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [476] Chapter: Substitution Principle [478] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [479] Chapter: Side Fee Fallacy [482] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [483] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [484] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [485] https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.pdf [486] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [487] Chapter: Pooling Pressure Risk [488] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [489] Chapter: Energy Waste Fallacy [490] Chapter: Censorship Resistance Property [491] Chapter: Other Means Principle [495] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [496] Chapter: Value Proposition [497] Chapter: Proof of Stake Fallacy [498] Chapter: Axiom of Resistance [499] Chapter: Proof of Memory Façade [500] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [501] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [502] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [503] Chapter: State Banking Principle [504] https://www.frbdiscountwindow.org [505] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance [507] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [508] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_(economics) [509] Chapter: Replay Protection Fallacy [510] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value [511] Chapter: Consolidation Principle [515] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [516] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/996 [517] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [518] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves [519] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [520] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Money_creation_by_commercial_banks [521] Chapter: State Banking Principle [522] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/default.htm [543] Chapter: Savings Relation [544] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference [545] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [548] Chapter: Production and Consumption [561] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [562] Chapter: Unlendable Money Fallacy [563] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value [564] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [565] Chapter: Production and Consumption [566] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [569] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [570] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [571] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [572] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [573] Chapter: Thin Air Fallacy [574] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-reserve_banking [602] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [603] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [604] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining [605] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [607] Chapter: Risk Free Return Fallacy [635] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [636] Chapter: Production and Consumption [637] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [639] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [640] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [641] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [642] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [643] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump [644] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [645] Chapter: Savings Relation [646] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [647] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility [648] Chapter: Dumping Fallacy [649] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [650] Chapter: Production and Consumption [651] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [652] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [653] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [654] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/926 [655] Chapter: Expression Principle [656] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [657] Chapter: Pure Bank [658] Chapter: Reservation Principle [659] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [661] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_axiom [662] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods_and_services [663] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [664] Chapter: Labor and Leisure [665] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste [666] Chapter: Pure Bank [667] Chapter: Reserve Definition [668] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividend [677] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking [678] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve [679] https://www.fdic.gov [680] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_window [681] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [682] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [683] Chapter: Inflation Principle [684] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [685] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation [686] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [687] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage [688] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) [689] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [690] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maturity_(finance) [691] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [692] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost [693] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest [699] Chapter: Savings Relation [700] Chapter: Inflation Principle [704] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [705] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [706] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard [707] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/989 [708] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_requirement [709] Chapter: Expression Principle [715] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [726] Chapter: Savings Relation [727] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [732] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [733] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [734] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [735] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [739] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [740] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [741] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [742] Chapter: Inflation Principle [756] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [757] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [758] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [759] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [760] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange [761] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [762] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [763] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity [764] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) [765] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [766] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [767] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [779] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [780] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promissory_note [788] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender [789] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [790] Chapter: Stability Property [791] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money [797] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [798] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power [799] Chapter: Inflation Principle [803] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money [808] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [809] https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Contractual+Claim [810] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [811] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization [812] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote [813] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_certificate [814] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [815] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/electronic-money.asp [816] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [819] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_money [823] Chapter: Cryptodynamic Principles [824] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency [825] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [826] Chapter: Reserve Definition [827] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Regression_theorem [828] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [829] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [830] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter [831] https://mises.org/library/human-action-0/html/pp/778 [833] Chapter: Collectible Tautology [837] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [838] Chapter: Savings Relation [843] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-free_interest_rate [844] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [855] Chapter: Full Reserve Fallacy [856] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_money [857] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [858] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [860] https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Money_substitutes [861] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [874] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_past_each_other [875] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value [876] Chapter: Value Proposition [877] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallism [878] Chapter: Regression Fallacy [879] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism [880] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [886] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run [887] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [888] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort [889] Chapter: State Banking Principle [890] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [891] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_equation [892] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_inflation [893] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [894] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [895] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [897] Chapter: Inflation Principle [898] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation [899] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [901] Chapter: Speculative Consumption [905] https://medium.com/@paulbars/magic-internet-money-how-a-reddit-ad-made-bitcoin-hit-1000-and-inspired-south-parks-art-b414ec7a5598 [906] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [907] Chapter: Depreciation Principle [908] Chapter: Stability Property [909] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/25/could-the-price-of-bitcoin-go-to-1-million.aspx [910] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product [911] https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25 [912] Chapter: Stock to Flow Fallacy [913] Chapter: Reservation Principle [914] Chapter: Reserve Currency Fallacy [915] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallactics [916] https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market/html/p/949 [917] Chapter: Money Taxonomy [918] Chapter: Credit Expansion Fallacy [919] Chapter: Time Preference Fallacy [920] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank [921] Chapter: State Banking Principle [922] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_(finance) [923] Chapter: Debt Loop Fallacy [924] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States [931] Chapter: Permissionless Principle [932] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage [933] https://voxeu.org/index.php?

The Clash of the Cultures
by John C. Bogle
Published 30 Jun 2012

Never is this clearer than in his insistence that fees and costs are draining all the promised value out of the pockets of investors. Investors must know that they inevitably earn the gross return of the stock market, but only before the deduction of the costs of financial intermediation are taken into account. If beating the market is a zero sum game before costs, it is a loser’s game after costs are deducted. Which is why costs must be made clear to investors, and, one hopes, minimized. Pointing this out routinely surely cannot earn Jack Bogle many friends among Wall Street, which depends on the mystery surrounding financial innovations—as they are called euphemistically.

…

To understand why speculation is a drain on the resources of investors as a group, one need only understand the tautological nature of the markets: Investors, as a group, inevitably earn the gross return of, say, the stock market, but only before the deduction of the costs of financial intermediation are taken into account. If beating the market is a zero-sum game before costs, it is a loser’s game after costs are deducted. How often we forget the power of these “relentless rules of humble arithmetic” (a phrase used in another context by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis a century ago), when we bet against one another, day after day—inevitably, to no avail—in the stock market.

…

Our newly empowered institutions now hold 60 to 75 percent of the shares of virtually every U.S. publicly held corporation, giving them a firm grip on control over Corporate America. Renters and Owners With far too few exceptions, however, these powerful new institutional agents act less like owners of stocks than renters. They turn their portfolios over with abandon, trading (obviously) largely with one another, clearly engaging in a zero-sum game that enriches only Wall Street and ill-serves their principals. The average equity mutual fund turned over its portfolio at a 17 percent rate in the 1950s and 25 percent in the 1960s. But by 1985, turnover had leaped to 100 percent, and has remained around that astonishingly high level ever since.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Positive-Sum Games Steven Pinker Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; author, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature A zero-sum game is an interaction in which one party’s gain equals the other party’s loss—the sum of their gains and losses is zero. (More accurately, it is constant across all combinations of their courses of action.) Sports matches are quintessential examples of zero-sum games: Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing, and nice guys finish last. A nonzero-sum game is an interaction in which some combinations of actions provide a net gain (positive sum) or loss (negative sum) to the two participants.

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More despicable, if something happens that many regard as a bad outcome, this gives us the opportunity to sift through the causal nexus for the one thread that colorably leads back to our rivals (where the blame obviously lies). Lamentably, much of our species’ moral psychology evolved for moral warfare, a ruthless zero-sum game. Offensive play typically involves recruiting others to disadvantage or eliminating our rivals by publicly sourcing them as the cause of bad outcomes. Defensive play involves giving our rivals no ammunition to mobilize others against us. The moral game of blame attribution is only one subtype of misattribution arbitrage.

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A nonzero-sum game is an interaction in which some combinations of actions provide a net gain (positive sum) or loss (negative sum) to the two participants. The trading of surpluses, as when herders and farmers exchange wool and milk for grain and fruit, is a quintessential example, as is the trading of favors, as when people take turns baby-sitting each other’s children. In a zero-sum game, a rational actor seeking the greatest gain for himself or herself will necessarily be seeking the maximum loss for the other actor. In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself. More colloquially, positive-sum games are called win-win situations and are captured in the cliché “Everybody wins.”

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money
by Steven Drobny
Published 18 Mar 2010

The excess return is the difference between the fund’s actual return and the fund’s predicted return, the latter of which is defined by its beta to the benchmark. In hedge fund parlance, alpha represents the value that a portfolio manager adds to or subtracts from a fund’s return through active management, thus connoting a manager’s skill (or lack thereof). Is alpha extraction a zero-sum game? Alpha, by definition, is a zero-sum game—or at least by my definition. Before costs, that is. I don’t think there is that much alpha in hedge fund indices. Some hedge funds extract true alpha rather consistently, while others generate none, or even pay alpha. Then they hide it through beta, sometimes through difficult-to-see exotic betas.

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That way we get better allocation of resources in the real economy and fewer bubbles. If there had been more John Paulsons in the market during the last few years, and fewer gullible institutional investors in subprime, the global economy would have been much better off. But alpha in a strict sense is a zero-sum game, although with beneficial externalities for society. What else did you learn in 2008? Markets can go to even worse extremes than I thought possible. I was surprised to see the extent of arbitrage opportunities that emerged, although I was not very surprised by the extent of either stock market weakness or credit spread widening.

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I can think of many reasons why that could become an issue, so I have to take that into account but I would not want to buy oil based on my view that we are going to run out of oil. Are we headed towards inflation or deflation? I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that question. Everyone should be open-minded about this one, regardless of the strength of his opinions. Are the markets a zero sum game? No. Are they efficient? No. If you took 10 years off and were forced to put all your money in one trade, what would it be? Cash. Dollars? Pounds? Euros? Swiss francs? Probably euros but the question is difficult because it depends if my 10-year goal is to preserve my capital or maximize my wealth.

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market
by Steven Drobny
Published 31 Mar 2006

In the interim, this little-known element hidden away inside one of the world’s most prestigious financial institutions helps to shed some light on market psychology and risk in the global macro markets. THE TREASURER 135 What did your junior trader ask that you thought was interesting? He asked, “What makes you unique? If the market is a zero-sum game, why should anyone be able to beat the market?” Well, in a zero-sum game, you have winners and losers. With a certain ability, one can be among the winners.What makes me unique is probably my background. I have a PhD in psychology and a master’s in economics. I was always more academically oriented and planned on going into teaching and research, which I did for a year.Trading wasn’t something that particularly interested me—I actually didn’t start trading until I was 35 years old.

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The efficient market guys say if there’s a $100 bill lying on the pavement, it always gets picked up. My view is that it sometimes gets picked up and sometimes new $100 bills appear. 178 INSIDE THE HOUSE OF MONEY Are global macro markets a zero-sum game? In large part, that’s true, because there’s got to be somebody else who’s on the other side. In the equity markets, there is genuine wealth creation.Almost by default in most markets it’s close to a zero-sum game, but that’s exactly who you are trying to exploit, the person on the other side of the trade. Do hedge funds have an advantage against the person on the other side of the trade? Yes. Take a mundane example: A hedge fund manager can move much more quickly to a piece of news than a larger institution.

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For them, price discovery is the market, and they live and die by taking its pulse.Walking on the floor of the MERC, I could feel the pulse of the markets. It is here where equilibrium levels are found in the markets for interest rates, currencies, stock indexes, and commodities. If macro markets are a zero-sum game, as many attest, there does not seem to be any place to hide from this cruel fact in the trading pits of Chicago. After spending time on the floor, I went upstairs to Harris’s office, a stark, simple room on one of the upper floors of the MERC, where the dull glow of a fluorescent light revealed an old computer monitor; gray, marked-up walls; and a variety of files and papers strewn about.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

Some argue that marketing—especially that part of it concerned with advertising to build brands—is just a zero-sum game between companies: if my brand wins market share, yours loses. Some say that money spent on organizational development produces more bureaucracy and make-work. And some say that training should be excluded because it produces an asset for the person trained, not for the firm doing the training. Each of these criticisms has a kernel of truth, but not so much as to disqualify these sorts of spending as investments. Take the first objection, namely that branding is a zero-sum game and merely shifts sales from, say, Coke to Pepsi. This by itself is not an objection to it being an investment.

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Up until 2000, Austria, which taxed advertising, had differential rates across regions. In 2000 a nationwide harmonization introduced a 5 percent tax rate in all regions. Thus the cost of advertising increased in some parts of the country while simultaneously decreasing in other parts. If advertising were simply a zero sum game, this tax change should have made no difference to company spending. After all, if they are simply in an arms race to outspend each other, they would be forced into doing this by competition, regardless of taxes. In fact, advertising did change, falling where it got more expensive and rising where cheaper.

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Now, in some respects, this intangible asset provides a public as well as a private benefit: building a network of quality-assured, networked drivers is a valuable service for Uber’s customers. But critics have argued that at least in some respects, Uber’s “investment” in its driver network is a zero-sum game: the purpose of maintaining a network of drivers, they argue, is to allow Uber to get the benefits of hiring a lot of staff without having to comply with employment laws or minimum wages. To this extent, Uber’s investment in a network of drivers is valuable to Uber at least in part not because it creates new value but because it takes value away from drivers (who would otherwise benefit from minimum wages, etc.).

925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt and Retire a Millionaire So You Can Leave Your Mark on the World
by Devin D. Thorpe
Published 25 Nov 2012

Some options can be purchased for pennies and have the potential to be worth several dollars. In other words, some stock options appear to have short-term investment potential of twenty fold. You wouldn’t have to be successful so often with that strategy to make a fortune, it seems. For basic and fundamental reasons, however, options are to be avoided. Zero Sum Game: Options are a zero sum game. If you buy an option, someone (probably another investor) has accepted an exactly opposite bet on the markets. Every penny you win, he loses. Every penny you lose, he wins. Not quite, actually. The broker also takes a commission. Just Like Gambling: Options are just like gambling.

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If you keep 80 to 90% of your money cautiously invested—and keep contributing to your savings in the same proportion, you’ll keep your nest egg growing regardless of what happens with the money you’re putting at risk. Have caution with options: Investing in options over the long haul has a negative expected return. Options are a zero sum game—one player’s winnings are another’s losses. What’s worse is that the game is rigged: someone in the middle takes a commission so you aren’t even expected to get your money back. Writing naked calls is an easy way to make money until it bankrupts you. (If you don’t know what that is, you’re almost certainly not doing it.)

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While it is true that in the short run, the odds of an individual stock rising or falling are almost exactly equal to 50/50, that changes over time. The longer you hold the stock, the greater the odds of its value rising. So, too, with bonds and funds. Stocks and bonds often pay dividends. Options do not. Stocks, bonds and funds are not a zero sum game. The expected return on these investments is distinctly positive (even though people can and do lose money in the stock market). Why Do Options Exist? “If options are so stupid, why do they exist?” you ask. There are legitimate uses for options as a hedge as a sort of insurance. If you own a million shares of IBM and the stock is trading for $105.

Hedgehogging
by Barton Biggs
Published 3 Jan 2005

The pressure for short-term performance versus a benchmark can easily disorient the investment brain of a portfolio manager. What should matter is capital enhancement in bull markets and capital preservation in bears; in other words absolute, not relative, returns. In this sense, professional alpha investing is not a winner’s game but a zero-sum game, because for every winner there has to be a loser. In fact professional investing is even worse than zero-sum games like the NFL, where every Sunday the number of winners matches the number of losers, because transaction and management costs make investment management marginally a negative-sum game. Because compensation levels for portfolio managers are exalted, the game attracts the best, the brightest, and the most obsessive.

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However, again like Livermore and unlike the plungers and the peacocks of that speculative era that was coming to an ccc_biggs_ch03_21-33.qxd 11/29/05 6:58 AM Page 33 Short-Selling Oil 33 end, he understood that, without the cover of a pool or inside information, trading was essentially a zero-sum game but that investing could be a winner’s game. Without faith in his own judgment no man can go very far in this game.That is about all I have learned—to study general conditions, to take a position and stick to it. I can wait without a twinge of impatience. I can see a setback without being shaken, knowing that it is only temporary.

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Magazines would run features on the rags-to-riches stories of some of the contestants, and others would make appearances on talk shows at $50,000 a crack describing their unique flipping skills, ability to divine a coin in midair, and their mystic reflexive vision when it was about to land. Several would be rushing out books with titles like How to Make Millions Flipping and Why Jesus Chose Me to Win. Meanwhile angry college professors would be publishing articles in the Wall Street Journal about efficient markets, coin flipping, zero-sum games, and how the contest really was a random walk. Of course the contestants would be replying that if it can’t be done, how come there are 32 of us who have done it? In the weeks before the round of 16, the winners would be much in demand by attractive members of the opposite sex, and some of them would be pricing ski houses in Aspen and condominiums in Florida.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age
by Michael Wolff
Published 22 Jun 2015

And yet that sentiment was divorced from the future as he saw it and as he described the complicated new terms and relationships in a world of digital media. Finally, to what had become from Morris a kind of plea—“Are we in this together?”—Andreessen replied, “Excuse me. We are against each other. This is a zero-sum game.” “We all wanted to run away,” recalled Matt Stone in 2014. A funny thing happened over the intervening years, though. A strange schism developed. While everywhere there was the belief, near absolute, that the future of media lay with some ever-transforming technology, twenty years into this revolution, the value of traditional media, even with big losses in print and music, dramatically grew, with an Ernst & Young study in 2014 finding traditional media and entertainment companies increasing “their lead as one of the most profitable industries,” with television margins as high as almost 50 percent.

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Comcast, for its part, found itself with its NBC Universal acquisition in an ultimate schizoid business, owning two companies whose health depended on the competition with each other. NBC Universal with its network and its cable channels needed to be wholly focused on raising the fees it derived from the cable operators, notably Comcast, hence creating a strangely zero-sum game—Comcast paid NBC, which then gave the money back to Comcast, its owner (Comcast bought out GE’s remaining interest in 2013). Now, it was possible to look at this functionally closed system as a decent hedge—Comcast wasn’t going to win, but it wasn’t going to lose either. It balanced the push-pull of the business.

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A&E Networks, 61, 65, 117 ABC, 183 Abrahamsen, Kurt, 2 Advance Communications, 116, 117 advertising: adjacency strategy of, 59 ad-skipping devices, 49, 84, 96 and audience, 63, 72–73, 87, 198–99 billboards, 77, 115 brand, 23–24, 25, 26, 49–50, 67, 182–83 buying space vs. making ads, 48, 57, 63, 87–88 classified, 69, 115 and content, 59, 63, 84, 158 CPMs, 52, 65, 66, 71–72, 73 direct mail, 55–56, 69–70, 86 direct-response, 24, 25, 26, 85, 87 display, 69 dual markets for, 80–81, 85–88 falling prices of, 33, 50, 51, 52, 70–73, 74, 78, 167 global online industry, 75–76 government regulation of, 56 low tolerance for, 83–85 market predictions for, 79 and mass media, 123 measuring effectiveness of, 71–72, 79, 84–85, 87 media, 18, 21, 52 print, 25, 54, 69–71 programmatic buying/selling, 73, 76–80 as pyramid scheme, 57–58 remnant space for, 78 response rate, 55, 56–57, 72 as revenue source, 41, 43, 48 revolution in, 69–74 sales, 40–41, 56 and sports, 181–88 television, 24, 25, 40, 70, 79–80, 83–84, 99, 115, 119, 125, 129 too much space, 76 and YouTube, 153, 154–55 Advertising Week, New York, 21 Aereo, 112 aggregation, 18–19, 50–51, 59, 66, 190, 195–96 Ailes, Roger, 119 Alibaba, 19, 20 Allen, Mel, 182 Amazon, 42, 110, 112, 142, 161, 169 Andreessen, Marc, 2, 3, 4, 39, 60, 83, 97 AOL: and Huffington Post, 12, 58 and newspaper format, 18, 33, 189 and Time Warner, 11, 117, 126, 132, 159 Apple, 101–5 Apple TV, 109, 112, 113 Arledge, Roone, 183, 187 AT&T, 135, 136 audience: and advertising, 63, 72–73, 87, 198–99 auctions for, 77 behavior patterns of, 50 building, 47, 48, 50 and carriage, 125, 184–85 cost vs. profitability of, 54 demographics of, 73, 78 downmarket vs. upmarket, 192 drive-by, 54 eyeballs of, 57, 77–78 holding the attention of, 32, 50, 67, 71, 74 identifying, 47–49 illusory nature of, 64, 73–74 manipulation of, 50 mass, 35, 76, 195 measuring and monitoring, 48–50, 57, 77 migration of, 70 monetizing, 16, 40 and pay cable, 47–48 programming focused on, 128 and scarcity premium, 72 self-selected, 78 stand-alone unbranded entities, 78–79 as traffic, 18–19, 49–53, 73, 86, 196 value of, 48, 49 you don’t own it, 53, 54 Auletta, Ken, 95–100 Bartz, Carol, 19 Bewkes, Jeffrey, 121, 126 Blockbuster, 91 Blu-ray DVD players, 110–11 books, 115, 117, 124 broadband, 109, 135, 138–41 broadcast, 108, 112, 131, 168 BSkyB, 120 bundling-unbundling-rebundling, 171–78 BuzzFeed, 12, 18, 23, 57, 58–61, 62, 66, 67, 87, 102, 189, 193–94, 195–96, 199 cable companies: and broadband, 140–41 and bundling/unbundling, 174–78 bypassing fees of, 112 and costs, 99–100, 174 declining quality of, 168 deregulation of, 127 and digital access, 133 and government bureaucracy, 139 and Internet, 125, 129, 130, 135 mean and stingy deals from, 10 and “must-carry rule,” 131 pay cable model, 47–48, 113, 127 paying content providers, 125–26, 127, 130, 133 and sports, 184–85 streaming, 99–100 and television, see television upgrades, 134, 168 Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act (1992), 96, 131 Cannes Lions Festival, France, 21 Carey, Chase, 126 Carlson, Nicholas, 21–22 carriage, 125, 126, 131–32, 184–85 CBS, 97, 118, 121, 129, 130, 131, 160, 185, 198 Chiat, Jay, 101–2 Clear Channel, 116, 126 click fraud, 26, 74 CNN, 22, 32, 35, 65, 95, 126, 130, 132 Coleman, Greg, 58 Comcast, 10, 116, 120, 130, 132–36, 138, 143–44, 175, 185 Comedy Central, 3, 5, 130 computers: cloud, 108 as entertainment devices, 106 and television, 105, 108, 110, 111 comScore, 63 Condé Nast, 116, 117 consolivision, 114, 115–21 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), 83 “cool,” meanings of, 41, 63 copyright infringement, 146–49 Coupland, Douglas, 107 Couric, Katie, 21 Cue, Eddy, 103 curation, 36 Cusack, John, 2 Dacron Republican-Democrat, The, 18, 167 Dauman, Philippe, 126 Deadline Hollywood, 25 Delphi, 118 Demand Media, 52 Denton, Nick, 193–94, 196, 197 Deutsch, Donny, 2 digital convergence, 107 digital media: and advertising, 18, 21, 24, 25, 52, 70, 76, 84–85, 87, 128, 130 audience for, 16–17, 49, 54, 74, 87 and bundling/unbundling, 174–78 bureaucracies of, 19, 24, 138, 199 changed business of, 194–200 circulations strategy of, 56–57 click fraud on, 26, 74 and content producers, 189–92 as distribution deal, 104, 194, 199 efficiency of, 195 forecasts for, 25–26 functionality of, 16, 17, 41, 166, 168 image-based, 157–58 inevitability of the new, 5, 10, 12, 14, 15 life expectancy of, 194 lowered value of, 52, 81, 190 as news outlet, 33, 58 and profitability, 15, 49, 66 promotion as chief function of, 56–58 as reinvention of media business, 42, 168, 194 revenue sources of, 43 and sports, 181–88 digital media (cont.) stalled market of, 58 technology view of, 3, 11, 17, 43, 152–53, 166 traffic sought by, 14, 52, 59, 86 transitory nature of, 23, 194 unregulated, 138 and user satisfaction, 18 as video, 97–98, 109, 139, 157–59, 169 vs. traditional, 1–5, 14, 40, 190–91 as wasteland, 190 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 148 direct marketing, 55–56, 69–70, 86 Discovery Channel, 117 Disney, 60, 61, 102, 116, 117, 154, 185 dongle streaming device, 110, 111 dot-com crash, 65, 66, 134, 148 DoubleClick, 72 DSL, 133–34, 135 DVDs, 91–92, 111, 190 DVorkin, Lewis, 66–67 DVR, 83, 110, 146 entertainment businesses, 115, 142, 146, 168, 189–90, 192 ESPN, 95, 117, 120, 126, 127, 171, 184–85 Ethernet, 109 Everson, Carolyn, 40–41 Facebook, 86, 195 advertising on, 40–41, 161 and BuzzFeed, 59, 60, 102 News Feed, 33, 36–37, 157 rise of, 26, 117, 130–31 social strategy of, 52–53 and television, 157–62 as utility, 41, 42, 43 video on, 44, 158–62 FCC, 141–44, 174, 175 fiber optics, 135 Final Cut Pro, 62 Food Network, 21–22 Forbes, 57–58, 65–67, 161 Fox Broadcasting Company, 97 Fox Interactive Media, 20 Fox Network, 118, 120, 183, 185 Fox News Channel, 32, 35, 119 Freston, Tom, 62, 117, 126 Galloway, Scott, 99 Gannett, 116 Gawker media, 33, 193–97 generation gap, 13, 26 Godard, Jean-Luc, 31 Google, 42, 43, 52, 112 AdSense, 59 and Android, 102, 110 and digital vs. old media, 4, 40, 195 and DoubleClick, 72 income sources of, 26 and search engine wars, 15–16, 53 and sports, 181, 186 and traffic gaming, 59 and Yahoo, 16, 20 and YouTube, 1, 96, 147–49, 151–55, 158, 160 Google Chromecast, 110 Google News, 33 Greenfield, Richard, 96 Grey, Brad, 2 Guardian, The, 13 Hastings, Reed, 92–93, 98, 142, 187 HBO, 64, 95, 98, 100, 114, 117, 125, 126, 127, 130, 132, 171, 176, 177 Hearst, 61, 116, 117 Herzog, Doug, 2 Hirschhorn, Jason, 95 Hoffner, Jordon, 2 Holt, Dennis, 48 House of Cards, 94 Huffington, Arianna, 11–12, 34, 58–59 Huffington Post, The, 12, 18, 34, 58, 66, 189 Hughes, Chris, 196–97 Hulu, 5, 161 Icahn, Carl, 130, 132 information: bare minimum level of, 52 branding, 52 as currency, 32 personalized, 157, 158 real value of, 123 sources of, 52 surgical selection of, 51 too much, 35–36 transient nature of, 37 wanting to be free, 123, 124, 167, 189–90 intellectual property, 146–49, 194 Internet: bundling, 177–78 and cable, 125, 129, 130, 135 free, 123, 124, 139–41 moralistic intensity of, 191–92 “net neutrality,” 138–44 and OTT, 113 publishing, 65–66 and television, 91, 108, 111, 112, 139 two-speed, 143 and video, 26, 145, 159 Internet protocol (IP), 92, 94, 109, 110–11, 134 Jarvis, Jeff, 11 Jobs, Steve, 101–4, 105 Johansson, Scarlet, 2 journalists, technology, 10–11, 13 Kvamme, Mark, 2, 3 Kyncl, Robert, 96 Lauer, Matt, 21 Lerer, Ken, 11, 12, 58 Levinsohn, Ross, 20 licensing formats, 119–20, 126 LL Cool J, 2 Loeb, Dan, 19–20 magazines, 21, 56, 86, 104, 116 attention demands of, 71 CPMs, 52, 65, 66, 71–72, 73 production and distribution costs, 71 revenue sources, 48, 54, 115, 124 space limitations of, 72 Maker Studios, 154 Mann, Michael, 2 Martin, Laura, 175 Mayer, Marissa, 20–21 McCain, John, 174 McConaughey, Matthew, 2 McFee, Abigail, 27 McLuhan, Marshall, 107 media: advertising in, 18, 21, 52 and Apple, 101–3 audience for, 16–17, 40, 72 bundling/unbundling, 171–78 and consumer behavior, 12 content costs of, 165–67, 189 crossover executives in, 17, 20 deal-making in, 93 digital, see digital media disrupted paradigm of, 83 as entertainment, 31, 85 generation gap in, 13 hierarchical business of, 11 income sources for, 16 licensing and distribution, 104 low- vs. high-end, 85–88, 165, 187 and marketing, 64 mass, 39, 123, 195 as narrative, 31, 67 news outlets, 12, 18, 31–37 new world market for, 85 no-cost, 43 ownership trade-offs, 126–27 pirated, 146–49, 172 quest for new medium, 12 removing salesmen from, 76 and scarcity premium, 72, 76 and sports, 181–88 streaming media devices, 109–10 as television, 118, 121 traditional, value of, 4, 71 transformation of, 12–14 user-supported content, 127–28, 147–49, 190 as zero-sum game, 4, 23–24 media brand, 51 media business, 115–16 media buyer, 48 Microsoft, 16 Microsoft Xbox, 110 Milken, Michael, 11 Milner, Yuri, 43, 160 mobiles, 74, 102–3 Moonves, Les, 9–10, 12, 97, 131–32, 135–36 Morris, Kevin, 1–4 movies, 115, 123, 124, 146 MSN, 18, 33 MTV, 126, 130 Murdoch, Elisabeth, 119 Murdoch, James, 61, 119–20 Murdoch, Rupert, 103–4, 116–21 music industry, 1, 101–3, 146–47, 172, 173–74 Myspace, 20, 95, 117, 118 Napster, 146, 147 Nathanson, Michael, 25–26 NBC, 130, 132, 143, 160, 185 Netflix, 91–94, 97, 98–100, 139–40, 142–44, 155, 161, 169, 176, 177, 190 “net neutrality,” 138–44 Netscape, 39, 97 New Republic, The, 196–97 news: anchormen [-women] of, 35 as branding device, 59 declining value of, 34, 37, 168 economic triage of, 33 and elections, 59, 60 lower-cost, 32, 33, 35 media outlets for, 31–37, 58, 65 monetizing, 64 network, 35 as public good, 32 as reality, 31 repetitive, 33, 36 as storytelling, 31, 32 ubiquity of, 34 unprofitability of, 34, 35 and Vice, 63–64 News Corp, 20, 116, 117, 118 newspapers: attention demands of, 71 classified ads, 69, 115 consolidation of, 116 digital replacement of, 24–25, 167 entertainment supplements, 34 income sources of, 69, 124 local retailers publicized in, 115 nineteenth-century, 123 personalized, 33, 36–37 production and distribution costs, 71 space limitations of, 72 Web similarity to, 18, 33, 189 New Yorker, 94–100 New York magazine, 47, 48, 53, 61 New York Times, The, 12–13, 27, 35, 63, 73, 78, 165, 166 Nickelodeon, 95, 130 Nintendo Wii, 110 Oliver, John, 141 OTT (over-the-top) content venues, 84, 94, 100, 108, 109, 111–14, 130, 161, 175, 176–77 Outbrain, 53, 197 Paley, William, 160 Paramount Pictures, 2 Peretti, Jonah, 53, 58–59 pirated media, 146–49, 172 Pittman, Bob, 126 platform function, 93, 158, 161 Politico, 189 portal wars, 15 POTS (plain old telephone service), 135 programmatic buying, 73 publishing: business of, 55, 56, 115 Internet, 65–66 print, 66, 172 radio, 115, 116, 124 Redstone, Sumner, 121, 126, 147 Reilly, Kevin, 2 ReplayTV, 83 Roberts, Brian, 10 Rodman, Dennis, 64 Rogers Communications, 65 Roku, 109, 113 Rubicon Project, 75 Rutledge, Tom, 113 Saffo, Paul, 96–97 Sandberg, Sheryl, Lean In, 41 Scripps Networks, 21–22 search engine optimization (SEO), 51–53, 73 search engine wars, 15–16, 51, 53 Sears, Jay, 75–76, 80 Semel, Terry, 17 Sequoia Capital, 2 Showtime, 98, 177 60 Minutes, 64 smart phones, 105–6, 110, 111 smart TVs, 111, 113 Smith, Ben, 23 Smith, Shane, 62, 63–65 Snyder, Gabriel, 197 social media, 56–57, 62, 73, 158 Sony PlayStation, 110 Sorrell, Martin, 61, 99 South Park, 64 Spacey, Kevin, 94 sports events, 85, 181–88 Starz, 92, 93 Stewart, Adam, 2 Stone, Matt, 2, 4, 5 storytelling, 16, 31–32, 152, 190, 191, 199 Super Bowl, 23, 85 Supreme Court, U.S., 112 Swisher, Kara, 11 tablets, 103–6, 111 TCV, 61, 63 telephone companies (telcos), 135, 140–41, 177 television: advertising on, 24, 25, 40, 70, 79–80, 83–84, 99–100, 115, 119, 125, 129 anti-television views, 39–40 attention demands of, 71 as box, 107–8, 111, 113–14 broadcast, 108, 112, 132, 168 and bundling/unbundling, 173–75 cable networks, 95–96, 99–100, 109, 119, 124–25, 131–32, 139, 172, 184 comparisons with, 39, 167, 191–92, 197–98 and computers, 105, 108, 110, 111 deadwood on, 19 digital’s perceived threat to, 23, 25–27, 42–43 as distribution channel, 28, 94 entertainment, 111, 114, 190 evolution of, 190, 197–99 expanding, 94–96, 99–100, 107, 111–12, 120, 124, 132 and Facebook, 157–62 and family values, 191 free, 123 geographical organization of, 92 golden age of, 172 government regulation of, 137–38, 175 HDMI port, 110 income sources of, 24, 25, 28, 85, 93, 96, 99–100, 115, 117 and Internet, 91, 108, 111, 112, 139 licensing deals, 93, 97, 112, 126 as model, 21, 28, 58, 59, 64–65, 99–100, 114, 118, 168, 198 and Netflix, 91, 93–94 networks, 47, 64, 80, 131 pay for, 113, 124–28 prime time, 79–81, 96 profitability of, 4, 24 programming schedule, 83, 114, 128 ratings wars, 183 reality, 111–12, 191 as reborn industry, 96, 132, 191–92, 199 share price multiple, 40 smart TVs, 111, 113 and sports, 181–88 steady, old-fashioned nature of, 9–10, 24, 27 and storytelling, 16, 190, 191, 199 syndication, 96, 176 undifferentiated inventory supply, 79 value of, 85, 121, 198–99 and video, 96–97, 98, 108–9, 141–42, 145–46, 152–55, 158, 165–69 Thompson, Scott, 19 Time Inc., 159 Time Warner, 11, 61, 64–65, 116, 117, 119–21, 126, 130, 132, 159 Time Warner Cable (TWC), 120, 130, 135–36, 143, 185 TiVo, 83, 110 traffic: aggregation methods, 18–19, 50–51, 59, 66, 190, 195–96 audience as, 18–19, 49–53 exchanges of, 53 pumping, 73 traffic arbitrage, 52, 66 traffic loop aggregators, 73 transcendence, 42 transformation: inevitability of, 10, 12–13 print to digital, 65–67 as shell game, 66 Tribune, 116 True/Slant, 66–67 Turner, Ted, 126, 127 Turner Broadcasting, 117, 126, 127, 130, 132 21st Century Fox, 61, 118–21, 126 Twitter, 26, 33 unbundling, 171–78 utilities, 41–42 Verizon FiOS, 97, 135, 177 Viacom, 3, 116, 117, 118, 121, 126, 129, 130, 131, 147–49, 152 Vice, 57–58, 61–65, 67 video: ads on, 63, 158, 167 amateur (cheap), 167 and BuzzFeed.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 24 Mar 2020

In the last forty years, the opposite has occurred: The middle class has shrunk, democracy is too often malfunctioning, and the nation has turned its back on climate change, poverty, widening inequality, and the evils of racism and xenophobia. As I’ve said, the economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game in which winners do better only to the extent losers do worse. But power is necessarily a zero-sum game. Certain people possess it only to the extent other people don’t. Some people gain it only when others lose it. The connection between the economy and power is critical. As power has concentrated in the hands of a few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains for themselves.

…

All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else. As I will show, the average American now has no effect on public policy. Big corporations, CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have more influence than any comparable group since the robber barons. Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it there is at the top, the less there is anywhere else. This power shift is related to a tsunami of big money into politics. In the election cycle of 2016, the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans—24,949 extraordinarily wealthy people—accounted for a record-breaking 40 percent of all campaign contributions.

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne
Published 20 Jan 2014

And so strategy, as is commonly practiced, tees off with industry analysis—think five forces or its distant precursor SWOT analysis—where strategy is about matching a company’s strengths and weaknesses to the opportunities and threats present in the existing industry. Here strategy perforce becomes a zero-sum game where one company’s gain is another company’s loss, as firms are bound by existing market space. Blue ocean strategy, by contrast, shows how strategy can shape structure in an organization’s favor to create new market space. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.

…

Buyers prove that as they trade across alternative industries, refusing to see or be constrained by the cognitive boundaries industries impose upon themselves. And firms prove that as they invent and reinvent industries, collapsing, altering, and going beyond existing market boundaries to create all new demand. In this way, strategy moves from a zero-sum to a non-zero-sum game, and even an unattractive industry can be made attractive by companies’ conscious efforts. Which is to say a red ocean need not stay red. This brings us to a third point of distinction. Strategic creativity can be unlocked systematically. Ever since Schumpeter’s vision of the lone and creative entrepreneur, innovation and creativity have been essentially viewed as a black box, unknowable and random.3 Not surprisingly, with innovation and creativity viewed as such, the field of strategy predominantly focused on how to compete in established markets, creating an arsenal of analytic tools and frameworks to skillfully achieve this.

…

Taking market structure as given, it drives companies to try to carve out a defensible position against the competition in the existing market space. To sustain themselves in the marketplace, practitioners of strategy focus on building advantages over the competition, usually by assessing what competitors do and striving to do it better. Here, grabbing a bigger share of the market is seen as a zero-sum game in which one company’s gain is achieved at another company’s loss. Hence, competition, the supply side of the equation, becomes the defining variable of strategy. Such strategic thinking leads firms to divide industries into attractive and unattractive ones and to decide accordingly whether or not to enter.

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto
by Mark Helprin
Published 19 Apr 2009

Intellectual works are abstract concepts and do not naturally operate as zero sum [sic] games.”91 This business about zero-sum games is repeated as gospel in the documents of the anti-copyright movement, notably in the Lessig (“Wow!…I would have focused the attack in much the same way”92) wiki.93 Of course, property does not “operate” as a game or anything else, and intellectual works are not “concepts,” but that is beside the point. This off-kilter allusion fails to recognize the very nature of replicability that it is intended to address. According to the logic presented, if Arthur Miller opened Death of a Salesman on Broadway, because it is not physical property and not a “zero-sum game,” I could therefore justifiably rent a theater across the street and put on Death of a Salesman, charging less, because I would not have had to go through the trouble of writing it.

…

That this book was written in sight of Monticello makes honoring Jefferson by separating him from false claimants especially gratifying. The chapter also deals with some of the peculiar “microeconomic” arguments the opponents of copyright present, such as that copyright is a monopoly, a tax, and a gratuitous imposition upon a non-zero-sum game, all of which make it an inhibition to art. A machine that can print books individually, on demand, quickly, and at little cost is actually at work now. “The Espresso Book Machine,” Chapter four, considers the evolution of the technology that has given rise to the movement against copyright, and how the forces and capabilities that ushered-in the battle can almost effortlessly usher it out and make it moot.

…

In the same vein, nothing would be amiss were the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to sleep with Queen Victoria, because Prince Albert’s enjoyment would not be lessened—and, indeed in some quarters might conceivably be heightened—for the same reason that sexual pleasure, abstract in nature and wholly within the mind, is not a zero-sum game. The inapplicability of this strain of game theory to the notion it supposedly clarifies or impeaches is stunning. Let us say someone opens a golf course. Some people pay to use it. Others sneak on to it without paying. What these solons are saying is that because the nonpayers don’t spoil the enjoyment of those who do pay, no harm results.

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling
by Adam Kucharski
Published 23 Feb 2016

Von Neumann called it the “minimax” problem and wanted to prove that both players could find an optimal strategy in this tug-of-war. To do this, he needed to show that each player could always find a way to minimize the maximum amount that could potentially be lost, regardless of what their opponent did. One of the most prominent examples of a zero-sum game with two players is a soccer penalty. This ends either in a goal, with the kicker winning and the goalkeeper losing, or a miss, in which case the payoffs are reversed. Keepers have very little time to react after a penalty is taken, so generally make their decision about which way to dive before the kicker strikes the ball.

…

While the fiery debate between von Neumann and Fréchet sparked and crackled, John Nash was busy finishing his doctorate at Princeton. By establishing the Nash equilibrium, he had managed to extend von Neumann’s work, making it applicable to a wider number of situations. Whereas von Neumann had looked at zero-sum games with two players, Nash showed that optimal strategies exist even if there are multiple players and uneven payoffs. But knowing perfect strategies always exist is just the start for poker players. The next problem is working out how to find them. MOST PEOPLE WHO HAVE a go at creating poker bots don’t rummage through game theory to find optimal strategies.

…

J., 47–48 Metropolis, Nicholas, 61, 63–64, 168–169, 180 Mezrich, Ben, 214 Michigan Lottery, 30 Midas algorithm, 87, 88, 89 Milgram, Stanley, 13 Miller, George, 179 Millman, Chad, 102 mind-set, 209 minimax approach, 145, 147–148, 155 minor sports, benefit of focusing on, 107 MIT gambling course, 213–214 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, 85, 105, 107 mixed strategies, 142–143, 147 Monte Carlo fallacy, 6, 200 Monte Carlo method, 61–62, 63, 64, 83, 178–179, 217 Morgenstern, Oskar, 139, 150, 181–182 mortgage loan crisis, 96–97 multiple regression, 49 Munchkin, Richard, 72, 214 Nadal, Rafael, 110 NASCAR, 107 Nash, John, 137, 148–149, 158 Nash equilibrium, 137–138, 148–149, 151, 154, 160, 161, 181, 183, 184, 185, 187 National Academy of Sciences, 133 Nature (journal), 48, 49, 51 NBA, 85 near-equilibrium strategies, 152–153, 153–154 neural networks, 173–174 new data, testing strategies against, 53, 54 New England Patriots, 88 new games, advantages in, 72–73 New York Stock Exchange, 117 New York Times (newspaper), 101, 172, 177, 178, 180 New Yorker (magazine), 143 newsfeeds, 120, 122, 133–134 NFL, 103, 209 NHL, 85, 205 no-limit poker, 189, 195 “nonlinear” trajectory, 12 Oakland A’s, 209 Occam’s razor, 53 Oller, Joseph, 44 online betting, 90 online blackjack, 71–73 online gambling, advantages of, 72–73, 90, 107, 132 online poker sites, 192–193, 194, 195, 198, 200 online security, 195 Onside Analysis, 78, 105 opponent modeling, 163, 181, 184, 187 optimal strategies in bankroll management, 65–67 in blackjack, 36–37, 40, 72 in checkers, 158 in chess, 161, 202 in get-so-many-in-a row-style games, 158–159 in poker, 143–144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 160, 161, 177, 181, 184, 188, 208 in rock-paper-scissors, 143, 178, 180 in soccer, 146, 147 and stock/financial markets, 161 See also game theory; perfect strategies “Optimum Strategy in Blackjack, The” (Baldwin, Cantey, Maisel, and McDermott), 37 order-routing algorithms, 115 Osipau, Andrei, 72 overestimating, 98 overlays bias, 56 oversimplification, 212 Packard, Norman, 14, 20, 120 Palacios-Heurta, Ignacio, 146, 147 panic, 99, 133 pari-mutuel betting system, 43–45, 66, 114 Pascal, Blaise, 10 Pasteur, Louis, 202 patience and ingenuity, 218 PDO statistic, 205 Pearson, Karl, 4–7, 15, 24, 46–47, 48–49, 54, 61, 217 Pentagon, 92 perfect bet, story of the, 218 perfect strategies, 37, 53, 146, 149, 154, 159, 160, 168, 187 See also optimal strategies performance measurement, 85, 102–105, 208–209 physical bias, 7, 8, 21 Picasso, Pablo, 209–210 Pinnacle Sports, 91–92, 93 Poincare, Henri, 2–3, 8–9, 9–10, 11, 12, 21, 22, 40, 41, 46, 62, 63, 127, 217 Poisson, Siméon, 75 Poisson process, 75–76, 78 poker abstractions and, 212 analysis of the endgame in, 143 applying game theory to, 141, 148, 181, 183 bankroll management in, 144–145 basic options in, 138–139, 142 behaviors in, 191–192 coalitions in, 181–183 combined approach to, 208 heads-up, 172, 186, 188, 195 incomplete information in, 168 in Internet chat rooms, 142 as less vulnerable to brute force methods, 171 limited-stakes, 172, 177, 185, 187, 189 luck versus skill in, 198–200, 201, 215 more options in, complexity of, 142 near-equilibrium strategy for, 152–153, 153–154 no-limit, 189, 195 optimal strategy in, 143–144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 160, 161, 177, 181, 184, 188, 208 potential for errors in, 160 prediction in, 163 randomness in, 152, 156 robot players in, 135–136, 149–150, 151, 153, 154, 161, 163, 167–168, 172, 173, 175, 176–177, 182, 184, 185–189, 190, 192–196, 212, 217 scientific idea inspired by, 217 Texas hold’em, 140–141, 151–152, 172, 177, 185–186, 187–188 university course studying, 214–215 well-known research into, 169 World Series, 140–141 as a zero-sum game, 145, 181 poker boom, 198 poker face, optimal, 192 poker industry, 198 poker websites. See online poker sites Polaris poker bot, 185–186 Polaris 2.0, 186–187 policy analysis market, 92 Poots, Brendan, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104 popularity, randomness of, 203–204 populations, 125–129 Power Peg program, 118 Powerball, 29 predator-prey relationships, 129–130 Prediction Company, 120, 131 predictions baseball and, 87, 88 basketball and, 82, 85–86 blackjack and, 40, 42 bookmakers and, 91–92, 93 checkers and, 156, 157 comparing, against new data, 53, 54 computerized, 2, 13, 14, 15–20, 22, 46, 51, 61, 68, 80–82, 87, 88, 89–90, 97, 105, 156, 157, 217 degree of ignorance and, 3, 8 external disruptions as a factor in, 19–20 focus in making, 205–206 football and, 79, 82, 87, 88 golf and, 84–85 horse racing and, 46, 49–50, 51–54, 55–58, 64, 68, 69, 74, 206, 207, 216, 218 hydrogen bomb building and, 59, 61 opponent behavior and the need for, 163 poker and, 163 problem with explaining, 206–207 roulette and, 2, 3–4, 5–8, 10–11, 12–13, 14, 15–20, 21–22, 124, 127, 162, 210–211, 218 soccer and, 73–79, 82, 86, 90, 97–98, 98–99, 218 weather and, 9, 13, 53 of worst-case scenarios, 74 Preis, Tobias, 96 Premium Bonds, 204 Priomha Capital, 97, 99, 100, 101 prisoner’s dilemma, 137–138, 160 probability basic, successful strategies go beyond, 208 in blackjack, 36 of default on a home loan, 96 different conclusions about, 212 of ecosystem survival, 128 in horse racing, 45, 46, 51, 56–57, 58, 66, 206, 207 in lotteries, 32, 98 in poker, 138, 152, 171, 208 in rock-paper-scissors, 143 in roulette, 6, 17–18, 98 in soccer, 75, 146, 147, 209 in solitaire, 60 weighing against, 216 probability theory, 73, 132, 216–217 professional sports bettors, 102 proof by contradiction, 158–159 pseudorandom numbers, 61 psychological bias, 6, 98 psychology, 171, 177, 189, 208 pure strategies, 142, 143, 147, 152 qualitative information, 105 quality measurement, 50–51, 74 quantitative information, 105 raising, 143 Random Strategies Investments, LLC, 30 randomness as an abstraction, 210–211, 212 in basketball, 85 in blackjack, 38, 40, 41, 42, 71, 212 in chess, 168, 176, 202 in coin tosses, 199 collecting data on, 4–8 controlled, 25–26, 28 in ecosystems, 128, 129 generating, in game moves, 179 in golf, 84 and the infinite monkey theorem, 156–157 logistic map and, 126 Monte Carlo method and, 61 nonrandom patterns in, 178–179 in poker, 152, 156 of popularity, 203–204 in rock-paper-scissors, 143, 178, 181 in roulette, 2, 3–4, 5–8, 9, 10–11, 12–13, 15–20, 21–22, 38, 162, 178–179, 202, 212 and uniform distribution, 41 rationality, 123–124, 160 reality, model of, 211, 212 rebates, 69 recruitment teams, 73 regression analysis, 47–49, 50, 52, 79, 106, 206 regression to mediocrity, 47, 48–49, 205 regression to the mean, 106 regret minimization, 152–154, 187–188 regulation, 91, 101, 133 Reinhart, Vincent, 133 Retail Liquidity Program, 117 risk, 32, 36, 65, 66, 78, 95, 96, 99, 102, 120, 133, 144–145, 153, 156, 171, 184, 216 Ritz Club, 1–2, 20, 21 Robinson, Michael, 97–98 robots (bots) and the ability to learn, 151, 161, 163, 173, 174, 176, 177, 187, 188, 190, 217 in backgammon, 172–173 betting exchanges and, 112–113, 116–117 as bookmakers, 130 in checkers, 155–156, 157–158, 159–160, 167, 168, 190 in chess, 166, 167, 168, 171, 176, 189, 190 cognitive, other useful applications for, 166, 188 different types of, 129–130 faulty, 116–117, 118, 119, 120 in horse racing, 115–117 hybrid, 184 in Jeopardy!

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

Some behaviours of the highly skilled need to be curbed because they are predatory: the ability to win a ‘tournament’ can bring huge private gains at the expense of those who lose. Too many of our most talented people devote their abilities to such zero-sum games, while activities such as innovation, with large benefits for the entire society, are drained of talent. The sectors most prone to zero-sum games should be taxed more heavily than those in which little of the benefit accrues to those working in them. Narrowing the global divide between the rich societies of the world and those still stuck in poverty demands more than a big heart.

…

Most strikingly, ‘patriotism’ gets these favourable responses across all age groups, and across people clustered into their otherwise disquietingly divergent political and social preferences. Patriotism is also sharply distinguished from nationalism in how nations behave towards each other. The discourse used by nationalists, bragging about putting their country ‘first’, portrays international relations as a zero-sum game in which the winner is the one that is the most inflexible. Patriotism, as exemplified by President Macron, promotes a discourse of co-operation for mutual benefit. He is quite explicitly seeking to build new reciprocal commitments within Europe on economic matters, within NATO on the security of the Sahel, and globally on climate change.

…

This seems unlikely: would we really notice that much difference, were our financial sectors leaner? What is true of asset managers is true of lawyers. Willem Buiter, former Chief Economist for Citigroup, puts it aptly: the first third of lawyers produce the immense social value we know as the ‘rule of law’. The next third are working on legal disputes that are essentially zero-sum games: each side over-invests in winning the tournament and so they are socially useless. The rule of law is a huge public good, but no commercial lawyers are working to achieve ‘justice’; they work to win a case in a tournament. The last hour of such legal effort purchased by a party to a legal dispute yields its return not by generating more justice, but by increasing the chances of winning the tournament at the expense of the other party.

Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson
Published 28 Mar 2012

This conclusion has profound but mathematically elusive consequences; many complexities of nature, not to mention of economics or politics, can be treated formally as games. A substantial section of the 625-page book is devoted to showing how seemingly intractable situations can be rendered solvable through the assumption of coalitions among the players, and how non-zero-sum games can be reduced to zero-sum games by including a fictitious, impartial player (sometimes called Nature) in the game. Game theory was applied to fields ranging from nuclear deterrence to evolutionary biology. “The initial reaction of the economists to this work was one of great reserve, but the military scientists were quick to sense its possibilities in their field,” wrote J.

…

Having suffered the first of a series of misfortunes that would follow him through life, Ampère saw games of chance as “certain ruin” to those who played indefinitely or indiscriminately against multiple opponents, “who must then be considered as a single opponent whose fortune is infinite.”4 He observed that a zero-sum game (where one player’s loss equals the other players’ gain) will always favor the wealthier player, who has the advantage of being able to stay longer in the game. Von Neumann’s initial contribution to the theory of games, extending the work of Émile Borel, was published in 1928. Where Ampère saw chance as holding the upper hand, von Neumann sought to make the best of fate by determining the optimum strategy for any game.

…

“The average daily transactions in the London Bankers’ Clearing House amount to about twenty millions of pounds sterling, which if paid in gold coin would weigh about 157 tons,” reported Stanley Jevons in 1896.46 John von Neumann, although halted in midstream, was working toward a theory of the economy of mind. In the universe according to von Neumann, life and nature are playing a zero-sum game. Physics is the rules. Economics—which von Neumann perceived as closely related to thermodynamics—is the study of how organisms and organizations develop strategies that increase their chances for reward. Von Neumann and Morgenstern showed that the formation of coalitions holds the key, a conclusion to which all observed evidence, including Nils Barricelli’s experiments with numerical symbioorganisms, lends support.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

And his preferred form of regulation will have an absolute character: an uncompromising ‘no’, in the face of his opponent’s ‘yes and no’. He is playing a zero-sum game; if he wins, his opponent loses, and compromise is out of the question. The example points to a contrast that has been of considerable significance in environmental disputes. Local conflicts – for example, between polluting factories and those living downwind of them, between loggers and hunters, between weekenders and farmers – can often be resolved by discussion. But they will never be resolved if the parties believe themselves to be involved in a zero-sum game. They will be resolved by negotiation and compromise, and a shared willingness to give way for the sake of good relations.

…

Conservatives tend to see the campaigning NGOs like Greenpeace and Earth First! not merely as institutions without internal equilibrium, but also as threats to the equilibrium of others, on account of their desire to pin on the big actors blame that should in fact be distributed across us all. And by casting the conflict in the form of a zero-sum game between themselves and the enemy, they obscure what it is really about, which is the accountability of both. It seems to me that the dominance of international decision-making by unaccountable bureaucracies, unaccountable NGOs and multinational corporations accountable only to their shareholders (who may have no attachment to the environment that the corporations threaten) has made it more than ever necessary for us to follow the conservative path.

…

The Sierra Club, for example, which opposes all commercial logging in the national forests of America, could never have reached the agreement thrashed out in the Quincy Library, which finally ended the conflict between loggers, residents, farmers and environmentalists over a 2-million-acre patch. For this solution was a compromise, which allowed all parties to have some part of what they wanted.131 Likewise the conflict between hunt-followers and the big animal rights NGOs in Britain was a zero-sum game, pursued to the end through Parliament, when it was obvious to most reasonable observers that the matter concerned local communities who should have sat down together and worked out a compromise acceptable to all. In the next chapter I return to this point, since it is so important in understanding the contours of a viable conservative policy.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

This is the prisoner’s dilemma, one of the most famous examples in game theory. It is an example of a non-zero-sum game, where the actions of each player could make their combined situation better without taking from each other. Zero-sum games are different in that the gains from one person or group must equal the losses from another. An example of that is a cake being shared by ten people. If one person takes a bigger piece of the cake, the remaining nine all have equally smaller shares. The balance of trade in the world discussed in chapter 1 is another example of a zero-sum game in that if you combine all countries’ trade surpluses and deficits, the world’s trade balance must equal zero.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century
by George Gilder
Published 30 Apr 1981

It is not the enlargement of incentives and rewards that generates growth and progress, profits for the entrepreneur and revenues for the government, but the expansion of information and knowledge. The competitive pursuit of knowledge is not a dog-eat-dog Darwinian struggle. In capitalism, the winners do not eat the losers but teach them how to win through the spread of information. Far from a zero-sum game, where the successes of some come at the expense of others, free economies climb spirals of mutual gain and learning. Far from a system of greed, capitalism depends on a golden rule of enterprise: The good fortune of others is also your own. Applying to both domestic and international trade and commerce, this golden rule is the moral center of the system.

…

This mode of thinking, prominent in foundation-funded reports, bestselling economics texts, newspaper columns, and political platforms, is harmless enough on the surface. But its deeper effect is to challenge the golden rule of capitalism, to pervert the relation between rich and poor, and to depict the system as “a zero-sum game” in which every gain for someone implies a loss for someone else, and wealth is seen once again to create poverty. As Kristol said, a free society in which the distributions are widely seen as unfair cannot long survive. The distributionist mentality thus strikes at the living heart of democratic capitalism.

…

This is the secret not only of riches but also of growth. This is also the essential insight of supply-side economics. Government cannot significantly affect real aggregate demand through policies of taxing and spending—taking money from one man and giving it to another, whether in government or out. All this shifting of wealth is a zero-sum game and the net effect on incomes is usually zero, or even negative. Even a tax cut does not work by a direct impact on total disposable incomes, since every dollar of resulting deficit must be financed by a dollar of government debt, paid by the purchaser of federal securities out of his own disposable income.

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City
by Jack Brown
Published 14 Jul 2021

In between, both London and the UK had declined economically.68 It has been argued that London’s dominance of the national economy tends to increase in periods of globalisation, and these also tend to be periods in which the entire national economy does well in comparison to other nations or historical trends.69 This appears to be true. However, the idea that economic growth is a zero-sum game, with London required to ‘lose’ for others to gain, or that growth in London has a direct and inverse effect on growth in the rest of the country, has much less of a clear basis.70 While the nature of the national (and global) economy has changed over hundreds of years, the highly centralised nature of the UK’s political system has not.

…

And ‘your GDP’ is actually ‘our GDP’: even when generated in London, the benefits are shared across the nation, paying for hospitals, schools, potholes, and bin collections across the country. As Mattinson also observed, some feel that London must lose so that they can gain. This is understandable, but it is also untrue. Regional growth is not a zero-sum game. Damaging London’s economy would hinder, not help, the nation as a whole. Hence the carefully worded phrase ‘levelling up’ – which, as Mattinson also found, is something that people in ‘red wall’ seats say they will believe when they see.21 The ‘fair share’ arguments still stand, though. In October 2020, two-fifths of residents in so-called ‘left behind’ places across the country felt they were getting ‘less than their fair share’ of resources; just 4 per cent felt they got more.22 Contrast this with the one-third of Londoners who agreed with the latter statement.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jan 2008

In game theory von Neumann had crafted a tool that promised to analyze both poker and war. Yet rhetorically pleasing as the analogy is—and delighted as the RAND strategists were with game theory—analytically poker and war had very little in common. Poker is a zero-sum game: One player’s loss is another’s gain. It is also a game with well-defined rules. War is neither well defined nor a zero-sum game. (Nor is life. Von Neumann was too quick to draw the parallel between life and poker.) It is much more desirable to avoid war altogether than to fight a destructive war that does not change the balance of power, so while war is certainly a conflict of interests, there is nothing zero-sum about it.

…

If you’re confused, you’re beginning to appreciate the difficulties of von Neumann’s creation. Fundamental to von Neumann’s approach was the assumption that both players were as clever as von Neumann himself. He wanted to understand what infallible play looked like, and his answer can, in principle, be applied to any two-player “zero-sum” game, including poker, where one player’s loss is the other player’s gain. But in practice, there are two problems. The first is that the game may be so complex that even the fastest computer could not calculate the perfect strategy. The poker model is a perfect illustration of why game theory began to feel like such a disappointment in the real world.

…

Thomas Schelling was just one of many cold war intellectuals at RAND, the air force’s research arm, using von Neumann’s game theory to dissect the possibilities of an event nobody had yet experienced: thermonuclear war. Applying a theory of poker to try to understand the project of mutual annihilation may seem unhinged, but that is exactly what von Neumann and his disciples did. The theory of zero-sum games wasn’t up to the job, as we’ll shortly see. But how else to develop nuclear strategy? Practicing was not an option, while history, fortunately, could provide no exact parallels. Von Neumann demanded an aggressive approach. Coincidentally or not, his mathematical analysis backed his instinctive hatred of the Soviet Union, the occupier of his native Hungary.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

From a more economic perspective, the bias against charging interest is perfectly logical if you bear in mind the context. The mindset stems not so much from a failure to grasp the time value of money as from the nature of a world where minimal or non-existent growth in per capita income was the norm. As the earlier quotation from Aristotle’s Politics implied, without growth, trade struck people as a zero-sum game where it was felt that one man’s profit could only be earned at the cost of inflicting loss on another man. The moral basis of trade thus appeared dubious, while usury, or making money out of money, was still worse. Even the Jews were constrained by their religion in lending to each other at interest, while being permitted to lend to non-Jews.

…

Maddison’s work is an extraordinary statistical marathon. While some economists quibble about his methodology, few doubt that the broad picture is correct.14 The move towards a capitalist market economy that had started in the late medieval period thus became truly transformational. Economic activity was no longer perceived as a zero-sum game in which one man’s profit was another’s loss and thus morally questionable. It became easier to make great fortunes from industry and commerce than from the land, even if many landed aristocrats in Europe showed a remarkable tenacity in hanging on to their inherited assets. Wealth became increasingly intangible and the rich were rarely powerful in the military sense.

…

His full name, imposed on him by a strongly puritan father, was Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon.30 Yet little in his life appears to have been guided by religious principle. He was an early advocate of free markets and a critic of the mercantilists. They were the folk who believed that trade was a zero-sum game and that the way to enhance the prosperity and strength of a country was to boost exports and restrain imports in order to accumulate reserves of gold. His economic writings, of which A Discourse of Trade was the most important, were admired by Keynes, Schumpeter and Marx. He was also a pioneer of fire insurance after the Great Fire of London in 1666 and helped found England’s first mortgage bank.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

In Japan, people know how to cooperate with each other. . . . We seem to think we need to fight each other in a zero-sum game. But trade is not a zero-sum game.” Then he got to the point. “In Japan, there was a Tokugawa-period [1603–1868] philosopher who talked about trade. He was named, as it happened, with part of Satoshi’s name. He was called Nakomoto. He was in favor of an open Japan. He wrote how if Japan was to grow great, it needed to stay open to the West. Trade is not a zero-sum game. We in the bitcoin movement need to remember Nakomoto’s lesson today.” According to Vaughn-Perling, Wright introduced himself as Satoshi Nakomoto years before the release of bitcoin.

…

Renaissance’s improvement in market efficiency is small compared to the yield. As a result, too much American capital is migrating to Siren Servers and shunning “Zero to One” creative investments. Computerized index funds that “buy the market” thrive while IPOs languish. No net wealth is created, but money is arbitrarily siphoned off and redistributed in a zero-sum game. I pointed out that Renaissance’s “neutral” approach benefited from the counterproductive futility of insider-trading rules and fair disclosure requirements, which hobble rivals who are using their human brains in real time. Mercer disarmingly agreed. By remaining obtusely obsessed with the usually innocuous edge gained by people who laboriously investigate inside of companies, the Securities and Exchange Commission has driven the vast bulk of trading to purely algorithmic forms.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

The human cost of Amazon’s singular vision of commerce’s digital future does not come from some sadistic desire of Jeff Bezos to inflict pain on workers, suppliers, and others for his own pleasure. It is, rather, the necessary consequence of his libertarian worldview and the particular form of digital capitalism it justifies, which is that commerce is a zero-sum game. In that game there are either winners or losers. There is no sharing. No compromise. No middle ground. Everything Amazon does, from click to delivery, positions it to end up on the winning side, whatever the cost. The alternative this presents to anyone wishing to do commerce online—be it an individual entrepreneur looking to sell a product, an established retail store, like Surf Ontario, trying to diversify its customer base, or a large global brand like Nike—is pretty stark.

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Where consumers can access all the convenience, selection, and choice they need but also enjoy the benefits that real stores and restaurants bring to our communities, complete with the physical, human interactions and joys that we missed when we were forced to shop online. What if we can create alternatives to Amazon and revive the original promise of e-commerce, which was a win-win situation rather than a zero-sum game? Local and global. Clicks and bricks. What if digital technology could actually support the stores and restaurants that form the backbone of analog commerce rather than try to run them out of business? My pandemic experience began just weeks before my latest book, The Soul of an Entrepreneur, was supposed to come out.

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Computers and the internet were designed as democratizing tools, placing the same powers in the hands of small businesses as held by large corporations. Digital commerce was supposed to allow anyone to sell anything and compete on a level playing field. But as markets consolidated and companies like Amazon, Uber, and Grubhub pursued a zero-sum game of commerce, the scales tipped, and analog became subservient to digital. By putting the digital tools and even ownership of the software platform itself back in the hands of those small stores and restaurants, companies like Loco.Coop and Captain were restoring some of that balance and showing a potentially different future.

The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions
by Victor Haghani and James White
Published 27 Aug 2023

Returning to our coin‐flip experiment, our optimism that this book can do good stems in part from the fact that once we explained a more sensible sizing strategy to the participants, they took that on board and would mostly have reached the maximum payout if given another chance to play. If people are exposed to a good framework, they will often readily understand and embrace it. Making better decisions is not a zero‐sum game. Sound financial decision‐making, consistent with your individual preferences, will not only increase your and your family's expected happiness, but will dramatically increase the welfare of our entire society. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. —Benjamin Franklin Notes a.

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A society that is less risk‐averse will enjoy higher expected economic growth, but at the cost of higher risk in that growth.2 As with the individual, so with a collection of individuals: in general we cannot say whether we're better off when we have more growth and more risk. With regard to the second part of the question, greater dispersion in risk‐aversion among individuals will generally lead to greater expected inequality of wealth and income. Many people think that's a negative. However, economic activity is far from being a zero‐sum game, and the lower risk‐aversion of some individuals can have positive side effects—“externalities” in economic‐speak—on other members of society through their more aggressive risk‐taking in developing new technologies. It is also believed that dispersion in individual risk‐aversion can lead to greater market instability.

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It is remarkable that the notional dollar volume of daily trading in options on single stocks, running at close to $400 billion per day in early 2022, is close to—and sometimes higher than—the daily volume of trading in the underlying shares themselves. However, we are skeptical that, from a purely financial perspective, ignoring the potential “YOLO” (You Only Live Once!) value of speculation, this activity improves individual investors' welfare. When investors trade in options on a single stock, they are likely engaging in two zero‐sum games at once—or more likely two negative‐sum games after trading costs, uncompensated risk, and information asymmetries.n Options markets are perhaps more markedly zero‐sum in that every buyer of an option must find a counterparty willing to short that option contract. This likely requires stronger conviction than convincing a counterparty to underweight a particular stock versus its index weight.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

The games of life sometimes leave rational actors no choice but to do things that make themselves and everyone else worse off; to be random, arbitrary, or out of control; to cultivate sympathies and nurse grievances; to willingly submit to penalties and punishments; and sometimes, to refuse to play at all. Game theory unveils the strange rationality beneath many of the perversities of social and political life, and as we will see in a later chapter, it helps explain the central mystery of this book: how a rational species can be so irrational. A Zero-Sum Game: Scissors-Paper-Rock The quintessential game-theoretic dilemma, which lays bare how the payoff of a choice depends on the other guy’s choice, is the game of Scissors-Paper-Rock.3 Two players simultaneously display a hand gesture—two fingers for scissors, flat for paper, clenched for rock—and the winner is determined by the rule “Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock blunts scissors.”

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The game can be displayed as a matrix in which the possible choices of the first player, Amanda, are shown as rows, the choices of the second, Brad, are shown as columns, and the payoffs are written in each cell, Amanda’s in the lower left corner, Brad’s in the upper right. Let’s give numerical values to the outcomes: 1 for a win, –1 for a loss, 0 for a tie. Amanda’s payoffs and Brad’s payoffs sum to 0 in every cell, giving us a technical term that has crossed over from game theory into everyday life: the zero-sum game. Amanda’s gain is Brad’s loss, and vice versa. They’re locked in a state of pure conflict, fighting over a fixed pie. Which move (row) should Amanda choose? The crucial technique in game theory (and indeed in life) is to see the world from the other player’s point of view. Amanda must examine Brad’s choices, the columns, one at a time.

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Even when a move is not literally picked at random (presumably in 1944 the Allies did not roll a die before deciding whether to invade Normandy or Calais), the player must assume a poker face and suppress any tell or leak, making the choice appear random to their opponents. The philosophers Liam Clegg and Daniel Dennett have argued that human behavior is inherently unpredictable not just because of random neural noise in the brain but as an adaptation that makes it harder for our rivals to outguess us.4 A Non-Zero-Sum Game: The Volunteer’s Dilemma Rational actors can end up in outguessing standoffs not just in games that pit them in zero-sum competition but in ones that partly align them with common interests. An example is the Volunteer’s Dilemma, which may be illustrated by the medieval story Belling the Cat.

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards
by Antti Ilmanen
Published 4 Apr 2011

Worse, and rarely mentioned, is the unpleasant fact that your most likely counterparty when you trade in markets is no longer a retired dentist or an unmotivated long-only manager—it is a HF manager. Admittedly, the zero-sum-game argument is clearest when all investors have the same benchmark; in the real world of segmented markets and multiple benchmarks this argument is more complicated. I am not sure how the zero-sum-game argument works in a technical sense if all benchmarks used by investors do not add up to the global all-asset market portfolio, but the argument is sound conceptually in that we cannot collectively be worth more than the sum of what we are worth individually

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The classic statement from Fama (1970) is that markets are informationally efficient if “prices reflect all available information”. The EMH is also closely tied to the assumption of investor rationality. The main practical implication of the EMH is investors’ inability to consistently beat the market. Why? Competition among many profit-seeking agents eliminates any easy pickings. Active management is a zero-sum game even before costs; after trading costs and fees it is a negative-sum game (this observation is mathematically true regardless of whether the market is efficient). Empirical analyses unequivocally confirm that most managers underperform passive indices after fees and leave open the possibility that winners have just been lucky.

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The main advantage of private equity over public markets is in better corporate governance, including closer supervision of management. PE funds can create wealth by improving operating efficiency and exploiting tax deductibility of interest payments through leverage—thus PE is not subject to the zero-sum-game argument of most active managers. Yet, PE also involves risks. PE and VC funds have especially high equity market betas if artificially smoothed returns are adjusted for, so they offer less diversification to an equity-dominated portfolio than do other alternatives. The characteristics of low liquidity and long holding periods have some advantages in enabling the PE fund to accomplish its goals with the companies it holds, but surely warrant some premium as compensation.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
by John Cassidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

The key to this process was thought to lie in extending the solution methods that von Neumann and Morgenstern had introduced, most of which applied to zero-sum games, such as coin-tossing and poker. In games of that nature, the players compete against one another, and one player’s winnings are another player’s losses. But many types of economic activity, such as international trade and investing in the stock market, involve the possibility of cooperation and mutual gains: they are positive-sum games. During the late 1940s, some progress was made in tackling this broader category of problems when John Nash, a Princeton mathematician, introduced a general method for solving non-zero-sum games, but much remained unclear.

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According to William Poundstone, the author of an illuminating account of early game theory, from which I have taken some historical details, the founders of the problem felt the same way. “Both Flood and Dresher say they initially hoped that someone at RAND would ‘resolve’ the prisoner’s dilemma,” Poundstone writes. “They expected Nash, Von Neumann, or someone to mull over the problem and come up with a new and better theory of non-zero-sum games. The theory would address the conflict between individual and collective rationality typified by the prisoner’s dilemma. Possibly it would show, somehow, that cooperation is rational after all. The solution never came.” One criticism that is often made of the prisoner’s dilemma is that the noncooperative solution (Confess, Confess) can’t possibly be the rational outcome, because rational decision-makers would never choose an inferior outcome.

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If there is any wiggle room, excessive risk-taking and other damaging behavior will simply migrate to the unregulated sector. Imposing restrictions on the biggest hedge funds and private equity firms could well lead to a drastic shrinkage in these industries, which would be no great loss. Much of the activity that such firms engage in amounts to a zero-sum game, which doesn’t yield any economic gains for society at large. The proposed central clearinghouse for derivatives transactions is a good idea that doesn’t go far enough. By imposing leverage limits on traders, and demanding adequate collateral for exposed positions, the clearinghouse could eliminate a lot of counterparty credit risk.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It
by Scott Kupor
Published 3 Jun 2019

But failing to invest in a winner means that you forfeit all the asymmetric upside that comes along with that investment. Missing the next Facebook or Google is no doubt painful, and depending on the rest of your portfolio, can be career ending for a VC. VC Investing Is a Zero-Sum Game Another reason that success in venture capital seems to cluster is that VC investing is largely a zero-sum game. Let me explain this by analogy to public market investing. If you and I both think that Apple is a great stock to buy, we can both decide to buy it. Of course, if one of us is a really big buyer, the act of buying it might move the price such that my price might be different from yours (depending on which of us gets there first).

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See dot.com boom/bust term sheets, 140–169, 170–188 on aggregate proceeds, 142, 278 antidilution provisions in, 165–167, 280–281 on board of directors, 171–173, 281 on capitalization, 154, 278 on confidentiality, 285 on conversion/auto-conversion to common shares, 160–165, 280 on co-sale agreements, 181 on D&O insurance, 183, 284 on dividends, 154–155 drag-along provisions in, 182–183, 252, 284 on employee and consultant agreements, 187 and go-shop provisions, 239 on information rights, 282 on legal counsel and fees, 286 on liquidation preference, 155–159, 279 and no-shop provisions, 187–188, 239, 285 on preferred shares, 141–142 on price per share, 147–149, 278 on pro rata investments, 178–180, 283 on protective provisions, 173–177, 281–282 and recapitalizations, 281, 282 on redemption rights, 159 on registration rights, 178, 282 on right-of-first-refusal, 180–181 sample, 141, 277–286 on stock purchase agreement, 284 on stock restriction, 180–182, 283 on vesting, 183–187, 284 on voting rights, 167–169, 281 Tesla, 110 timing in startup world, importance of, 14 Tiny Speck, 137 Trados case, 220–231 and common shareholders, 221–222, 223 and conflict of board, 222–226 decision on, 227–228 distribution of proceeds from acquisition, 221 and entire fairness rule, 222, 226–229 guidelines stemming from, 225–226 and management incentive plan, 221, 226–227 takeaways from, 228–231 transfer restrictions, 98–99 Uber, 102, 172–173 United States and venture capital, 3, 271, 275 university endowments, 54–55, 56–57, 71 unrelated business income (UBIT), 93–94 use of proceeds, 278 vacation policies, 244–245 VA Linux, 264–265 valuation, 118–123 and antidilution provisions in term sheet, 165–167 and convertible notes, 144 pre- and post-money, 147–149 of very-early-stage startups, 153–154 valuation marks, understanding, 76–83 venture-backed companies economic impact of, 3–4, 41 exiting options of (see acquisitions; initial public offerings) five largest US market capitalization companies, 25, 41 and information asymmetry, 5, 140, 275 VC’s relationship with, 2–3, 4–5 venture capital (VC) and ability to raise new funds, 67–68 as asset class, 29–30 batting average of, 37–40 cardinal sins of, 44, 50–51, 179–180 competition for, 271–272 distribution of returns for, 30–32, 31, 35, 38, 40 and dot.com boom/bust, 64–65 early years in Silicon Valley, 19–20 as endorsement of a company, 43–44 equity financing as basis of, 26–27, 28 and evolution of VC industry, 270–273 extensions of last round of, 233 and institutional investors, 40–41 life cycle of, 7–8, 114–115, 268 and life cycle of fund, 152 measuring success of, 36–40 median ten-year returns in, 30 and multiple funds, 67 potential replacements for, 273–274 relationship of LPs to, 69–71 reserves set aside by, 66–67 restricted nature of, 35–36 risks inherent in, 39 rounds of, 34–35, 66–67, 115–117, 138–139, 151–152 signaling in, 32–33, 35, 37 size of industry, 40–41 and state of fund, 83–84 three professional roles in, 29 and Yale University endowment, 62–63, 64–65 as zero-sum game, 33–35 venture capitalists average duration of relationship with, 5, 115 creating incentives for, 114–115 as dual fiduciaries, 201–202 exit of, following IPO, 266–267 and failure to invest in winners, 33 funding from (see difficult financings; raising money from venture capitalists; term sheets) goals of, 114–115, 126, 139 and information asymmetry, 5, 140, 275 and opportunity costs, 43–44, 83, 212–213, 223 over-involvement with company, 203 and pitches (see pitching to venture capitalists) role of, 2–3, 29, 274–275 vesting accelerated, 99–101, 186–187, 250–251 and acquisitions, 250–251 and founders, 95–97, 99–101, 183, 186, 205–206 and general partners (GPs), 89 and term sheets, 183–187, 284 VMware, 132 voting on authorization of new classes of stock, 176 on corporate actions, 176 protective provisions on, 173–177 voting rights, 167–169, 281 WARN statutes, 243–244 waterfall valuation method, 77, 78–79 Waymo, 187 whaling industry, 53 winding down the company, 243–246 working capital, 150 Yale University endowment, 54, 59–65 Y Combinator (YC), 20–21 zero-sum game, venture capital as, 33–35 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABOUT THE AUTHOR Scott Kupor is the managing partner of Andreessen Horowitz.

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See dot.com boom/bust term sheets, 140–169, 170–188 on aggregate proceeds, 142, 278 antidilution provisions in, 165–167, 280–281 on board of directors, 171–173, 281 on capitalization, 154, 278 on confidentiality, 285 on conversion/auto-conversion to common shares, 160–165, 280 on co-sale agreements, 181 on D&O insurance, 183, 284 on dividends, 154–155 drag-along provisions in, 182–183, 252, 284 on employee and consultant agreements, 187 and go-shop provisions, 239 on information rights, 282 on legal counsel and fees, 286 on liquidation preference, 155–159, 279 and no-shop provisions, 187–188, 239, 285 on preferred shares, 141–142 on price per share, 147–149, 278 on pro rata investments, 178–180, 283 on protective provisions, 173–177, 281–282 and recapitalizations, 281, 282 on redemption rights, 159 on registration rights, 178, 282 on right-of-first-refusal, 180–181 sample, 141, 277–286 on stock purchase agreement, 284 on stock restriction, 180–182, 283 on vesting, 183–187, 284 on voting rights, 167–169, 281 Tesla, 110 timing in startup world, importance of, 14 Tiny Speck, 137 Trados case, 220–231 and common shareholders, 221–222, 223 and conflict of board, 222–226 decision on, 227–228 distribution of proceeds from acquisition, 221 and entire fairness rule, 222, 226–229 guidelines stemming from, 225–226 and management incentive plan, 221, 226–227 takeaways from, 228–231 transfer restrictions, 98–99 Uber, 102, 172–173 United States and venture capital, 3, 271, 275 university endowments, 54–55, 56–57, 71 unrelated business income (UBIT), 93–94 use of proceeds, 278 vacation policies, 244–245 VA Linux, 264–265 valuation, 118–123 and antidilution provisions in term sheet, 165–167 and convertible notes, 144 pre- and post-money, 147–149 of very-early-stage startups, 153–154 valuation marks, understanding, 76–83 venture-backed companies economic impact of, 3–4, 41 exiting options of (see acquisitions; initial public offerings) five largest US market capitalization companies, 25, 41 and information asymmetry, 5, 140, 275 VC’s relationship with, 2–3, 4–5 venture capital (VC) and ability to raise new funds, 67–68 as asset class, 29–30 batting average of, 37–40 cardinal sins of, 44, 50–51, 179–180 competition for, 271–272 distribution of returns for, 30–32, 31, 35, 38, 40 and dot.com boom/bust, 64–65 early years in Silicon Valley, 19–20 as endorsement of a company, 43–44 equity financing as basis of, 26–27, 28 and evolution of VC industry, 270–273 extensions of last round of, 233 and institutional investors, 40–41 life cycle of, 7–8, 114–115, 268 and life cycle of fund, 152 measuring success of, 36–40 median ten-year returns in, 30 and multiple funds, 67 potential replacements for, 273–274 relationship of LPs to, 69–71 reserves set aside by, 66–67 restricted nature of, 35–36 risks inherent in, 39 rounds of, 34–35, 66–67, 115–117, 138–139, 151–152 signaling in, 32–33, 35, 37 size of industry, 40–41 and state of fund, 83–84 three professional roles in, 29 and Yale University endowment, 62–63, 64–65 as zero-sum game, 33–35 venture capitalists average duration of relationship with, 5, 115 creating incentives for, 114–115 as dual fiduciaries, 201–202 exit of, following IPO, 266–267 and failure to invest in winners, 33 funding from (see difficult financings; raising money from venture capitalists; term sheets) goals of, 114–115, 126, 139 and information asymmetry, 5, 140, 275 and opportunity costs, 43–44, 83, 212–213, 223 over-involvement with company, 203 and pitches (see pitching to venture capitalists) role of, 2–3, 29, 274–275 vesting accelerated, 99–101, 186–187, 250–251 and acquisitions, 250–251 and founders, 95–97, 99–101, 183, 186, 205–206 and general partners (GPs), 89 and term sheets, 183–187, 284 VMware, 132 voting on authorization of new classes of stock, 176 on corporate actions, 176 protective provisions on, 173–177 voting rights, 167–169, 281 WARN statutes, 243–244 waterfall valuation method, 77, 78–79 Waymo, 187 whaling industry, 53 winding down the company, 243–246 working capital, 150 Yale University endowment, 54, 59–65 Y Combinator (YC), 20–21 zero-sum game, venture capital as, 33–35 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABOUT THE AUTHOR Scott Kupor is the managing partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He has overseen the firm's rapid growth to one hundred fifty employees and more than $7 billion in assets under management. He is also a cofounder and codirector of the Stanford Venture Capital Director's College and teaches venture capital and corporate governance courses at Stanford Law School and the Haas School of Business and Boalt School of Law at UC Berkeley.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

As part of our early exploration of American culture, we looked at two areas we thought might be at play in this social discord. First we looked at whether a sense of social identity threat was fueling some of these views. The second area was related but slightly different. A common logical fallacy that people have is seeing the world as a zero-sum game of winners and losers. This flawed logic extends into a perception that attention paid to other groups will ultimately mean less attention for people like them. Either way, minorities seemed to be “threats”—identity threats or threats to resources. Following this hypothesis of an underlying sense of threat, we wanted to see if we could mitigate some of these feelings, and we did so by trying to reduce the sense of threat.

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Now CA had users who (1) self-identified as part of an extreme group, (2) were a captive audience, and (3) could be manipulated with data. Lots of reporting on Cambridge Analytica gave the impression that everyone was targeted. In fact, not that many people were targeted at all. CA didn’t need to create a big target universe, because most elections are zero-sum games: If you get one more vote than the other guy or girl, you win the election. Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread. Once a group reached a certain number of members, CA would set up a physical event. CA teams would choose small venues—a coffee shop or bar—to make the crowd feel larger.

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There had always been publications that parodied the “hicks” of flyover country, but social media represented an extraordinary opportunity to rub “regular” Americans’ noses in the snobbery of coastal elites. Cambridge Analytica began to use this content to touch on an implied belief about racial competition for attention and resources—that race relations were a zero-sum game. The more they take, the less you have, and they use political correctness so you cannot speak out. This framing of political correctness as an identity threat catalyzed a “boomerang” effect in people where counternarratives would actually strengthen, not weaken, the prior bias or belief. This means that when targets would see clips containing criticism of racist statements by candidates or celebrities, this exposure would have the effect of further entrenching the target’s racialized views, rather than causing them to question those beliefs.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
Published 14 Jul 2019

Computing mixed–strategy equilibria is algorithmically much more intricate. To keep things simple, we will focus on methods for zero–sum games and comment briefly on their extension to other games at the end of this section. In 1928, von Neumann developed a method lor finding the optimal mixed strategy lor two-player, zero-sum games—games in which the payoffs always add up to zero (or a constant, as explained on page 193). Clearly, Morra is such a game. For two-player, zero-sum games, we know that the payoffs are equal and opposite, so we need consider the payoffs of only one player, who will be the maximizer (just as in Chapter 6).

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Our result for two-finger Morra is an example of the general result by von Neumann: every two-player zero-sum game has a maximin equilibrium when you allow mixed strategies. Furthermore, every Nash equilibrium in a zero–sum game is a maximin for both players. A player who adopts the maximin strategy has two guarantees: First, no other strategy can do better against an opponent who plays well (although some other strategies might be better at exploiting an opponent who makes irrational mistakes). Second, the player continues to do just as well even if the strategy is revealed to the opponent. The general algorithm for finding maximin equilibria in zero–sum games is somewhat more involved than Figures 17.2(e) and (f) might suggest.

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Section 6.5 discusses games that include an element of chance (through rolling dice or shuffling cards) and Section 6.6 covers games of imperfect information (such as poker and bridge, where not all cards are visible to all players). 6.1.1Two-player zero-sum games The games most commonly studied within AI (such as chess and Go) are what game theorists call deterministic, two-player, turn-taking, perfect information, zero-sum games. “Perfect information” is a synonym for “fully observable,”1 and “zero-sum” means that what is good for one player is just as bad for the other: there is no “win-win” outcome. For games we often use the term move as a synonym for “action” and position as a synonym for “state.”

Ethics in Investment Banking
by John N. Reynolds and Edmund Newell
Published 8 Nov 2011

The conflict may come in the investment bank’s advice about which financing structure to use to complete a transaction. Syndication and restructuring – Zero-sum games There are a number of areas in investment banking that can be typified by relatively aggressive behaviour, and it is usefully to consider each separately. We have taken two areas that involve situations where the outcome Ethical Issues – Clients 119 of a transaction can be a “zero-sum game” or the distribution of a finite pool of value, increasing the incentives for aggressive behaviour. Syndication In the sale of securities (whether a primary or secondary issue), a syndicate made up of a number of investment banks may be appointed.

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Index ABACUS, 7, 16–17, 46, 63–4, 68, 73, 78 Abrahamic faiths Christianity, 52–4 Islam, 54–5 Judaism, 56 abuse market, 14, 70, 75, 84–8 personal, 159 of resources, 127–8 abusive management practices, 157 abusive trading, 93 adult entertainment, 56 advisers financial, 109 investment banking, 111 sell-side, 107, 111–13 trusted, 108–9, 125 advisory fees, 119, 124 advisory markets, 73 agents, 65 aggressive behaviours, 118–19 Alpha International, 9 American Bar Association, 19 Anderson, Geraint “CityBoy”, 8 Anglican Communion, 53 Anglicanism, 53 annual general meeting (AGM), 29, 54 Aquinas, Thomas, 34, 37 Aristotle, 34 Arjuna, 57 attrition rate, 132 authorisation, informal, 81, 98 BAE Systems, 48 bait and switch, 102–3, 158 bank debt, 82–3, 120 banking regulations, 16 Bank of America, 16 Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), 12 Bank of England, 25 Barclays Capital, 139 Bar Council, 19 Bayly, Daniel, 8 Bear Stearns, 5, 16, 76 beauty parade, 110 behaviours aggressive, 118–19 discriminatory, 129–31 of Hedge fund, 12 investment banking, 3 management, 131–2 market, 71 misleading, 86 unethical, 68 virtuous, 37 Benedict XVI, Pope, 6, 52 Bentham, Jeremy, 36 Bernanke, Ben S., 96 Besley, Tim, 42 Beyond the Crash (Brown), 4 Bhagavad Gita, 57 bid price, 64 big cap, 65, 85 black box approach, 114 Blackstone Group, 20 Blankfein, Lloyd, 47, 63–4, 68, 78 bluffing, 113 Boesky, Ivan, 12 bonds government, 23 investment grade, 118 junk, 118 bonus pools in public ownership, 136–9 Bootle, Roger, 4 Bribery Act 2010, 129 British Academy, 42 Brown, Gordon, 4, 135 Buddhism, 57 bullying, 159 170 Index business ethics of fiduciary duties, 27 of financial crisis, 12–32 within governments, 59 of market capitalism, 12–14 of regulation, regulatory changes and, 18–21 of religion, 51–62 of shareholders, 27–9 strategic issues with, 30–1 Business Ethics Center, 56 Business Judgment Rule, 20 Business Standards Report, 46 buy recommendation, 115 capitalism market, 12–14 modern, 54 see also casino capitalism capital markets, 155 advisory markets vs., 73 conflicts of interest in, 112–14 cardinal virtues, 37 Caritas in Veritate (Benedict), 6, 52 cash compensation, 132, 134 casino capitalism emergence of, 43 in investment banking, 3 speculative, 16, 93 categorical imperative, 34, 59, 69 Caterpillar, 48 Central Finance Board of the Methodist Church (CFB), 54, 59 chief executive officer (CEO), 116 Christianity, 52–4 Anglican Communion, 53 Methodist Church, 53 Roman Catholic Church, 53 Christian Old Testament, 34 Church Investors’ Group (CIG), 135 Church of England, 9, 53, 58 Citigroup, 19, 112 claiming credit, 134 clients confidential information, 120 conflicts of interest, 105–10 171 duty of care, 105 engagement letters, 122–3 fees, 115–18 financial restructuring, 119–20 hold-out value, 120–1 honesty, 101–5 margin-calls, 121 practical issues, 110–15 promises, 100–1 restructuring fees, 121–2 syndication, 118–22 truth, 101–5 Code of Ethics, 47–50, 147–51 for Goldman Sachs business principles, 46 in investment banking, 47–9 Revised, 47 collatoralised debt obligations (CDOs), 30, 42, 75 command economies, 13 commercial banking, 19–21, 25 communication within markets, 88 Companies Act 2006, 27 compensation cash, 132, 134 defined, 132 for employees, 135 internal issues on, 8 for junior bankers, 136 levels of, 132–3, 138 objectivity of, 144 political issues with, 6, 137 restrictions on, 10 competitors, 113 compliance corporate, 20 danger of, 20 frameworks for, 68, 146 regulatory, 18 requirements of, 6 confidential information, 120 conflicts of interest, 105–10, 158 with capital markets, 109–10 with corporate finance, 107–8 personal, 47 with pre-IPO financing, 110 with private equity, 110 172 Index conflicts of interest – continued reconciling, 68–70 of trusted advisers, 108–9 consequentialist ethics, 36–7, 42 corporate compliance, 20 Corporate/Compliance Social Responsibility (CSR), 7 corporate debt, 17 corporate entertainment, 128–9, 159 corporate finance, 107–8 Corporate Sustainability Committee, 152 Costa, Ken, 9 Cox, Christopher, 96–7 creative accounting, 12 credit crunch, 17 credit default swap (CDS), 71 credit downgrade, 17, 76 Credit Lyonnais, 12 creditors, restricted, 121 credit rating, 75–7 calculating, 76 inaccurate, 5 manipulating, 75, 156, 158 unreliability of, 17 credit rating agencies, 76 Crisis and Recovery (Williams), 53 culture, 46, 136, 151 customers, 69 Daily Telegraph, 84 Debtor in Possession finance (DIP finance), 80 debts bank, 82–3, 120 corporate, 17 junior, 118 rated, 77 senior, 118 sovereign, 17 deferred equity, 5 deferred shares, 133 Del Monte Foods Co., 107 deontological ethics, 34–6 stockholders, 41–2 trust, 40–1 derivative, 27, 30 dharma, 63–4 Dharma Indexes, 57 discounted cash flow (DCF), 27 discount rate, 27 discriminatory behaviour, 129–31 distribution, 15, 35, 66 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 25 dotcom crisis, 94 dotcom stocks, 17 Dow Jones, 55–6 downgrade credit, 17, 76 defined, 76 multi-notch, 17, 76 duties, see rights vs. duties duty-based ethics, 66–8 duty of care, 105 Dynegy, 8 Earnings Before Interest Tax Depreciation and Amortisation (EBITDA), 27 economic free-ride, 5, 21 economic reality, 137 effective tax rate (ETR), 140 emissions trading, 14 employees, compensation for, 135 Encyclical, 52 engagement letters, 122–3, 159 Enron, 8, 12, 17, 20, 76 enterprise value (EV), 27 entertainment adult, 56 corporate, 128–9, 159 sexist, 159 equity deferred, 5 private, 2–3, 12, 110 equity research, 88–9, 113–15 insider dealing and, 83–4 ethical behaviour, 38–9 Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG), 53, 58 ethical investment banking, 145–7 ethical standards, 47 Index ethics consequentialist, 36–7, 42 deontological, 34–6 duty-based, 66–8 exceptions and, effects of, 89–90 financial crisis and, 4–8 in investment banking, 1 in moral philosophy, 1 performance and, 8–10 rights-based, 66–8 virtue, 37–8, 43–4 see also business ethics; Code of Ethics Ethics Helpline, 48 Ethics of Executive Remuneration: a Guide for Christian Investors, The, 135 European Commission, 89 European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 17 exceptions, 89 external regulations, 19, 31 fair dealing, 45 Fannie Mae, 43 Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, 43 Federal National Mortgage Association, 43 fees, 115–18 advisory, 107, 116 restructuring of, 121–2 2 and 20, 13 fiduciary duties, 27–8 financial advisers, 109 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), 26 financial crisis, business ethics during CDOs during, 90 CDSs during, 90 ethics during, 4–8, 12–34 investment banking and, necessity of, 14–15 market capitalism, 12–14 necessity of, 14–15 non-failure of, 21 positive impact of, 18 problems with, 15–17 reality of, 16 speculation in, 91 173 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 76 Financial Policy Committee (FPC), 25 financial restructuring, 119–20 Financial Services Modernization Act, 19 Financial Stability Oversight Council, 25 firm price, 67 Four Noble Truths, 57 Freddie Mac, 43 free-ride defined, 26 economic, 5, 21 in investment banking, 24 FTSE, 55 Fuhs, William, 8 General Board of Pension and Health Benefits, 54, 59 German FlowTex, 12 Gift Aid, 141 Glass–Steagall Act, 19 Global Settlement, 113 golden parachute arrangements, 133 Golden Rule, 35, 150 Goldman Sachs, 7, 16, 45, 63 Business Principles, 45–6 charges against, 78 Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, 45, 68 Code of Ethics for, 47–8 Goldsmith, Lord, 27 government, 59 business ethics within, 60 guarantees of, 24 intervention by, 22–3 government bonds, 23 greed, 4–5 Green, Stephen, 8–9 gross revenues, 59 Hedge fund behaviour of, 12 failure of, 21 funds for, raising, 2 investment fund, as type of, 3 rules for, 133 174 Index Hennessy, Peter, 42 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), 140–1 high returns, 28, 110 Hinduism, 56–7 Hobbes, Thomas, 36 hold-out value, 120–1 honesty, see trust hospitality, 128–9 hot IPOs, 94 hot-stock IPOs, 94 HSBC, 9, 28, 152 Ijara, 55 implicit government guarantee, 22–3 Independent Commission on Banking, 25 inequitable rewards, 6 informal authorisation, 81, 98 Initial Public Offering (IPO), 7 of dotcom stocks, 17 hot, allocation of, 94 hot-stock, 94 insider dealings, 83–4, 155 equity research and, 83–4 ethics of, 66, 70 laws on, 84 legal prohibition on, 82 legal restrictions on, 10 legal status of, 82 legislation on, 74 restrictions on, 83 rules of, 82, 90 securities, 70 insider trading, 12 insolvency, 24–5 institutional greed, 4 integrated bank, 28 integrated investment banking, 2, 30, 67, 106, 108 interest payments, 59–60 interest rate, 60 internal ethical issues, 126–43 abuse of resources, 127–8 corporate entertainment, 128–9 discriminatory behaviour, 129–31 hospitality, 128–9 management behaviour, 131–2 remuneration, 132–9 tax, 139–41 internal review process, managing, 134 investment banking, 94 casino capitalism in, 3 Code of Ethics in, 47–9 commercial and, convergence of, 20–1 defined, 2 ethics in, 1 free-ride in, 24 integrated, 2, 30, 67, 108, 112 in market position, role of, 65–6 moral reasoning and, 38 necessity of, 14–15 non-failure of, 19–20 positive impact of, 18 recommendations in, 94–7 sector exclusions for, 58–9 investment banking adviser, 121 investment banking behaviours, 3 investment banking ethics committee, 151–3 investment bubbles, 95 investment fund, 3 investment grade bonds, 118 investment grade securities, 76 investment recommendations, 94 investments personal account, 128, 156 principal, 15, 28 proprietary, 29 IRS, 140 Islam, 54–5 Islamic banking, 6, 54–5 Jewish Scriptures, 34 Joint Advisory Committee on the Ethics of Investment (JACEI), 54 JP Morgan, 16 Judaism, 56 junior bankers, 139 junior debt, 118 junk bond, 118 “just war” approach, 38 Index Kant, Immanuel, 35, 69 karma, 57 Kerviel, Jérôme, 44, 80 Krishna, 57 Law Society, 19 Lazard International, 9 leading adviser, 41 Leeson, Nick, 12, 44, 81 legislative change, 25–6 Lehman Brothers, 5–6, 15, 21, 23, 31, 43, 76 lenders, 26, 131 lending, 59–60 leverage levels of, 25 over, 75, 80, 119 Levin, Carl, 17, 63–4, 68 light-touch regulations, 4 liquidity market, 95 orderly, 25 withdrawal of, 24 loan-to-own, 80 Locke, John, 34 London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 23 London School of Economics, 43 London Stock Exchange, 65, 71, 84 long-term values, 147 Lords Grand Committee, 27 LTCM, 23 lying, 101 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 38 management behaviour, 131–2 margin-calls, 121 market abuse, 14, 70, 75, 86–8, 155 market announcements, 88 market behaviours, 74 market capitalism, 12–14 market communications, 88 market liquidity, 95 market maker defined, 65–7 investment bank as, 66 primary activities of, 65 175 market manipulation, 75 market position, role of, 104 market rate, 117 markets advisory, 73 capital, 73, 117–18, 158 communication within, 88 duties to support, 71–2 primary, 103 qualifying, 70, 82 secondary, 103 market trading, 41 Maxwell, Robert, 12 Meir, Asher, 56 mergers and acquisitions (M&As), 41, 79 Merkel, Angela, 93 Merrill Lynch, 8, 16 Methodism, 53 Methodist Central Finance Board, 59 Methodist Church, 54 Midrash, 56 Milken, Michael, 12 Mill, John Stuart, 36 Mirror Newspaper Group, 12 misleading behaviours, 86, 105 mis-selling of goods and services, 77–9, 155 modern capitalism, 54 moral-free zones, 31 moral hazard, 22, 70 moral philosophy, 1 moral reasoning, 38 moral relativism, 38–9, 49, 68 Morgan Stanley, 47 multi-notch downgrade, 17, 79 natural law, 34, 37 natural virtues, 37 necessity of investment banking, 14–15 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 65, 71 New York Times, 8 Noble Eightfold Path, 57 Nomura Group Code of Ethics, 47 normal market trading, 71 Northern Rock, 43 176 Index offer price, 64 off-market trading, 71–3, 90, 155 Olis, Jamie, 8 on-market trading, 70–1 oppressive regimes, 61 option value, 121 Orderly Liquidation Authority, 25 orderly liquidity, 25 out-of-pocket expenses, 127–8 over-leverage, 75, 80, 119, 158 overvalued securities, 155 patronage culture, 131, 142 Paulson, Henry M., 86 Paulson & Co., 78 “people-based” activity, 67 P:E ratio, 27 performance, 8–10 personal abuse, 159 personal account investments, 128, 156 personal account trading, 128 personal conflicts of interest, 45 pitching, 102, 159 Plato, 37 practical issues, 110–15 competitors, relationships with, 113 equity research, 113–15 pitching, 111 sell-side advisers, 111–13 pre-IPO financing, 110 prescriptive regulations, 31, 145 price tension, 79, 113 primary market, 103 prime-brokerage, 2 principal investment, 15, 28 private equity, 2–3, 12, 110 private trading, 94 Project Merlin, 133, 141 promises, 100–1 proprietary investment, 29 proprietary trading, 15, 25, 66, 150, 155 Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), 26 public ownership, bonus pools in, 136–9 “pump and dump” strategy, 86 qualifying instruments, 70, 87 qualifying markets, 70, 82 quality-adjusted life year (QALY), 36 Quantitative Easing (QE), 23 Queen Elizabeth II, 42 Qu’ran, 54 rated debt, 77 rates attrition, 132 discount, 27 interest, 60 market, 117 tax, 140 rating agencies, 76 Rawls, John, 35, 136 recognised exchanges, 71 Regal Petroleum, 84 regulations banking, 16 compliance with, 28 external, 19, 31 light-touch, 4 prescriptive, 31, 145 regulatory changes and, 18–20 securities, 114 self, and impact on legislation, 19 regulatory compliance, 18 religion, business ethics in, 51–62 Buddhism, 56 Christianity, 52–4 Governments, 59 Hinduism, 56–7 interest payments, 59–60 Islam, 54–5 Judaism, 56 lending, 59–60 thresholds, 60 usury, 59–60 remuneration, 132–9 bonus pools in public ownership and, 136–9 claiming credit, 134 ethical issues with, 142–3 internal review process, managing, 134 1 Timothy 6:10, 135–6 Index research, 156 resources, abuse of, 127–8 restricted creditors, 120 restructuring of fees, 121–2 financial, 119–20 syndication and, 118–22 retail banks, 16 returns, 28, 156 Revised Code of Ethics, 47 right livelihood, 57 rights-based ethics, 66–8 rights vs. duties advisory vs. trading/capital markets, 73 conflict between, reconciling, 68–70 duty-based ethics, 66–8 off-market trading, ethical standards to, 71–2 on-market trading, ethical standards in, 70–1 opposing views of, 63–74 reconciling conflict between, 68–70 rights-based ethics, 66–8 Roman Catholic Church, 52 Royal Dutch Shell, 85 Sarbanes–Oxley Act, 20 Schwarzman, Stephen, 20 scope of ethical issues, 7–8 secondary market, 103 sector exclusions for investment banking, 58–9 securities investment grade, 76 issuing, 103–5 overvalued, 155 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 7, 16 Goldman Sachs, charges against, 78 rating agencies, review by, 77 short-selling, review of, 96–7 securities insider dealing, 70 securities mis-selling, 77–9 securities regulations, 114 self-regulation, 19 sell recommendation, 115 177 sell-side advisers, 107, 111–13 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 46 senior debt, 118 sexist entertainment, 159 shareholders, 27–9 shares, deferred, 133 Shariah finance, 55 short-selling, 94–7, 154–5 Smith, Adam, 14, 35–6 social cohesion, 53 socially responsible investment (SRI), 56 Société Générale, 44, 80 solidarity, 53 Soros, George, 17 South Sea Bubble, 90 sovereign debt, 17 speculation, 91–4, 155 in financial crisis, 93 traditional views of, 91–3 speculative casino capitalism, 16, 91 spread, 21 stabilisation, 89 stock allocation, 94–7 stockholders, 41–2 stocks, dotcom, 17 Strange, Susan, 43 strategic issues with business ethics, 30–1 syndication, 119 and restructuring, 118–22 systemic risk, 24–5 Takeover Panel, 109 Talmud, 56 taxes, 139–41 tax optimisation, 158 tax rates, 140 tax structuring, 140 Terra Firma Capital Partners, 79, 112 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith), 14 3iG FCI Practitioners’ Report, 51 thresholds, 60 1 Timothy 6:10, 135–6 178 Index too big to fail concept, 21–7 ethical duties, and implicit Government guarantee, 22–3 ethical implications of, 26–7 in government, 22–3 insolvency, systemic risk and, 24–5 legislative change, 25–6 Lehman, failure of, 23 systemic risk, 24–5 toxic financial products, 5 trading abusive, 93 emissions, 14 insider, 12 market, 41 normal market, 71 off-market, 71–83, 90, 155 on-market, 70–1 personal account, 128 private, 94 proprietary, 15, 25, 66, 150, 155 unauthorised, 7 “trash and cash” strategy, 86 Travellers, 19 Treasury Select Committee, 26 Trinity Church, 53 Trouble with Markets, The (Bootle), 4 trust, 40, 53 trusted adviser, 108–9, 125 truth, 101–5 bait and switch, 102–3 misleading vs. lying, 101 securities, issuing, 103–5 2 and 20 fee, 13 UBS Investment Bank, 9 unauthorised trading, 7, 80–1, 155 unethical behaviour, 68 UK Alternative Investment Market, 89 UK Business Growth Fund, 133 UK Code of Practice, 141 UK Independent Banking Commission, 4, 22 United Methodist Church, 54, 59 United Methodist Investment Strategy Statement, 59 US Federal Reserve, 24, 25 US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 4 US Open, 126 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 64, 73 US Treasury Department, 132 universal banks, 2, 21, 28, 67 untoward movement, 85 usury, 59–60 utilitarian, 84 utilitarian ethics, 49, 84, 139 values, 9, 46, 119–21, 148 Vedanta, 57 victimless crime, 82 virtue ethics, 37–8, 43–4 virtues, 9, 34 virtuous behaviours, 37 Vishnu, 57 Volcker, Paul, 25 Volcker Rule, 2, 25 voting shareholders, 29 Wall Street, 12, 19, 53 Wall Street Journal, 20 Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 14 Wesley, John, 53 Wharf, Canary, 18 Williams, Rowan, 53 Wimbledon, 127 WorldCom, 12, 17, 20, 76 write-off, 80 zakat, 55 zero-sum games, 118–22 

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella , Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols
Published 25 Sep 2017

At first some product-line leaders within Microsoft felt uneasy about partnering with their competitor; I definitely heard some resistance behind closed doors. One way to explain the logic is by turning to game theory, which uses mathematical models to explain cooperation and conflict. Partnering is too often seen as a zero-sum game—whatever is gained by one participant is lost by another. I don’t see it that way. When done right, partnering grows the pie for everyone—for customers, yes, but also for each of the partners. Ultimately the consensus was that this partnership with Apple would help to ensure Office’s value was available to everyone, and Apple was committing to make its iOS really show off the great things Office can do, which would further solidify Microsoft as the top developer for Apple.

…

In fact, back then I was begging for customers and partners to work with us on our fledgling server business, a job that demanded an attitude of humility rather than one of hubris. One lesson I learned from the antitrust case (there were many lessons) was to compete hard and then equally celebrate the opportunities we create for everyone. It’s not a zero-sum game. I’ve taken that to heart. Google today is a dominant company in our industry. For years we’ve competed in the marketplace while also feuding through nonstop complaints to government regulators in the United States and abroad. As CEO, I decided to turn the page on that strategy, reasoning that it was time to end our regulatory battles and focus all of our energy on competing for customers in the cloud.

…

See also employee resource groups (ERGs) Word, 104, 121 workstations, 26–27 World Bank, 217 worldview, 69–70, 76–77 World War II, 188 Wright, Wilbur, 209–10 Xamarin, 137 Xbox, 2, 59, 65, 89, 106–8, 145 Xbox Live, 61 Xbox One, 161 Xbox Video, 171 Xerox PARC, 30 Xiaoice, 195–96 Yahoo, 3, 51, 52, 58, 134, 174 Yale Law School, 186 Yammer, 110 Young Men and Fire (Maclean), 56 Z80 computer, 21, 143 Zander, Jason, 58 zero-sum game, 124, 130 Zika epidemic, 142 Zo, 195–97 Zocdoc, 218 Zonis, Marvin, 29 About the Author Satya Nadella is a husband, father, and the chief executive officer of Microsoft—the third in the company’s forty-year history. On his twenty-first birthday, Nadella immigrated from Hyderabad, India, to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in computer science.

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

In cooperative games, players can make agreements or contracts before the game itself begins. Non-cooperative game theory assumes such agreements are impossible, because they are unenforceable (players will make promises then break them). But the book did not discuss most non-cooperative games. It only covered one type: zero-sum games between two players. Zero-sum games are those in which whatever is good for one player is bad for the other. This framing of the analysis can make a big difference. The nuclear stand-off between America and the USSR was a perilous, indisputably ‘non-cooperative’ game – but was it zero-sum? Should the strategists at RAND and the Pentagon rule out altogether, in the very set-up of their analysis, the possibility of an outcome in which neither side wins?

…

objection, 107, 119–20 Friedman, Milton, 4–5, 56, 69, 84, 88, 126, 189 awarded Nobel Prize, 132 and business responsibility, 2, 152 debate with Coase at Director’s house, 50, 132 as dominant Chicago thinker, 50, 132 on fairness and justice, 60 flawed arguments of, 132–3 influence on modern economics, 131–2 and monetarism, 87, 132, 232 at Mont Pèlerin, 5, 132 rejects need for realistic assumptions, 132–3 Sheraton Hall address (December 1967), 132 ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’ (essay, 1953), 132–3 ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’ (article, 1970), 2, 152 Frost, Gerald, Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty (2002), 7* Galbraith, John Kenneth, 242–3 game theory assumptions of ‘rational behaviour’, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 Axelrod’s law of the instrument, 41 backward induction procedure, 36–7, 38 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 focus on consequences alone, 43 as form of zombie science, 41 and human awareness, 21–3, 24–32 and interdependence, 23 limitations of, 32, 33–4, 37–40, 41–3 minimax solution, 22 multiplicity problem, 33–4, 35–7, 38 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 the Nash program, 25 and nature of trust, 28–31, 41 the Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 real world as problem for, 21–2, 24–5, 29, 31–2, 37–8, 39–40, 41–3 rise of in economics, 40–41 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138–9 and spectrum auctions, 39–40 theory of repeated games, 29–30, 35 tit-for-tat, 30–31 and trust, 29, 30–31, 32, 41 uses of, 23–4, 34, 38–9 view of humanity as non-cooperative/distrustful, 18, 21–2, 25–32, 36–8, 41–3 Von Neumann as father of, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 zero-sum games, 21–2 Gates, Bill, 221–2 Geithner, Tim, 105 gender, 127–8, 130–31, 133, 156 General Electric, 159 General Motors (GM), 215–16 George, Prince of Cambridge, 98 Glass–Steagall Act, repeal of, 194 globalization, 215, 220 Goldman Sachs, 182, 184, 192 Google, 105 Gore, Al, 39 Great Reform Act (1832), 120 greed, 1–2, 196, 197, 204, 229, 238 Greenspan, Alan, 57, 203 Gruber, Jonathan, 245 Haifa, Israel, 158, 161 Harper, ‘Baldy’, 7 Harsanyi, John, 34–5, 40 Harvard Business Review, 153 Hayek, Friedrich and Arrow’s framework, 78–9 economics as all of life, 8 and Antony Fisher, 6–7 influence on Thatcher, 6, 7 and Keynesian economics, 5–6 and legal frameworks, 7* at LSE, 4 at Mont Pèlerin, 4, 5, 6, 15 and Olson’s analysis, 104 and public choice theory, 89 rejection of incentive schemes, 156 ‘spontaneous order’ idea, 30 The Road to Serfdom (1944), 4, 5, 6, 78–9, 94 healthcare, 91–2, 93, 178, 230, 236 hedge funds, 201, 219, 243–4 Heilbroner, Robert, The Worldly Philosophers, 252 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 98, 107, 243–4 Helmsley, Leona, 105 hero myths, 221–3, 224 Hewlett-Packard, 159 hippie countercultural, 100 Hoffman, Abbie, Steal This Book, 100 Holmström, Bengt, 229–30 homo economicus, 9, 10, 12, 140, 156–7 and Gary Becker, 126, 129, 133, 136 and behaviour of real people, 15, 136, 144–5, 171, 172, 173, 250–51 and behavioural economics, 170, 171, 172, 255 long shadow cast by, 248 and Nudge economists, 13, 172, 173, 174–5, 177 Hooke, Robert, 223 housing market, 128–9, 196, 240–41 separate doors for poor people, 243 Hume, David, 111 Huxley, Thomas, 114 IBM, 181, 222 identity, 32, 165–6, 168, 180 Illinois, state of, 46–7 immigration, 125, 146 Impossibility Theorem, 72, 73–4, 75, 89, 97 Arrow’s assumptions, 80, 81, 82 and Duncan Black, 77–8 and free marketeers, 78–9, 82 as misunderstood and misrepresented, 76–7, 79–82 ‘paradox of voting’, 75–7 as readily solved, 76–7, 79–80 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 incentives adverse effect on autonomy, 164, 165–6, 168, 169–70, 180 authority figure–autonomy contradiction, 180 and behavioural economics, 171, 175, 176–7 cash and non-cash gifts, 161–2 context and culture, 175–6 contrast with rewards and punishments, 176–7 ‘crowding in’, 176 crowding out of prior motives, 160–61, 162–3, 164, 165–6, 171, 176 impact of economists’ ideas, 156–7, 178–80 and intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 and moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 morally wrong/corrupting, 168–9 origins in behaviourism, 154 and orthodox theory of motivation, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 168–70, 178–9 payments to blood donors, 162–3, 164, 169, 176 as pervasive in modern era, 155–6 respectful use of, 175, 177–8 successful, 159–60 as tools of control/power, 155–7, 158–60, 161, 164, 167, 178 Indecent Proposal (film, 1993), 168 India, 123, 175 individualism, 82, 117 and Becker, 134, 135–8 see also freedom, individual Industrial Revolution, 223 inequality and access to lifeboats, 150–51 and climate change, 207–9 correlation with low social mobility, 227–8, 243 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 and economic imperialism, 145–7, 148, 151, 207 and efficiency wages, 237–8 entrenched self-deluding justifications for, 242–3 and executive pay, 215–16, 219, 224, 228–30, 234, 238 as falling in 1940–80 period, 215, 216 Great Gatsby Curve, 227–8, 243 hero myths, 221–3, 224 increases in as self-perpetuating, 227–8, 230–31, 243 as increasing since 1970s, 2–3, 215–16, 220–21 and lower growth levels, 239 mainstream political consensus on, 216, 217, 218, 219–21 marginal productivity theory, 223–4, 228 new doctrine on taxation since 1970s, 232–5 and Pareto, 217, 218–19, 220 poverty as waste of productive capacity, 238–9 public attitudes to, 221, 226–8 rises in as not inevitable, 220, 221, 242 role of luck downplayed, 222, 224–6, 243 scale-invariant nature of, 219, 220 ‘socialism for the rich’, 230 Thatcher’s praise of, 216 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233–5, 239 trickle-down economics, 232–3 US and European attitudes to, 226–7 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 innovation, 222–3, 242 Inside Job (documentary, 2010), 88 Institute of Economic Affairs, 7–8, 15, 162–3 intellectual property law, 57, 68, 236 Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go, 148 Jensen, Michael, 229 Journal of Law and Economics, 49 justice, 1, 55, 57–62, 125, 137 Kahn, Herman, 18, 33 Kahneman, Daniel, 170–72, 173, 179, 202–3, 212, 226 Kennedy, President John, 139–40 Keynes, John Maynard, 11, 21, 162, 186, 204 and Buchanan’s ideology, 87 dentistry comparison, 258–9, 261 on economics as moral science, 252–3 Friedman’s challenge to orthodoxy of, 132 Hayek’s view of, 5–6 massive influence of, 3–4, 5–6 on power of economic ideas, 15 and probability, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 190, 210 vision of the ideal economist, 20 General Theory (1936), 15, 188–9 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 128 Khrushchev, Nikita, 139–40, 181 Kilburn Grammar School, 48 Kildall, Gary, 222 Kissinger, Henry, 184 Knight, Frank, 185–6, 212 Krugman, Paul, 248 Kubrick, Stanley, 35*, 139 labour child labour, 124, 146 and efficiency wages, 237–8 labour-intensive services, 90, 92–3 lumpenproletariat, 237 Olson’s hostility to unions, 104 Adam Smith’s ‘division of labour’ concept, 128 Laffer, Arthur, 232–3, 234 Lancet (medical journal), 257 Larkin, Philip, 67 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 Lazear, Edward, ‘Economic Imperialism’, 246 legal system, 7* and blame for accidents, 55, 60–61 and Chicago School, 49, 50–52, 55 and Coase Theorem, 47, 49, 50–55, 63–6 criminal responsibility, 111, 137, 152 economic imperialist view of, 137 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 transaction costs, 51–3, 54–5, 61, 62, 63–4, 68 Lehmann Brothers, 194 Lexecon, 58, 68 Linda Problem, 202–3 LineStanding.com, 123 Little Zheng, 123, 124 Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 234–5, 236 lobbying, 7, 8, 88, 115, 123, 125, 146, 230, 231, 238 loft-insulation schemes, 172–3 logic, mathematical, 74–5 The Logic of Life (Tim Harford, 2008), 130 London School of Economics (LSE), 4, 48 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 201, 257 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 89, 94 Mafia, 30 malaria treatments, 125, 149 management science, 153–4, 155 Mandelbrot, Benoît, 195, 196, 201 Mankiw, Greg, 11 marginal productivity theory, 223–4 Markowitz, Harry, 196–7, 201, 213 Marx, Karl, 11, 101, 102, 104, 111, 223 lumpenproletariat, 237 mathematics, 9–10, 17–18, 19, 21–4, 26, 247, 248, 255, 259 of 2007 financial crash, 194, 195–6 and Ken Arrow, 71, 72, 73–5, 76–7, 82–3, 97 axioms (abstract assumptions), 198 fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201, 219 and orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 214 Ramsey Rule on discounting, 208–9, 212 and Savage, 189–90, 193, 197, 198, 199, 205 and Schelling, 139 Sen’s framework on voting systems, 80–81 standard deviation, 182, 192, 194 and stock market statistics, 190–91, 195–6 use of for military ends, 71–2 maximizing behaviour and Becker, 129–31, 133–4, 147 and catastrophe, 211 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 61, 63–9 economic imperialism, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 147, 148–9 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 profit-maximizing firms, 228 see also wealth-maximization principle; welfare maximization McCluskey, Kirsty, 194 McNamara, Robert, 138 median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 Merton, Robert, 201 Meucci, Antonio, 222 microeconomics, 9, 232, 259 Microsoft, 222 Miles, David, 258 Mill, John Stuart, 102, 111, 243 minimum wage, national, 96 mobility, economic and social correlation with inequality, 226–8, 243 as low in UK, 227 as low in USA, 226–7 US–Europe comparisons, 226–7 Modern Times (Chaplin film, 1936), 154 modernism, 67 Moivre, Abraham de, 193 monetarism, 87, 89, 132, 232 monopolies and cartels, 101, 102, 103–4 public sector, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Mont Pèlerin Society, 3–9, 13, 15, 132 Morgenstern, Oskar, 20–22, 24–5, 28, 35, 124, 129, 189, 190 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 91, 92–3 Murphy, Kevin, 229 Mussolini, Benito, 216, 219 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 Nash, John, 17–18, 22–3, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 awarded Nobel Prize, 34–5, 38, 39, 40 mental health problems, 25, 26, 34 National Health Service, 106, 162 ‘neoliberalism’, avoidance of term, 3* Neumann, John von ambition to make economics a science, 20–21, 24–5, 26, 35, 125, 151, 189 as Cold War warrior, 20, 26, 138 and expansion of scope of economics, 124–5 as father of game theory, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 final illness and death of, 19, 34, 35, 43–4 genius of, 19–20 as inspiration for Dr Strangelove, 19 and Nash’s equilibrium, 22–3, 25, 38* simplistic view of humanity, 28 theory of decision-making, 189, 190, 203 neuroscience, 14 New Deal, US, 4, 194, 231 Newton, Isaac, 223 Newtonian mechanics, 21, 24–5 Nixon, Richard, 56, 184, 200 NORAD, Colorado Springs, 181 nuclear weapons, 18–19, 20, 22, 27, 181 and Ellsberg, 200 and game theory, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), 35, 138 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138, 139 Nudge economists, 13, 171–5, 177–8, 179, 180, 251 Oaten, Mark, 121 Obama, Barack, 110, 121, 157, 172, 180 Olson, Mancur, 103, 108, 109, 119–20, 122 The Logic of Collective Action (1965), 103–4 On the Waterfront (Kazan film, 1954), 165 online invisibility, 100* organs, human, trade in, 65, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 42–3 Osborne, George, 233–4 Packard, David, 159 Paine, Tom, 243 Pareto, Vilfredo 80/20 rule’ 218 and inequality, 217, 218–19, 220 life and background of, 216–17 Pareto efficiency, 217–18, 256* Paul the octopus (World Cup predictor, 2010), 133 pensions, workplace, 172, 174 physics envy, 9, 20–21, 41, 116, 175–6, 212, 247 Piketty, Thomas, 234, 235 plastic shopping bag tax, 159–60 Plato’s Republic, 100–101, 122 political scientists and Duncan Black, 78, 95–6 Black’s median voter theorem, 95–6 Buchanan’s ideology, 84–5 crises of the 1970s, 85–6 influence of Arrow, 72, 81–2, 83 see also public choice theory; social choice theory Posner, Richard, 54, 56–63, 137 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 ‘The Economics of the Baby Shortage’ (1978), 61 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 price-fixing, 101, 102, 103–4 Princeton University, 17, 19–20 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 prisons, cell upgrades in, 123 privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 probability, 182–4 and Keynes, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 210 Linda Problem, 202–3 modern ideas of, 184–5 Ramsey’s personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 and Savage, 190, 193, 197, 198, 199, 203, 205 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 see also risk and uncertainty Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 productivity Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and efficiency wages, 237–8 improvement in labour-intensive services, 92–3 labour input, 92 protectionism, 246, 255 psychology availability heuristic, 226 behaviourism, 154–8, 237 and behavioural economics, 12, 170–71 cognitive dissonance, 113–14 and financial incentives, 156–7, 158–60, 163–4, 171 framing effects, 170–71, 259 of free-riding, 113–14, 115 intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 irrational behaviour, 12, 15, 171 learning of social behaviour, 163–4 moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 motivated beliefs, 227 ‘self-command’ strategies, 140 view of in game theory, 26–31 view of in public choice theory, 85–6 and welfare maximization, 149 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 public choice theory as consensus view, 84–5 and crises of the 1970s, 85–6 foolish voter assumption, 86–8 ‘paradox of voter turnout’, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16 partial/self-contradictory application of, 86, 87–9 ‘political overload’ argument, 85, 86–7 ‘public bad, private good’ mantra, 93–4, 97 and resistance to tax rises, 94, 241 self-fulfilling prophecies, 95–7 and selfishness, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 as time-bomb waiting to explode, 85 public expenditure in 1970s and ’80s, 89 Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and Keynesian economics, 4 and public choice theory, 85–8, 89, 241 and tax rises, 241–2 public-sector monopolies, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 queue-jumping, 123, 124 QWERTY layout, 42 racial discrimination, 126–7, 133, 136, 140 Ramsey, Frank, 186–8, 189, 190, 205, 208 Ramsey Rule, 208–9, 212 RAND Corporation, 17, 41, 103, 138, 139 and Ken Arrow, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 and behaviourism, 154 and Cold War military strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 70, 73, 75–6, 141, 200, 213 and Ellsberg, 182–4, 187, 197–8, 200 and Russell’s Chicken, 33 Santa Monica offices of, 18 self-image as defender of freedom, 78 rational behaviour assumptions in game theory, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 axioms (abstract mathematical assumptions), 198 Becker’s version of, 128–9, 135, 140, 151 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173, 174–5 distinction between values and tastes, 136–8 economic imperialist view of, 135, 136–8, 140, 151 and free-riding theory, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 115–16 and orthodox decision theory, 198, 199 public choice theory relates selfishness to, 86 term as scientific-sounding cover, 12 see also homo economicus Reader’s Digest, 5, 6 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 87–8, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233 regulators, 1–2 Chicago view of, 40 Reinhart, Carmen, 258 religion, decline of in modern societies, 15, 185 renewable energy, 116 rent-seeking, 230, 238 ‘right to recline’, 63–4 risk and uncertainty bell curve distribution, 191–4, 195, 196–7, 201, 203–4, 257 catastrophes, 181–2, 191, 192, 201, 203–4, 211–12 delusions of quantitative ‘risk management’, 196, 213 Ellsberg’s experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200 errors in conventional thinking about, 191–2, 193–4, 195–7, 204–5, 213 financial orthodoxy on risk, 196–7, 201–2 and First World War, 185 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 hasard and fortuit, 185* ‘making sense’ of through stories, 202–3 ‘measurable’ and ‘unmeasurable’ distinction, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 210–11, 212–13 measurement in numerical terms, 181–4, 187, 189, 190–94, 196–7, 201–2, 203–5, 212–13 orthodox decision theory, 183–4, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 201–2, 203–5, 211, 212–14 our contemporary orthodoxy, 189–91 personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 pure uncertainty, 182–3, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 197, 198–9, 210, 211, 212, 214, 251 redefined as ‘volatility’, 197, 213 the Savage orthodoxy, 190–91, 197, 198–200, 203, 205 scenario planning as crucial, 251 Taleb’s black swans, 192, 194, 201, 203–4 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 urge to actuarial alchemy, 190–91, 197, 201 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 see also probability Robertson, Dennis, 13–14 Robinson, Joan, 260 Rodrik, Dani, 255, 260–61 Rogoff, Ken, 258 Rothko, Mark, 4–5 Rumsfeld, Donald, 232–3 Russell, Bertrand, 33–4, 74, 97, 186, 188 Ryanair, 106 Sachs, Jeffrey, 257 Santa Monica, California, 18 Sargent, Tom, 257–8 Savage, Leonard ‘Jimmie’, 189–90, 193, 203, 205scale-invariance, 194, 195–6, 201, 219 Scandinavian countries, 103, 149 Schelling, Thomas, 35* on access to lifeboats, 150–51 awarded Nobel Prize, 138–9 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 138, 139–40 and economic imperialism, 141–5 and game theory, 138–9 and Washington–Moscow hotline, 139–40 work on value of human life, 141–5, 207 ‘The Intimate Contest for Self-command’ (essay, 1980), 140, 145 ‘The Life You Save May be Your Own’ (essay, 1968), 142–5, 207 Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 172 Schmidt, Eric, 105 Scholes, Myron, 201 Schwarzman, Stephen, 235 Second World War, 3, 189, 210 selfishness, 41–3, 178–9 and Becker, 129–30 and defence of inequality, 242–3 as free marketeers’ starting point, 10–12, 13–14, 41, 86, 178–9 and game theory, 18 and public choice theory, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 Selten, Reinhard, 34–5, 36, 38, 40 Sen, Amartya, 29, 80–81 service sector, 90–93, 94 Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure, 169 Shaw, George Bernard, 101 Shiller, Robert, 247 Simon, Herbert, 223 Skinner, Burrhus, 154–5, 158 Smith, Adam, 101, 111, 122 The Wealth of Nations (1776), 10–11, 188–9 snowflakes, 195 social choice theory, 72 and Ken Arrow, 71–83, 89, 95, 97, 124–5, 129 and Duncan Black, 78, 95 and free marketeers, 79, 82 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 social media, 100* solar panels, 116 Solow, Bob, 163, 223 Sorites paradox, 117–18, 119 sovereign fantasy, 116–17 Soviet Union, 20, 22, 70, 73, 82, 101, 104, 167, 237 spectrum auctions, 39–40, 47, 49 Stalin, Joseph, 70, 73, 101 the state anti-government attitudes in USA, 83–5 antitrust regulation, 56–8 dismissal of almost any role for, 94, 135, 235–6, 241 duty over full employment, 5 economic imperialist arguments for ‘small government’, 135 increased economic role from 1940s, 3–4, 5 interventions over ‘inefficient’ outcomes, 53 and monetarism, 87, 89 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 3, 4, 5 and privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 public-sector monopolies, 48–50, 93–4 replacing of with markets, 79 vital role of, 236 statistical lives, 141–5, 207 Stern, Nick, 206, 209–10 Stigler, George, 50, 51, 56, 69, 88 De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum (with Becker, 1977), 135–6 Stiglitz, Joseph, 237 stock markets ‘Black Monday’ (1987), 192 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 193–4, 201 Strittmatter, Father, 43–4 Summers, Larry, 10, 14 Sunstein, Cass, 173 Nudge (with Richard Thaler, 2008), 171–2, 175 Taleb, Nassim, 192 Tarski, Alfred, 74–5 taxation and Baumol’s cost disease, 94 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 as good thing, 231, 241–2, 243 Laffer curve, 232–3, 234 new doctrine of since 1970s, 232–4 property rights as interdependent with, 235–6 public resistance to tax rises, 94, 239, 241–2 and public spending, 241–2 revenue-maximizing top tax rate, 233–4, 235 tax avoidance and evasion, 99, 105–6, 112–13, 175, 215 ‘tax revolt’ campaigns (1970s USA), 87 ‘tax as theft’ culture, 235–6 top-rate cuts and inequality, 231, 233–5, 239 whines from the super-rich, 234–5, 243 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 153–4, 155, 167, 178, 237 Thaler, Richard, 13 Nudge (with Cass Sunstein, 2008), 171–2, 175 Thatcher, Margaret, 2, 88, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and Hayek, 6, 7 and inequality, 216, 227 privatization programme, 93–4 and top-rate tax cuts, 231 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944), 20, 21, 25, 189 Titanic, sinking of (1912), 150 Titmuss, Richard, The Gift Relationship, 162–3 tobacco-industry lobbyists, 8 totalitarian regimes, 4, 82, 167–8, 216, 219 see also Soviet Union trade union movement, 104 Tragedy of the Commons, 27 Truman, Harry, 20, 237 Trump, Donald, 233 Tucker, Albert, 26–7 Tversky, Amos, 170–72, 173, 202–3, 212, 226 Twitter, 100* Uber, 257 uncertainty see risk and uncertainty The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford, 2005), 130 unemployment and Coase Theorem, 45–7, 64 during Great Depression, 3–4 and Keynesian economics, 4, 5 United Nations, 96 universities auctioning of places, 124, 149–50 incentivization as pervasive, 156 Vietnam War, 56, 198, 200, 249 Villari, Pasquale, 30 Vinci, Leonardo da, 186 Viniar, David, 182, 192 Volkswagen scandal (2016), 2, 151–2 Vonnegut, Kurt, 243–4 voting systems, 72–4, 77, 80, 97 Arrow’s ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’, 81, 82 Arrow’s ‘Universal Domain’, 81, 82 and free marketeers, 79 ‘hanging chads’ in Florida (2000), 121 recount process in UK, 121 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 Waldfogel, Joel, 161* Wanniski, Jude, 232 Watertown Arsenal, Massachusetts, 153–4 Watson Jr, Thomas J., 181 wealth-maximization principle, 57–63 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 63–9 as core principle of current economics, 253 created markets, 65–7 extension of scope of, 124–5 and justice, 55, 57–62, 137 and knee space on planes, 63–4 practical problems with negotiations, 62–3 and values more important than efficiency, 64–5, 66–7 welfare maximization, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 148–9, 176 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173 and vulnerable/powerless people, 146–7, 150 welfare state, 4, 162 Wilson, Charlie, 215 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 186, 188 Wolfenschiessen (Swiss village), 158, 166–7 Woolf, Virginia, 67 World Bank, 96 World Cup football tournament (2010), 133 World Health Organization, 207 Yale Saturday Evening Pest, 4–5 Yellen, Janet, 237 THE BEGINNING Let the conversation begin … Follow the Penguin twitter.com/penguinukbooks Keep up-to-date with all our stories youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Like ‘Penguin Books’ on facebook.com/penguinbooks Listen to Penguin at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover more stories like this at penguin.co.uk ALLEN LANE UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com First published 2019 Copyright © Jonathan Aldred, 2019 The moral right of the author has been asserted Jacket photograph © Getty Images ISBN: 978-0-241-32544-5 This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

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A French mathematician who wrote one of the many stellar reviews of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior was also a book collector. In the 1960s he purchased a mathematical treatise from one of the stalls along the banks of the Seine in Paris. It included a letter describing the minimax solution to two-person zero-sum games. The letter was dated 1713. 2 RAND’s failure to produce useful research was becoming a joke. By the late 1950s outsiders said that RAND stood for ‘Research And No Development’. 3 However, in the film the US did not know in advance that the Doomsday machine existed, rendering it useless as a threat.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

Put another way, if we hold the view that firms spend money on lobbying but it is useless, then we must recognize that this view is inconsistent with most of what we know about economics and human nature. It’s not strictly impossible, but I am not going to take this idea very seriously. Second, rent seeking is a zero-sum game, and zero-sum games are difficult to identify in the data. For instance, suppose firm A spends $100 to lobby for a regulatory change that would give it an advantage over firm B. Firm B then spends $200 to fight this change. Firm B prevails. What do we see? We see that they collectively spent $300 and that nothing has changed: the relative market shares, growth rates, and productivity of the two firms are the same as before.

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—the idea being, if tariffs were announced, prices would rise, and all that cheap foreign metal would suddenly become more valuable. And that’s what happened.” Rent-seeking causes loss of wealth in two ways. First, the direct expenditures that interest groups spend on lobbying could be used for productive work, rather than zero sum games. The second loss is the policies themselves. The policies advocated by lobbyists are rarely efficient. They do not take the form of simple transfers or lump-sum taxes. Consider, for instance, the regulation of entry. Imagine a world where entrants pay a lump-sum tax to compensate for the disruption and harm they inflict on incumbents.

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In most industries, innovation is good for growth, but financial innovations do not seem to improve capital allocation very much. What, then, is the matter with finance? Why does it appear to behave differently from other industries? I am going to highlight three main issues: a high prevalence of zero-sum games, entrenched market power, and heavy and sometimes misguided regulations. Harvard economists Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein (2013) study what goes on inside the black box and provide an illuminating picture of the growth of modern finance. They show that growth of finance since 1980 comes mostly from asset management (in the securities industry) and the provision of household credit (in the credit intermediation industry).

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

The Old Testament book Ecclesiastes advises: “Send your grain across the seas, and in time, profits will flow back to you. But divide your investments among many places, for you do not know what risks might lie ahead.”4 Even at home, merchants might find that their local government had decided to seize their property. This certainly happened frequently in history and still occurs today. But this is a zero-sum game. If your crops are seized every year by the local bandit (or landlord), you will not bother to grow them next year. Long-term economic growth will not occur. As Thomas Hobbes, the gloomy 17th-century philosopher, wrote: “In such condition there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain.”5 The existence of modern states, which protect the rights of private property and the peaceful settlement of disputes, was needed before economic growth could take off.

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In The Wealth of Nations, he wrote: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” He attacked the notion of mercantilism, which believed that trade was a zero-sum game in which the aim was to get more gold than other nations. On the contrary, the aim of trade was to import goods that one needed or desired. He emphasised the benefits of specialisation. One example was the pin factory, where the separation of tasks into discrete steps, handled by different workers, enabled pin production to soar.

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Only 9% of manufactured goods in Japan were imported, compared with 32% in the US.32 Japan’s consistent trade surpluses meant that it built up large holdings of US Treasury bonds and also privately held assets such as the Rockefeller Center in New York and Columbia Pictures in Hollywood. This led to some paranoid thrillers about a Japanese takeover of the global economy, such as Rising Sun by Michael Crichton and Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy.33 These fantasises were a sign that many people see trade as a “zero-sum game” in which if one side wins, the other might lose. The fact that, thanks to the Japanese, Americans got cheaper cars and electronic goods, as well as lower borrowing costs, tended to be overlooked. Another focus for trade talk was the strength of the dollar in the early 1980s, which flowed from Volcker’s high interest rate policy.

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 18 Jun 2012

It is equally misleading to think that a country’s finances can be viewed in isolation from those of all other countries it trades with and in which it invests money or raises capital. Yet that is precisely what the political class and the general public naturally do. Global Trade Is Not a Zero-Sum Game The basic math is simple. If one country sells more stuff to another country than it buys in return, a trade deficit arises in the first country and a trade surplus in the second. These add up to zero, being mirror images of each other, and it is natural to assume that this is a zero-sum game where surplus countries win and deficit countries lose. However, bilateral trade is actually almost never in balance because countries have different stages of economic development and different business cycles, as well as different advantages in producing specific goods, services, and commodities. 94 Chapter 5 | Global Whirlwinds This is even more true when looking at multilateral trade, since every country actually trades and invests with many other countries at once.

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eBook <www.wowebook.com> 170 Index Global whirlwinds (continued) economic primacy, 113 European banking crisis ECB, 102–103 federal funds market, 102 Federal Reserve, 103 global money market, 102 interbank market, 101 interbank-lending market, 102 interest rate and currency risks, 101 investment-banking industry, 101 recession, 103 short-and medium-term credit, 101 short-term funding and liquidity, 101 sovereign risk, 102 steroids, 103 globalization, 113 global money pump, 103–105 global trade, zero-sum game ants and grasshoppers, 96 cheap TV deal, 94–95 Chinese Central Bank, 94 currency manipulation, 95–96 multilateral trade, 94 political demagoguery, 94 hegemon, 113–116 sustainable development, 112 technology vs. friction, 105–106 US global economic leadership, 112 US losing clout, 111–112 war, settlement risk, 108–109 Western decline acceleration, 113 Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), 17 Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, 36 Great Depression, 5, 44, 61 Great Moderation, 16–18, 21, 61 “Green” economy, 85 Growth-killing austerity, 111 H Home equity lines of credit (HELOCs), 16 I Industrial Revolution, 77 Infinite customization, 68 J Joint-stock banking, 63, 76 L Laissez-faire economy, 84–86 Liberal arts, 132 Life after finance, 75 credit-driven economy, 76–77 death knell, consumer credit American optimism, 90 big data, 90 entrepreneurs starvation, 91–92 loan factories, 90 per-account/per-transaction, 90 securitization, 90 unbanking, 91 financial repression Bretton Woods system, 79 capital exports and foreignexchange transactions, 79 captive domestic audience, 79 debt restructuring, 78 GDP, 79 government banks ownership, 79 industrial policy, 86 monopolies, 86 negative real interest rates, 78, 79 prudential regulation, 79 rules, 80 subsidized green energy, 86 tax raising and lowering, 81–82 World War II, 79 Government expenditure, 75–76 low interest rates, 77–78 political direction, credit and investment formal taxation, 82 government-run utility, 83 Japanese banks, 83 laissez-faire economy myth, 84–86 Index market-driven banking system, 83 winners and losers, 83–84 risky business amalgamation, 88 coincidence, 88 competition, 89–90 joint-stock banks, 87 often-contradictory rules and requirements, 88 private partnerships, 87 separation of functions, 87 shareholder-owned banks, 87 small-town banks, 87 Life-line banking, 70 R Liquidity trap, 72 Ring fencing, 88 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 102 Rules-based regulation, 59, 61 M S “Market-centric” financial system, 110 Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), 108 Regulation process “Anglo-Saxon” world, 36 balance sheets and trading desks, 35 definition, 36 finance deregulation, 35–36 Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, 36 Triple A–rated bonds, 37 “ultra-safe” money market mutual fund, 37 Regulatory arbitrage, 61 Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), 31 Savings-and-loan (S&L) industry, 28, 30 Mass-market retail banking, 66 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules, 33 McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), 110 S&L industry.See Savings-and-loan industry Micro-regulation, 92 Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), 83 Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), 107 Moral hazard, 18 Straight-through procession, 107 N National Bank Act, 49 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 78 O Outsourcing, 13 P Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE), 90 Price discovery, 104 Principles-based regulation, 59 Printing money, 78 Professional/proprietary trading, 12 Subprime mortgage market, 66 T The Dodd-Frank Act, 49 Trillion-pound banking groups, 60 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), 39 U US Federal Reserve, 6 V Volcker rule, 88 W Working capital, 11 171 Broken Markets A User’s Guide to the Post-Finance Economy Kevin Mellyn Broken Markets: A User’s Guide to the Post-Finance Economy Copyright © 2012 by Kevin Mellyn All rights reserved.

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.
by Mitch Joel
Published 20 May 2013

The thinking was fairly basic: Having ten raving fans is better than blasting thousands of people who couldn’t care less, and now these fans are self-identifying in places like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter… It seemed to make a plausible argument. My thinking has since evolved (dramatically). It’s not a zero-sum game anymore. A business that is strong must have both components: a mass number of fans who are also deeply engaged. In a Facebook world of over one billion people connected and sharing, you can have both a mass number of people as well as a better understanding of who they are and what their needs are.

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If you think about this integration of e-commerce at the retail level (be it on a smartphone or a touchscreen installation), retailers may discover that a store in Sioux Falls sells as much inventory on certain products (or maybe more) than a flagship store in Times Square. Thinking that e-commerce kills the retail experience is simply bad thinking. People still like to go out, wander the malls, touch and see what’s new and exciting. It’s not a zero-sum game. The smarter retailers are going to wake up and realize that e-commerce will no longer be a vertical business within their retail experience… it’s going to quickly become horizontal across the organization. The digitization and ability for consumers to hit the retail level, but have access to the full inventory (and maybe even more products… some of which can even be virtual goods), is going to be the true shopping experience of the soon-to-be-future for retail.

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Kids do not need Google, a great math teacher is much better than an iPad app, and it’s important that kids know what an actual book is. But there’s something else we need to remember: Our values were created in a different time and in a different place. Let’s rephrase the question: Am I doing my children a service or disservice by not allowing their education to include computers, technology, and connectivity? This is not a zero-sum game. Think about it this way: The jobs that the majority of my friends are currently working at didn’t even exist as occupations when I was in high school. Should children be lugging around five textbooks in a backpack, or does an iPad give them not only a lighter load but also the ability to create, collaborate, and engage more with their peers (when used correctly)?

The Broken Ladder
by Keith Payne
Published 8 May 2017

Chapter 7: Inequality in Black and White since the first slave ship reached North America: I. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Whites seemed to view discrimination as a zero-sum game: M. I. Norton and S. R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6 (2011): 215–18. racial gaps in wealth: R. Kochhar and R. Fry, “Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines Since End of Great Recession,” Pew Research Center, December 12, 2014, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/.

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The two groups differed even more strikingly, though, in their perceptions of antiwhite discrimination. Black respondents thought antiwhite bias was not a problem in the 1950s and was still not a problem today. White respondents, in contrast, believed that antiwhite bias had steadily risen in the period in question. Whites seemed to view discrimination as a zero-sum game: The less discrimination they perceived against blacks, the more they saw it turned against whites. The trend was so stark in the eyes of white respondents that by the 2000s they judged discrimination against whites to be a bigger problem than discrimination against blacks. Notes: Blacks and whites include only non-Hispanics.

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention
by Simon Baron-Cohen
Published 14 Aug 2020

But this may also reflect that there was negative selection pressure on individuals with this brain type. Perhaps as well as conferring remarkable advantages in spotting if-and-then patterns this brain type also carries certain disadvantages, namely, being challenged socially. This would be expected if the tuning of the Empathy Circuit and the Systemizing Mechanism is a zero-sum game.6 That is, the higher one of these is tuned, the lower the other is tuned. We’ll come back to look at evidence for this relationship between these two brain circuits. Let’s have a closer look at hyper-systemizers, who, according to my theory, are central to the story of human invention because they systemize non-stop.

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And we confirmed this in the UK Brain Types Study, this time with 600,000 people.12 Not only were those in STEM more likely to be Type S or Extreme Type S, compared to those in non-STEM occupations, but those in STEM occupations on average also had a higher AQ. In the UK Brain Types Study, we also found that people who were Type S or Extreme Type S had a higher score on the AQ. This nailed it for us. Those with autism and those who are strong systemizers have similar minds. Let’s return to the idea that systemizing and empathizing can be a zero-sum game: the more you have of one capacity, the less you have of the other. If this is the case, we should expect to see a trade-off, a negative correlation between empathy and systemizing: the better you are at one, the worse you are at the other. The results from the UK Brain Types Study did show a small trade-off.13 This suggests that, while these two dimensions are largely independent of each other, they may also share a common biological factor.

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Treffert (2009), “The savant syndrome: An extraordinary condition: A synopsis: Past, present, future,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Series B, Biological Sciences 364(1522), 1351–1357; K. Hyltenstam (2016), Advanced proficiency and exceptional ability in second languages (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH); D. Kennedy and L. Squire (2007), “An analysis of calendar performance in two autistic calendar savants,” Learning and Memory 14(8), 533–538. 6. A zero-sum game would be expected if empathy and systemizing competed for some common biological resource. See N. Goldenfeld et al. (2005), “Empathizing and systemizing in males, females, and autism,” Clinical Neuropsychiatry 2, 338–345; and N. Goldenfeld et al. (2007), “Empathizing and systemizing in males, females, and autism: A test of the neural competition theory,” in T.

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 3 Aug 2020

For any one child to be gifted there must be others who are not. When I read policy writing and journalism about education, I am often reminded of Garrison Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.” By refusing to really define whose interests we’re advocating in a zero-sum game, we as a community of educators, researchers, and citizens have abdicated the basic intellectual work of our enterprise. Meritocracy, writ large, is a tool for reducing equality. That is its very function; the basic presumption is that some have more merit than others and should be rewarded for that merit.

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See teachers Eiseley, Loren Eisenhower era elementary schools median public school teacher pay norm-referenced state-mandated standardized tests and “Texas miracle” under socialism and universal childcare elite colleges and universities college admissions scandal of 2019 (Operation Varsity Blues) returns on attendance at and winning in contemporary capitalist society employment and advanced degree premium college unemployment premium and elite high schools and labor force participation rate under socialism and universal basic income enfranchisement, political Engels, Friedrich engineering programs equality and mobility social inequality types of equality equality of opportunity and behavioral genetics and blank-slate philosophy of education and Dewey, John impossibility of and income inequality and liberalism and mobility and morality Obama, Barack on and poverty and progressivism and racism equality of outcomes equality under socialism eugenics Every Student Succeeds Act extracurricular activities Facebook Fish, Jefferson M. Florida, Richard Flynn, James Flynn effect formative equality of opportunity. See also equality of opportunity Founding Fathers France, Anatole free college free market economics free trade Freud, Sigmund Friedman, Milton Friedman, Rose game theory. See zero-sum game gaps achievement and performance gaps gender gaps Obama on education gaps racial achievement gaps wage gaps Gates, Bill Gattaca (film) gender achievement gap gender essentialism gender wage gap genetic assortative mating genetics and achievement gaps and Flynn effect Genome-Wide Association Study and parenting and pseudoscientific racism Three Laws of Behavioral Genetics twin and adoption studies and Wilson effect See also behavioral genetics Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) Gentleman’s C gentrification genuine socialism gifted student programs globalization and collegiate arms race and knowledge economy and neoliberalism Goldin, Claudia “good life,” the Gottfredson, Linda GPA, high school graduation rates college high school and loosening of standards and moral choice and selection bias and special-needs students of women Great Recession Great Society liberals Green, Thomas Hill Greene, Jay P.

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wealth and bailouts and college admissions scandal of 2019 and equality of opportunity and inequality and social mobility and taxation and tutoring industry wealth segregation “weed out” classes Williams, Bernard Wilson, Ronald Wilson effect winners compared with being a person under socialism in contemporary capitalist society work. See employment; labor and teacher unions World War I World War II Yale University Yglesias, Matthew young adulthood zero-sum game of contemporary capitalism of meritocracy and mobility of traditional versus charter schools and value of college education zoning, residential About the Author FREDRIK DEBOER is a writer and academic. He has worked at Brooklyn College and has a PhD from Purdue University. His writing has appeared in such places as The New York Times, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Playboy, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, n+1, and Jacobin.

The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals
by Daniel R. Solin
Published 7 Nov 2006

. • Many hyperactive brokers and advisors in this system have successfully avoided being held to a fiduciary standard because they know they cannot meet that standard in their relationships with investors. 38 Your Broker or Advisor Is Keeping You from Being a Smart Investor In short, being a Hyperactive Investor is a fool's errand. It is a zero-sum game (or worse, when you consider transaction costs), except from the perspective of the hyperactive brokers and advisors. They make out just fine. Chapter 11 Brokers Aren't on Your Side It [is} a fundamental dishonesty, a fundamental problem that cuts to the core of the lack of integrity on Wall Street.

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It really doesn't matter if you invest in a mutual fund or a wrap account. If either or both are hyperactively managed, they are poor choices. The bottom line is that the combination of higher costs, lower performance and greater tax consequences make all investments touted as being able to beat the markets worse than a zero-sum game, which is why Smart Investors avoid them. Chapter 20 Brokers Understand Fees but Not Risk Odds are you don't know what the odds are. -Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich, Why Smart Peopk Make Big Monry Mistake; Costs incurred are one of the twO major differences between Smart Investors and H yperactive Investors.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

Wrong on the internet: A reference to an xkcd cartoon in which a man stayed up all night because it was his duty to argue with idiots who were wrong on the internet. WSOP: See: World Series of Poker. X-risk: See: existential risk. YOLO: An acronym for “you only live once.” An argument for being a degen or an effective hedonist. Zero-sum game: A situation in which one participant’s gain is exactly balanced by another’s loss, with the total utility remaining constant. Although zero-sum games were the original basis for game theory, many real-world scenarios like nuclear deterrence involve mixed motives blending elements of competition and cooperation. notes Chapter 0: Introduction Seminole Hard Rock: David Lyons, “Guitar Hotel to Make Its Bow as Seminole Hard Rock Flexes Financial Might,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, October 19, 2019, sun-sentinel.com/business/fl-bz-hard-rock-guitar-hotel-peek-20191018-xhnj3qwkv5fhbjtdgrrhkjtbxa-story.html.

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Health, nytimes.com/2020/12/20/health/virus-vaccine-game-theory.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT when OPEC colludes to set: “OPEC (Cartel),” Energy Education, energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/OPEC_(cartel). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT avoid confrontations with each other: Technically, these players are playing a zero-sum game, but it’s a zero-sum game between all players at the table. When two players with big chip stacks collide, they’re costing themselves money and transferring it to the table that’s just sitting idly by. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT call him Holden: I know the player’s real name but I’m not going to use it because I don’t want to make it seem as though I’m accusing him of misconduct—it was a highly ambiguous situation.

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And we don’t want competing firms to fix their prices: maybe it doesn’t seem so bad if Lupo’s and Francisco’s charge a little extra for a slice, but you probably feel differently when OPEC colludes to set the price of oil. Poker Isn’t Always Zero-Sum Either What about poker? You might think that it’s strictly a zero-sum game. If that’s the case, the prisoner’s dilemma does not apply to it. But there are some poker situations where players have an incentive to cooperate. The most common one is near the prize money in a tournament. A tournament ends when one player has won literally all of the chips and is the last player standing.

The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management
by Alexander Elder
Published 28 Sep 2014

Losers bring money into the markets, which is necessary for the prosperity of the trading industry. A Minus-Sum Game Winners in a zero-sum game make as much as losers lose. If you and I bet $20 on the direction of the next 100-point move in the Dow, one of us will collect $20 and the other will lose $20. A single bet has a component of luck, but the more knowledgeable person will keep winning more often than losing over a period of time. People buy the industry's propaganda about trading being a zero-sum game, take the bait, and open accounts. They don't realize that trading is a minus-sum game. Winners receive less than what losers lose because the industry drains money from the markets.

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It proposed new rules limiting leverage to 10 to 1. Frauds may include churning customer accounts, selling useless software, improperly managing “managed accounts,” false advertising, and Ponzi schemes. All the while, promoters claim that trading foreign exchange is a road to profits. The real forex market is a zero sum game, in which well-capitalized professional traders, many of whom work for banks, devote full-time attention to trading. An inexperienced retail trader has a significant information disadvantage. The retail trader always pays the bid-ask spread, which lowers his odds of winning. Retail forex traders are almost always undercapitalized and subject to the problem of “gambler's ruin.”

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See also Success bending the rules after desire for difficulty of and emotional trading essential components for and self-control vs. controlling markets by taking charge of your life and volume of trading Wisdom of crowds Wisdom of Crowds, The (James Surowiecki) Wishful thinking with classical charting giving trades “more room” as and stops Worldwide crowds Writing options Y Yahoo Finance Z Zero-sum game: forex market as trading as WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA. Table of Contents PREFACE Introduction 1. Trading—The Last Frontier 2. Psychology Is the Key 3. The Odds against You PART 1: Individual Psychology 4.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

At the societal level, though, there is a clear danger that this positional race doesn’t contribute much to overall prosperity. ‘The stock of status, measured as positive advantages, showed a sustained increase in the post-war years’, acknowledges the economic historian Avner Offer. ‘Much of the pay-off, however, was absorbed in positional competition’.30 It begins to look as though economic growth is a kind of ‘zero sum game’. The population as a whole gets richer. Some people are better off than others and positions in society may change. But the process adds little or nothing to overall wellbeing. We might even have to dub this a ‘negative sum game’. Because, ultimately, the environmental and social costs of the ‘game’ can have a profoundly negative impact on all of us.

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And there is little doubt that at the individual level social position counts. ‘A positive social ranking produces an inner glow that is also matched with a clear advantage in life expectation and health’, argues Avner Offer.13 But if this process is, as the previous chapter suggested, little more than a zero sum game, then there is little to lose, and perhaps quite a lot to gain, by changing it. A different form of social organisation – a more equal society – in which social positioning is either less important or signalled differently – is a clear possibility. This suggestion is borne out by the remarkable evidence marshalled by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level.

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INDEX Locators in italic refer to figures absolute decoupling 84–6; historical perspectives 89–96, 90, 92, 94, 95; mathematical relationship with relative decoupling 96–101, 111 abundance see opulence accounting errors, decoupling 84, 91 acquisition, instinctive 68 see also symbolic role of goods adaptation: diminishing marginal utility 51, 68; environmental 169; evolutionary 226 advertising, power of 140, 203–4 Africa 73, 75–7; life-expectancy 74; philosophy 227; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; growth 99; relative income effect 58, 75; schooling 78 The Age of Turbulence (Greenspan) 35 ageing populations 44, 81 agriculture 12, 148, 152, 220 Aids/HIV 77 algebra of inequality see inequality; mathematical models alienation: future visions 212, 218–19; geographical community 122–3; role of the state 205; selfishness vs. altruism 137; signals sent by society 131 alternatives: economic 101–2, 139–40, 157–8; hedonism 125–6 see also future visions; post-growth macroeconomics; reform altruism 133–8, 196, 207 amenities see public services/amenities Amish community, North America 128 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith) 123, 132 angelised growth see green growth animal welfare 220 anonymity/loneliness see alienation anthropological perspectives, consumption 70, 115 anti-consumerism 131 see also intrinsic values anxiety: fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15; novelty 116–17, 124, 211 Argentina 58, 78, 78, 80 Aristotle 48, 61 The Art of Happiness (Dalai Lama) 49 arts, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 assets, stranded 167–8 see also ownership austerity policies xxxiii–xxxv, 189; and financial crisis 24, 42–3; mathematical models 181 Australia 58, 78, 128, 206 authoritarianism 199 autonomy see freedom/autonomy Ayres, Robert 143 backfire effects 111 balance: private interests/common good 208; tradition/innovation 226 Bank for International Settlements 46 bank runs 157 banking system 29–30, 39, 153–7, 208; bonuses 37–8 see also financial crisis; financial system basic entitlements: enterprise as service 142; income 67, 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; limits to growth 63–4 see also education; food; health Basu, Sanjay 43 Baumol, William 112, 147, 222, 223; cost disease 170, 171, 172, 173 BBC survey, geographical community 122–3 Becker, Ernest 69 Belk, Russ 70, 114 belonging 212, 219 see also alienation; community; intrinsic values Bentham, Jeremy 55 bereavement, material possessions 114, 214–15 Berger, Peter 70, 214 Berry, Wendell 8 Better Growth, Better Climate (New Climate Economy report) 18 big business/corporations 106–7 biodiversity loss 17, 47, 62, 101 biological perspectives see evolutionary theory; human nature/psyche biophysical boundaries see limits (ecological) Black Monday 46 The Body Economic (Stuckler and Basu) 43 bond markets 30, 157 bonuses, banking 37–8 Bookchin, Murray 122 boom-and-bust cycles 157, 181 Booth, Douglas 117 borrowing behaviour 34, 118–21, 119 see also credit; debt Boulding, Elise 118 Boulding, Kenneth 1, 5, 7 boundaries, biophysical see limits (ecological) bounded capabilities for flourishing 61–5 see also limits (flourishing within) Bowen, William 147 Bowling Alone (Putnam) 122 Brazil 58, 88 breakdown of community see alienation; social stability bubbles, economic 29, 33, 36 Buddhist monasteries, Thailand 128 buen vivir concept, Ecuador xxxi, 6 built-in obsolescence 113, 204, 220 Bush, George 121 business-as-usual model 22, 211; carbon dioxide emissions 101; crisis of commitment 195; financial crisis 32–8; growth 79–83, 99; human nature 131, 136–7; need for reform 55, 57, 59, 101–2, 162, 207–8, 227; throwaway society 113; wellbeing 124 see also financial systems Canada 75, 206, 207 capabilities for flourishing 61–5; circular flow of the economy 113; future visions 218, 219; and income 77; progress measures 50–5, 54; role of material abundance 67–72; and prosperity 49; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; role of shame 123–4; role of the state 200 see also limits (flourishing within); wellbeing capital 105, 107–10 see also investment Capital in the 21st Century (Piketty) 33, 176, 177 Capital Institute, USA 155 capitalism 68–9, 80; structures 107–13, 175; types 105–7, 222, 223 car industry, financial crisis 40 carbon dioxide emissions see greenhouse gas emissions caring professions, valuing 130, 147, 207 see also social care Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 213 causal path analysis, subjective wellbeing 59 Central Bank 154 central human capabilities 64 see also capabilities for flourishing The Challenge of Affluence (Offer) 194 change see alternatives; future visions; novelty/innovation; post-growth macroeconomics; reform Chicago school of economics 36, 156 children: advertising to 204; labour 62, 154; mortality 74–5, 75, 206 Chile xxxiii, xxxvii, 58, 74, 74, 75, 76 China: decoupling 88; GDP per capita 75; greenhouse gas emissions 91; growth 99; life expectancy 74; philosophy 7; post-financial crisis 45–6; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; relative income effect 58; resource use 94; savings 27; schooling 76 choice, moving beyond consumerism 216–18 see also freedom/autonomy Christian doctrine see religious perspectives chromium, commodity price 13 Cinderella economy 219–21, 224 circular economy 144, 220 circular flow of the economy 107, 113 see also engine of growth citizen’s income 207 see also universal basic income civil unrest see social stability Clean City Law, São Paulo 204 climate change xxxv, 22, 47; critical boundaries 17–20; decoupling 85, 86, 87, 98; fatalism 186; investment needs 152; role of the state 192, 198, 201–2 see also greenhouse gas emissions Climate Change Act (2008), UK 198 clothing see basic entitlements Club of Rome, Limits to Growth report xxxii, xxxiii, 8, 11–16, Cobb, John 54 collectivism 191 commercial bond markets 30, 157 commitment devices/crisis of 192–5, 197 commodity prices: decoupling 88; financial crisis 26; fluctuation/volatility 14, 21; resource constraints 13–14 common good: future visions 218, 219; vs. freedom and autonomy 193–4; vs. private interests 208; role of the state 209 common pool resources 190–2, 198, 199 see also public services/amenities communism 187, 191 community: future visions of 219–20; geographical 122–3; investment 155–6, 204 see also alienation; intrinsic values comparison, social 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect competition 27, 112; positional 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also struggle for existence complexity, economic systems 14, 32, 108, 153, 203 compulsive shopping 116 see also consumerism Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (CoP21) 19 conflicted state 197, 201, 209 connectedness, global 91, 227 conspicuous consumption 115 see also language of goods consumer goods see language of goods; material goods consumer sovereignty 196, 198 consumerism 4, 21, 22, 103–4, 113–16; capitalism 105–13, 196; choice 196; engine of growth 104, 108, 120, 161; existential fear of death 69, 212–15; financial crisis 24, 28, 39, 103; moving beyond 216–18; novelty and anxiety 116–17; post-growth economy 166–7; role of the state 192–3, 196, 199, 202–5; status 211; tragedy of 140 see also demand; materialism contemplative dimensions, simplicity 127 contraction and convergence model 206–7 coordinated market economies 27, 106 Copenhagen Accord (2009) 19 copper, commodity prices 13 corporations/big business 106–7 corruption 9, 131, 186, 187, 189 The Cost Disease: Why Computers get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t (Baumol) 171, 172 Costa Rica 74, 74, 76 countercyclical spending 181–2, 182, 188 crafts/craft economies 147, 149, 170, 171 creative destruction 104, 112, 113, 116–17 creativity 8, 79; and consumerism 113, 116; future visions 142, 144, 147, 158, 171, 200, 220 see also novelty/innovation credit, private: deflationary forces 44; deregulation 36; financial crisis 26, 27, 27–31, 34, 36, 41; financial system weaknesses 32–3, 37; growth imperative hypothesis 178–80; mortgage loans 28–9; reforms in financial system 157; spending vs. saving behaviour of ordinary people 118–19; and stimulation of growth 36 see also debt (public) credit unions 155–6 crises: of commitment 192–5; financial see financial crisis critical boundaries, biophysical see limits (ecological) Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi 127 Cuba: child mortality 75; life expectancy 74, 77, 78, 78; response to economic hardship 79–80; revolution 56; schooling 76 Cushman, Philip 116 Dalai Lama 49, 52 Daly, Herman xxxii, 54, 55, 160, 163, 165 Darwin, Charles 132–3 Das Kapital (Marx) 225 Davidson, Richard 49 Davos World Economic Forum 46 Dawkins, Richard 134–5 de Mandeville, Bernard 131–2, 157 death, denial of 69, 104, 115, 212–15 debt, public-sector 81; deflationary forces 44; economic stability 81; financial crisis 24, 26–32, 27, 37, 41, 42, 81; financial systems 28–32, 153–7; money creation 178–9; post-growth economy 178–9, 223 Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (Graeber) 28 decoupling xix, xx, xxxvii, 21, 84–7; dilemma of growth 211; efficiency measures 84, 86, 87, 88, 95, 104; green growth 163, 163–5; historical perspectives 87–96, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95; need for new economic model 101–2; relationship between relative and absolute 96–101 deep emission and resource cuts 99, 102 deficit spending 41, 43 deflationary forces, post-financial crisis 43–7, 45 degrowth movement 161–3, 177 demand 104, 113–16, 166–7; post-financial crisis 44–5; post-growth economy 162, 164, 166–9, 171–2, 174–5 dematerialisation 102, 143 democratisation, and wellbeing 59 deposit guarantees 35 deregulation 27, 34, 36, 196 desire, role in consumer behaviour 68, 69, 70, 114 destructive materialism 104, 112, 113, 116–17 Deutsche Bank 41 devaluation of currency 30, 45 Dichter, Ernest 114 digital economy 44, 219–20 dilemma of growth xxxi, 66–7, 104, 210; basic entitlements 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; decoupling 85, 87, 164; degrowth movement 160–3; economic stability 79–83, 174–6; material abundance 67–72; moving beyond 165, 166, 183–4; role of the state 198 diminishing marginal utility: alternative hedonism 125, 126; wellbeing 51–2, 57, 60, 73, 75–6, 79 disposable incomes 27, 67, 118 distributed ownership 223 Dittmar, Helga 126 domestic debt see credit dopamine 68 Dordogne, mindfulness community 128 double movement of society 198 Douglas, Mary 70 Douthwaite, Richard 178 downshifting 128 driving analogy, managing change 16–17 durability, consumer goods 113, 204, 220 dynamic systems, managing change 16–17 Eastern Europe 76, 122 Easterlin, Richard 56, 57, 59; paradox 56, 58 eco-villages, Findhorn community 128 ecological investment 101, 166–70, 220 see also investment ecological limits see limits (ecological) ecological (ecosystem) services 152, 169, 223 The Ecology of Money (Douthwaite) 178 economic growth see growth economic models see alternatives; business-as-usual model; financial systems; future visions; mathematical models; post-growth macroeconomics economic output see efficiency; productivity ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ (Keynes) 145 economic stability 22, 154, 157, 161; financial system weaknesses 34, 35, 36, 180; growth 21, 24, 67, 79–83, 174–6, 210; post-growth economy 161–3, 165, 174–6, 208, 219; role of the state 181–3, 195, 198, 199 economic structures: post-growth economy 227; financial system reforms 224; role of the state 205; selfishness 137 see also business-as-usual model; financial systems ecosystem functioning 62–3 see also limits (ecological) ecosystem services 152, 169, 223 Ecuador xxxi, 6 education: Baumol’s cost disease 171, 172; and income 67, 76, 76; investment in 150–1; role of the state 193 see also basic entitlements efficiency measures 84, 86–8, 95, 104, 109–11, 142–3; energy 41, 109–11; growth 111, 211; investment 109, 151; of scale 104 see also labour productivity; relative decoupling Ehrlich, Paul 13, 96 elasticity of substitution, labour and capital 177–8 electricity grid 41, 151, 156 see also energy Elgin, Duane 127 Ellen MacArthur Foundation 144 emissions see greenhouse gas emissions employee ownership 223 employment intensity vs. carbon dioxide emissions 148 see also labour productivity empty self 116, 117 see also consumerism ends above means 159 energy return on investment (EROI) 12, 169 energy services/systems 142: efficiency 41, 109–11; inputs/intensity 87–8, 151; investment 41, 109–10, 151–2; renewable xxxv, 41, 168–9 engine of growth 145; consumerism 104, 108, 161; services 143, 170–4 see also circular flow of the economy enough is enough see limits enterprise as service 140, 141–4, 158 see also novelty/innovation entitlements see basic entitlements entrepreneur as visionary 112 entrepreneurial state 220 Environmental Assessment Agency, Netherlands 62 environmental quality 12 see also pollution environmentalism 9 EROI (energy return on investment) 12, 169 Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus) 9–11, 132–3 evolutionary map, human heart 136, 136 evolutionary theory 132–3; common good 193; post-growth economy 226; psychology 133–5; selfishness and altruism 196 exchange values 55, 61 see also gross domestic product existential fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15 exponential expansion 1, 11, 20–1, 210 see also growth external debt 32, 42 extinctions/biodiversity loss 17, 47, 62, 101 Eyres, Harry 215 Fable of the Bees (de Mandeville) 131–2 factor inputs 109–10 see also capital; labour; resource use fast food 128 fatalism 186 FCCC (Framework Convention on Climate Change) 92 fear of death, existential 69, 104, 115, 212–15 feedback loops 16–17 financial crisis (2008) 6, 23–5, 32, 77, 103; causes and culpability 25–8; financial system weaknesses 32–7, 108; Keynesianism 37–43, 188; nationalisation of financial sector 188; need for financial reforms 175; role of debt 24, 26–32, 27, 81, 179; role of state 191; slowing of growth 43–7, 45; spending vs. saving behaviour of ordinary people 118–21, 119; types/definitions of capitalism 106; youth unemployment 144–5 financial systems: common pool resources 192; debt-based/role of debt 28–32, 153–7; post-growth economy 179, 208; systemic weaknesses 32–7; and wellbeing 47 see also banking system; business-as-usual model; financial crisis; reform Findhorn community 128 finite limits of planet see limits (ecological) Fisher, Irving 156, 157 fishing rights 22 flourishing see capabilities for flourishing; limits; wellbeing flow states 127 Flynt, Larry 40 food 67 see also basic entitlements Ford, Henry 154 forestry/forests 22, 192 Forrester, Jay 11 fossil fuels 11, 20 see also oil Foucault, Michel 197 fracking 14, 15 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 92 France: GDP per capita 58, 75, 76; inequality 206; life-expectancy 74; mindfulness community 128; working hours 145 free market 106: financial crisis 35, 36, 37, 38, 39; ideological controversy/conflict 186–7, 188 freedom/autonomy: vs. common good 193–4; consumer 22, 68–9; language of goods 212; personal choices for improvement 216–18; wellbeing 49, 59, 62 see also individualism Friedman, Benjamin 176 Friedman, Milton 36, 156, 157 frugality 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 fun (more fun with less stuff) 129, 217 future visions 2, 158, 217–21; community banking 155–6; dilemma of growth 211; enterprise as service 140, 141–4, 147–8, 158; entrepreneur as visionary 112; financial crisis as opportunity 25; and growth 165–6; investment 22, 101–2, 140, 149–53, 158, 169, 208; money as social good 140, 153–7, 158; processes of change 185; role of the state 198, 199, 203; timescales for change 16–17; work as participation 140, 144–9, 148, 158 see also alternatives; post-growth macroeconomics; reform Gandhi, Mahatma 127 GDP see gross domestic product gene, selfish 134–5 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) 54, 54 geographical community 122–3 Germany xxxi; Federal Ministry of Finance 224–5; inequality 206; relative income effect 58; trade balance 31; work as participation 146 Glass Steagal Act 35 Global Commodity Price Index (1992–2015) 13 global corporations 106–7 global economy 98: culture 70; decoupling 86–8, 91, 93–5, 95, 97, 98, 100; exponential expansion 20–1; inequality 4, 5–6; interconnectedness 91, 227; post-financial crisis slowing of growth 45 Global Research report (HSBC) 41 global warming see climate change Godley, Wynne 179 Goldman Sachs 37 good life 3, 6; moral dimension 63, 104; wellbeing 48, 50 goods see language of goods; material goods; symbolic role of goods Gordon, Robert 44 governance 22, 185–6; commons 190–2; crisis of commitment 192–5, 197; economic stability 34, 35; establishing limits 200–8, 206; growth 195–9; ideological controversy/conflict 186–9; moving towards change 197–200, 220–1; post-growth economy 181–3, 182; power of corporations 106; for prosperity 209; signals 130 government as household metaphor 30, 42 governmentality 197, 198 GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) 54, 54 Graeber, David 28 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act 35 Great Depression 39–40 Greece: austerity xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxvii, 43; energy inputs 88; financial crisis 28, 30, 31, 77; life expectancy 74; schooling 76; relative income effect 58; youth unemployment 144 Green Economy initiative 41 green: growth xxxvii, 18, 85, 153, 166, 170; investment 41 Green New Deal, UNEP 40–1, 152, 188 greenhouse gas emissions 18, 85, 86, 91, 92; absolute decoupling 89–92, 90, 92, 98–101, 100; dilemma of growth 210–11; vs. employment intensity 148; future visions 142, 151, 201–2, 220; Kyoto Protocol 18, 90; reduction targets 19–20; relative decoupling 87, 88, 89, 93, 98–101, 100 see also climate change Greenspan, Alan 35 gross domestic product (GDP) per capita 3–5, 15, 54; climate change 18; decoupling 85, 93, 94; financial crisis 27, 28, 32; green growth 163–5; life expectancy 74, 75, 78; as measure of prosperity 3–4, 5, 53–5, 54, 60–1; post-financial crisis 43, 44; post-growth economy 207; schooling 76; wellbeing 55–61, 58 see also income growth xxxvii; capitalism 105; credit 36, 178–80; decoupling 85, 96–101; economic stability 21, 24, 67, 80, 210; financial crisis 37, 38; future visions 209, 223, 224; inequality 177; labour productivity 111; moving beyond 165, 166; novelty 112; ownership 105; post-financial crisis slowing 43–7, 45; prosperity as 3–7, 23, 66; role of the state 195–9; sustainable investment 166–70; wellbeing 59–60; as zero sum game 57 see also dilemma of growth; engine of growth; green growth; limits to growth; post-growth macroeconomy growth imperative hypothesis 37, 174, 175, 177–80, 183 habit formation, acquisition as 68 Hall, Peter 106, 188 Hamilton, William 134 Hansen, James 17 happiness see wellbeing/happiness Happiness (Layard) 55 Hardin, Garrett 190–1 Harvey, David 189, 192 Hayek, Friedrich 187, 189, 191 health: Baumol’s cost disease 171, 172; inequality 72–3, 205–6, 206; investment 150–1; and material abundance 67, 68; personal choices for improvement 217; response to economic hardship 80; role of the state 193 see also basic entitlements Heath, Edward 66, 82 hedonism 120, 137, 196; alternatives 125–6 Hirsch, Fred xxxii–xxxiii historical perspectives: absolute decoupling 86, 89–96, 90, 92, 94, 95; relative decoupling 86, 87–9, 89 Holdren, John 96 holistic solutions, post-growth economy 175 household finances: house purchases 28–9; spending vs. saving behaviour 118–20, 119 see also credit household metaphor, government as 30, 42 HSBC Global Research report 41 human capabilities see capabilities for flourishing human happiness see wellbeing/happiness human nature/psyche 3, 132–5, 138; acquisition 68; alternative hedonism 125; evolutionary map of human heart 136, 136; intrinsic values 131; meaning/purpose 49–50; novelty/innovation 116; selfishness vs. altruism 133–8; short-termism/living for today 194; spending vs. saving behaviour 34, 118–21, 119; symbolic role of goods 69 see also intrinsic values human rights see basic entitlements humanitarian perspectives: financial crisis 24; growth 79; inequality 5, 52, 53 see also intrinsic values hyperbolic discounting 194 hyperindividualism 226 see also individualism hyper-materialisation 140, 157 I Ching (Chinese Book of Changes) 7 Iceland: financial crisis 28; life expectancy 74, 75; relative income effect 56; response to economic hardship 79–80; schooling 76; sovereign money system 157 identity construction 52, 69, 115, 116, 212, 219 IEA (International Energy Agency) 14, 152 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 45, 156–7 immaterial goods 139–40 see also intrinsic values; meaning/purpose immortality, symbolic role of goods 69, 104, 115, 212–14 inclusive growth see inequality; smart growth income 3, 4, 5, 66, 124; basic entitlements 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; child mortality 74–5, 75; decoupling 96; economic stability 82; education 76; life expectancy 72, 73, 74, 77–9, 78; poor nations 67; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; tax revenues 81 see also gross domestic product INDCs (intended nationally determined commitments) 19 India: decoupling 99; growth 99; life expectancy 74, 75; philosophy 127; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; savings 27; schooling 76 indicators of environmental quality 96 see also biodiversity; greenhouse gas emissions; pollution; resource use individualism 136, 226; progressive state 194–7, 199, 200, 203, 207 see also freedom/autonomy industrial development 12 see also technological advances inequality 22, 67; basic entitlements 72; child mortality 75, 75; credible alternatives 219, 224; deflationary forces 44; fatalism 186; financial crisis 24; global 4, 5–6, 99, 100; financial system weaknesses 32–3; post-growth economy 174, 176–8; role of the state 198, 205–7, 206; selfishness vs. altruism 137; symbolic role of goods 71; wellbeing 47, 104 see also poverty infant mortality rates 72, 75 inflation 26, 30, 110, 157, 167 infrastructure, civic 150–1 Inglehart, Ronald 58, 59 innovation see novelty/innovation; technological advances inputs 80–1 see also capital; labour productivity; resource use Inside Job documentary film 26 instant gratification 50, 61 instinctive acquisition 68 Institute for Fiscal Studies 81 Institute for Local Self-Reliance 204 institutional structures 130 see also economic structures; governance intended nationally determined commitments (INDCs) 19 intensity factor, technological 96, 97 see also technological advances intentional communities 127–9 interconnectedness, global 91, 227 interest payments/rates 39, 43, 110; financial crisis 29, 30, 33, 39; post-growth economy 178–80 see also credit; debt Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 18, 19, 201–2 International Energy Agency (IEA) 14, 152 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 45, 156–7 intrinsic values 126–31, 135–6, 212; role of the state 199, 200 see also belonging; community; meaning/purpose; simplicity/frugality investment 107–10, 108; ecological/sustainable 101, 152, 153, 166–70, 220; and innovation 112; loans 29; future visions 22, 101–2, 140, 149–53, 158, 169, 208, 220; and savings 108; social 155, 156, 189, 193, 208, 220–3 invisible hand metaphor 132, 133, 187 IPAT equation, relative and absolute decoupling 96 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 18, 19, 201–2 Ireland 28; inequality 206; life expectancy 74, 75; schooling 76; wellbeing 58 iron cage of consumerism see consumerism iron ore 94 James, Oliver 205 James, William 68 Japan: equality 206; financial crisis 27, 45; life expectancy 74, 76, 79; relative income effect 56, 58; resource use 93; response to economic hardship 79–80 Jefferson, Thomas 185 Jobs, Steve 210 Johnson, Boris 120–1 Kahneman, Daniel 60 Kasser, Tim 126 keeping up with the Joneses 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect Kennedy, Robert 48, 53 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesianism 23, 34, 120, 174, 181–3, 187–8; financial crisis 37–43; financial system reforms 157; part-time working 145; steady state economy 159, 162 King, Alexander 11 Krugman, Paul 39, 85, 86, 102 Kyoto Protocol (1992) 18, 90 labour: child 62, 154; costs 110; division of 158; elasticity of substitution 177, 178; intensity 109, 148, 208; mobility 123; production inputs 80, 109; structures of capitalism 107 labour productivity 80–1, 109–11; Baumol’s cost disease 170–2; and economic growth 111; future visions 220, 224; investment as commitment 150; need for investment 109; post-growth economy 175, 208; services as engine of growth 170; sustainable investment 166, 170; trade off with resource use 110; work-sharing 145, 146, 147, 148, 148, 149 Lahr, Christin 224–5 laissez-faire capitalism 187, 195, 196 see also free market Lakoff, George 30 language of goods 212; material footprint of 139–40; signalling of social status 71; and wellbeing 124 see also consumerism; material goods; symbolic role of goods Layard, Richard 55 leadership, political 199 see also governance Lebow, Victor 120 Lehman Brothers, bankruptcy 23, 25, 26, 118 leisure economy 204 liberal market economies 106, 107; financial crisis 27, 35–6 life expectancy: and income 72, 73, 74, 77–9, 78; inequality 206; response to economic hardship 80 see also basic entitlements life-satisfaction 73; inequality 205; relative income effect 55–61, 58 see also wellbeing/happiness limits, ecological 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 20–2; climate change 17–20; decoupling 86; financial crisis 23–4; growth 21, 165, 210; post-growth economy 201–2, 226–7; role of the state 198, 200–2, 206–7; and social boundaries 141; wellbeing 62–63, 185 limits, flourishing within 61–5, 185; alternative hedonism 125–6; intrinsic values 127–31; moving towards 215, 218, 219, 221; paradox of materialism 121–23; prosperity 67–72, 113, 212; role of the state 201–2, 205; selfishness 131–8; shame 123–4; spending vs. saving behaviour 118–21, 119 see also sustainable prosperity limits to growth: confronting 7–8; exceeding 20–2; wellbeing 62–3 Limits to Growth report (Club of Rome) xxxii, xxxiii, 8, 11–16 ‘The Living Standard’ essay (Sen) 50, 123–4 living standards 82 see also prosperity Lloyd, William Forster 190 loans 154; community investment 155–6; financial system weaknesses 34 see also credit; debt London School of Economics 25 loneliness 123, 137 see also alienation long-term: investments 222; social good 219 long-term wellbeing vs. short-term pleasures 194, 197 longevity see life expectancy love 212 see also intrinsic values low-carbon transition 19, 220 LowGrow model for the Canadian economy 175 MacArthur Foundation 144 McCracken, Grant 115 Malthus, Thomas Robert 9–11, 132–3, 190 market economies: coordinated 27, 106; liberal 27, 35–6, 106, 107 market liberalism 106, 107; financial crisis 27, 35–6; wellbeing 47 marketing 140, 203–4 Marmot review, health inequality in the UK 72 Marx, Karl/Marxism 9, 189, 192, 225 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 11, 12, 15 material abundance see opulence material goods 68–9; identity 52; language of 139–40; and wellbeing 47, 48, 49, 51, 65, 126 see also symbolic role of goods material inputs see resource use materialism: and fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15; and intrinsic values 127–31; paradox of 121–3; price of 126; and religion 115; values 126, 135–6 see also consumerism mathematical models/simulations 132; austerity policies 181; countercyclical spending 181–2, 182; decoupling 84, 91, 96–101; inequality 176–8; post-growth economy 164; stock-flow consistent 179–80 Mawdsley, Emma 70 Mazzucato, Mariana 193, 220 MDG (Millennium Development Goals) 74–5 Meadows, Dennis and Donella 11, 12, 15, 16 meaning/purpose 2, 8, 22; beyond material goods 212–16; consumerism 69, 203, 215; intrinsic values 127–31; moving towards 218–20; wellbeing 49, 52, 60, 121–2; work 144, 146 see also intrinsic values means and ends 159 mental health: inequality 206; meaning/purpose 213 metaphors: government as household 30, 42; invisible hand 132, 133, 187 Middle East, energy inputs 88 Miliband, Ed 199 Mill, John Stuart 125, 159, 160, 174 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 74–5 mindfulness 128 Minsky, Hyman 34, 35, 40, 182, 208 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 11, 12, 15 mixed economies 106 mobility of labour, loneliness index 123 Monbiot, George 84, 85, 86, 91 money: creation 154, 157, 178–9; and prosperity 5; as social good 140, 153–7, 158 see also financial systems monopoly power, corporations 106–7 The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Friedman) 82, 176 moral dimensions, good life 63 see also intrinsic values moral hazards, separation of risk from reward 35 ‘more fun with less stuff’ 129, 217 mortality fears 69, 104, 115, 212–15 mortality rates, and income 74, 74–6, 75 mortgage loans 28–9, 35 multinational corporations 106–7 national debt see debt, public-sector nationalisation 191; financial crisis 38, 188 natural selection 132–3 see also struggle for existence nature, rights of 6–7 negative emissions 98–9 negative feedback loops 16–17 Netherlands 58, 62, 206, 207 neuroscientific perspectives: flourishing 68, 69; human behaviour 134 New Climate Economy report Better Growth, Better Climate 18 New Deal, USA 39 New Economics Foundation 175 nickel, commodity prices 13 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001) 121 Nordhaus, William 171, 172–3 North America 128, 155 see also Canada; United States Norway: advertising 204; inequality 206; investment as commitment 151–2; life expectancy 74; relative income effect 58; schooling 76 novelty/innovation 104, 108, 113; and anxiety 116–17, 124, 211; crisis of commitment 195; dilemma of growth 211; human psyche 135–6, 136, 137; investment 150, 166, 168; post-growth economy 226; role of the state 196, 197, 199; as service 140, 141–4, 158; symbolic role of goods 114–16, 213 see also technological advances Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler and Sunstein) 194–5 Nussbaum, Martha 64 nutrient loading, critical boundaries 17 nutrition 67 see also basic entitlements obesity 72, 78, 206 obsolescence, built in 113, 204, 220 oceans: acidification 17; common pool resources 192 Offer, Avner 57, 61, 71, 194, 195 oil prices 14, 21; decoupling 88; financial crisis 26; resource constraints 15 oligarchic capitalism 106, 107 opulence 50–1, 52, 67–72 original sin 9, 131 Ostrom, Elinor and Vincent 190, 191 output see efficiency; gross domestic product; productivity ownership: and expansion 105; private vs. public 9, 105, 191, 219, 223; new models 223–4; types/definitions of capitalism 105–7 Oxfam 141 paradoxes: materialism 121–3; thrift 120 Paris Agreement 19, 101, 201 participation in society 61, 114, 122, 129, 137; future visions 200, 205, 218, 219, 225; work as 140–9, 148, 157, 158 see also social inclusion part-time working 145, 146, 149, 175 Peccei, Aurelio 11 Perez, Carlota 112 performing arts, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 personal choice 216–18 see also freedom/autonomy personal property 189, 191 Pickett, Kate 71, 205–6 Piketty, Thomas 33, 176, 177 planetary boundaries see limits (ecological) planning for change 17 pleasure 60–1 see also wellbeing/happiness Plum Village mindfulness community 128 Polanyi, Karl 198 policy see governance political leadership 199 see also governance Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts 41 pollution 12, 21, 53, 95–6, 143 polycentric governance 191, 192 Poor Laws 10 poor nations see poverty population increase 3, 12, 63, 96, 97, 190; Malthus on 9–11, 132–3 porn industry 40 Portugal 28, 58, 88, 206 positional competition 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also social comparison positive feedback loops 16–17 post-growth capitalism 224 post-growth macroeconomics 159–60, 183–4, 221; credit 178–80; degrowth movement 161–3; economic stability 174–6; green growth 163–5; inequality 176–8; role of state 181–3, 182, 200–8, 206; services 170–4; sustainable investment 166–70 see also alternatives; future visions; reform poverty 4, 5–6, 216; basic entitlements 72; flourishing within limits 212; life expectancy 74, 74; need for new economic model 101; symbolic role of goods 70; wellbeing 48, 59–60, 61, 67 see also inequality; relative income effect power politics 200 predator–prey analogy 103–4, 117 private credit see credit private vs. public: common good 208; ownership 9, 105, 191, 219, 223; salaries 130 privatisation 191, 219 product lifetimes, obsolescence 113, 204, 220 production: inputs 80–1; ownership 191, 219, 223 productivity: investment 109, 167, 168, 169; post-growth economy 224; services as engine of growth 171, 172, 173; targets 147; trap 175 see also efficiency measures; labour productivity; resource productivity profits: definitions of capitalism 105; dilemma of growth 211; efficiency measures 87; investment 109; motive 104; post-growth economy 224; and wages 175–8 progress 2, 50–5, 54 see also novelty/innovation; technological advances progressive sector, Baumol’s cost disease 171 progressive state 185, 220–2; contested 186–9; countering consumerism 202–5; equality measures 205–7, 206; governance of the commons 190–2; governance as commitment device 192–5; governmentality of growth 195–7; limit-setting 201–2; moving towards 197–200; post-growth macroeconomics 207–8, 224; prosperity 209 prosocial behaviour 198 see also social contract prosperity 1–3, 22, 121; capabilities for flourishing 61–5; and growth 3–7, 23, 66, 80, 160; and income 3–4, 5, 66–7; limits of 67–72, 113, 212; materialistic vision 137; progress measures 50–5, 54; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; social perspectives 2, 22, 48–9; state roles 209 see also capabilities for flourishing; post-growth macroeconomics; sustainable prosperity; wellbeing prudence, financial 120, 195, 221; financial crisis 33, 34, 35 public sector spending: austerity policies 189; countercyclical spending strategy 181–2, 182; welfare economy 169 public services/amenities: common pool resources 190–2, 198, 199; future visions 204, 218–20; investment 155–6, 204; ownership 223 see also private vs. public; service-based economies public transport 41, 129, 193, 217 purpose see meaning/purpose Putnam, Robert 122 psyche, human see human nature/psyche quality, environmental 12 see also pollution quality of life: enterprise as service 142; inequality 206; sustainable 128 quality to throughput ratios 113 quantitative easing 43 Queen Elizabeth II 25, 32, 34, 37 quiet revolution 127–31 Raworth, Kate 141 Reagan, Ronald 8 rebound phenomenon 111 recession 23–4, 28, 81, 161–3 see also financial crisis recreation/leisure industries 143 recycling 129 redistribution of wealth 52 see also inequality reforms 182–3, 222; economic structures 224; and financial crisis 103; financial systems 156–8, 180 see also alternatives; future visions; post-growth economy relative decoupling 84–5, 86; historical perspectives 87–9, 89; relationship with absolute decoupling 96–101, 111 relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also social comparison religious perspectives 9–10, 214–15; materialism as alternative to religion 115; original sin 9, 131; wellbeing 48, 49 see also existential fear of death renewable energy xxxv, 41, 168–169 repair/renovation 172, 220 resource constraints 3, 7, 8, 11–15, 47 resource productivity 110, 151, 168, 169, 220 resource use: conflicts 22; credible alternatives 101, 220; decoupling 84–9, 92–5, 94, 95; and economic output 142–4; investment 151, 153, 168, 169; trade off with labour costs 110 retail therapy 115 see also consumerism; shopping revenues, state 222–3 see also taxation revolution 186 see also social stability rights: environment/nature 6–7; human see basic entitlements risk, financial 24, 25, 33, 35 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek) 187 Robinson, Edward 132 Robinson, Joan 159 Rockström, Johan 17, 165 romantic movement 9–10 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 35, 39 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 9, 131 Russia 74, 76, 77–80, 78, 122 sacred canopy 214, 215 salaries: private vs. public sector 130, 171; and profits 175–8 Sandel, Michael 150, 164, 218 São Paulo, Clean City Law 204 Sardar, Zia 49, 50 Sarkozy, Nicolas xxxi, 53 savage state, romantic movement 9–10 savings 26–7, 28, 107–9, 108; investment 149; ratios 34, 118–20, 119 scale, efficiencies of 104 Scandinavia 27, 122, 204 scarcity, managing change 16–17 Schumpeter, Joseph 112 Schwartz, Shalom 135–6, 136 schooling see education The Science of Desire (Dichter) 114 secular stagnation 43–7, 45, 173 securitisation, mortgage loans 35 security: moving towards 219; and wellbeing 48, 61 self-development 204 self-expression see identity construction self-transcending behaviours see transcendence The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) 134–5 selfishness 133–8, 196 Sen, Amartya 50, 52, 61–2, 123–4 service concept/servicization 140–4, 147–8, 148, 158 service-based economies 219; engine of growth 170–4; substitution between labour and capital 178; sustainable investment 169–70 see also public services SFC (stock-flow consistent) economic models 179–80 shame 123–4 shared endeavours, post-growth economy 227 Sheldon, Solomon 214 shelter see basic entitlements shopping 115, 116, 130 see also consumerism short-termism/living for today 194, 197, 200 signals: sent out by society 130, 193, 198, 203, 207; social status 71 see also language of goods Simon, Julian 13 simplicity/simple life 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 simulations see mathematical models/simulations slow: capital 170; movement 128 smart growth 85, 163–5 see also green growth Smith, Adam 51, 106–7, 123, 132, 187 social assets 220 social boundaries (minimum standards) 141 see also basic entitlements social care 150–1 see also caring professions social comparison 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect social contract 194, 198, 199, 200 social inclusion 48, 69–71, 114, 212 see also participation in society social investment 155, 156, 189, 193, 208, 220–3 social justice 198 see also inequality social logic of consumerism 114–16, 204 social stability 24, 26, 80, 145, 186, 196, 205 see also alienation social status see status social structures 80, 129, 130, 137, 196, 200, 203 social tolerance, and wellbeing 59, 60 social unrest see social stability social wage 40 social welfare: financial reforms 182–3; public sector spending 169 socialism 223 Sociobiology (Wilson) 134 soil integrity 220 Solon, quotation 47, 49, 71 Soper, Kate 125–6 Soros, George 36 Soskice, David 106 Soviet Union, former 74, 76, 77–80, 78, 122 Spain 28, 58, 144, 206 SPEAR organization, responsible investment 155 species loss/extinctions 17, 47, 62, 101 speculation 93, 99, 149, 150, 154, 158, 170; economic stability 180; financial crisis 26, 33, 35; short-term profiteering 150; spending: behaviour of ordinary people 34, 119, 120–1; countercyclical 181–2, 182, 188; economic stability 81; as way out of recession 41, 44, 119, 120–1; and work cycle 125 The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett) 71, 205–6 spiritual perspectives 117, 127, 128, 214 stability see economic stability; social stability stagflation 26 stagnant sector, Baumol’s cost disease 171 stagnation: economic stability 81–2; labour productivity 145; post-financial crisis 43–7, 45 see also recession state capitalism, types/definitions of capitalism 106 state revenues, from social investment 222–3 see also taxation state roles see governance status 207, 209, 211; and possessions 69, 71, 114, 115, 117 see also language of goods; symbolic role of goods Steady State Economics (Daly) xxxii steady state economies 82, 159, 160, 174, 180 see also post-growth macroeconomics Stern, Nicholas 17–18 stewardship: role of the state 200; sustainable investment 168 Stiglitz, Joseph 53 stock-flow consistent (SFC) economic models 179–80 Stockholm Resilience Centre 17, 201 stranded assets 167–8 see also ownership structures of capitalism see economic structures struggle for existence 8–11, 125, 132–3 Stuckler, David 43 stuff see language of goods; material goods; symbolic role of goods subjective wellbeing (SWB) 49, 58, 58–9, 71, 122, 129 see also wellbeing/happiness subprime lending 26 substitution, between labour and capital 177–178 suffering, struggle for existence 10 suicide 43, 52, 77 Sukdhev, Pavan 41 sulphur dioxide pollution 95–6 Summers, Larry 36 Sunstein, Cass 194 sustainability xxv–xxvi, 102, 104, 126; financial systems 154–5; innovation 226; investment 101, 152, 153, 166–70, 220; resource constraints 12; role of the state 198, 203, 207 see also sustainable prosperity Sustainable Development Strategy, UK 198 sustainable growth see green growth sustainable prosperity 210–12; creating credible alternatives 219–21; finding meaning beyond material commodities 212–16; implications for capitalism 222–5; personal choices for improvement 216–18; and utopianism 225–7 see also limits (flourishing within) SWB see subjective wellbeing; wellbeing/happiness Switzerland 11, 46, 157; citizen’s income 207; income relative to wellbeing 58; inequality 206; life expectancy 74, 75 symbolic role of goods 69, 70–1; existential fear of death 212–16; governance 203; innovation/novelty 114–16; material footprints 139–40; paradox of materialism 121–2 see also language of goods; material goods system dynamics model 11–12, 15 tar sands/oil shales 15 taxation: capital 177; income 81; inequality 206; post-growth economy 222 technological advances 12–13, 15; decoupling 85, 86, 87, 96–8, 100–3, 164–5; dilemma of growth 211; economic stability 80; population increase 10–11; role of state 193, 220 see also novelty/innovation Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 8 terror management, and consumption 69, 104, 115, 212–15 terrorist attacks (9/11) 121 Thailand, Buddhist monasteries 128 Thaler, Richard 194 theatre, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 theology see religious perspectives theory of evolution 132–3 thermodynamics, laws of 112, 164 Thich Nhat Hanh 128 thrift 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 throwaway society 113, 172, 204 timescales for change 16–17 tin, commodity prices 13 Today programme interview xxix, xxviii Totnes, transition movement 128–9 Towards a Green Economy report (UNEP) 152–3 Townsend, Peter 48, 61 trade balance 31 trading standards 204 tradition 135–6, 136, 226 ‘Tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin) 190–1 transcendence 214 see also altruism; meaning/purpose; spiritual perspectives transition movement, Totnes 128–9 Triodos Bank 156, 165 Trumpf (machine-tool makers) Germany 146 trust, loss of see alienation tungsten, commodity prices 13 Turkey 58, 88 Turner, Adair 157 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (2015) 19 UBS (Swiss bank) 46 Ubuntu, African philosophy 227 unemployment 77; consumer goods 215; degrowth movement 162; financial crisis 24, 40, 41, 43; Great Depression 39–40; and growth 38; labour productivity 80–1; post-growth economy 174, 175, 183, 208, 219; work as participation 144–6 United Kingdom: Green New Deal group 152; greenhouse gas emissions 92; labour productivity 173; resource inputs 93; Sustainable Development Strategy 198 United Nations: Development Programme 6; Environment Programme 18, 152–3; Green Economy initiative 41 United States: credit unions 155–6; debt 27, 31–32; decoupling 88; greenhouse gas emissions 90–1; subprime lending 26; Works Progress Administration 39 universal basic income 221 see also citizen’s income University of Massachusetts, Political Economy Research Institute 41 utilitarianism/utility, wellbeing 50, 52–3, 55, 60 utopianism 8, 38, 125, 179; post-growth economy 225–7 values, materialistic 126, 135–6 see also intrinsic values Veblen, Thorstein 115 Victor, Peter xxxviii, 146, 175, 177, 180 vision of progress see future visions; post-growth economy volatility, commodity prices 14, 21 wages: and profits 175–8; private vs. public sector 130, 171 walking, personal choices for improvement 217 water use 22 Wealth of Nations, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes (Smith) 123, 132 wealth redistribution 52 see also inequality Weber, Axel 46 welfare policies: financial reforms 182–3; public sector spending 169 welfare of livestock 220 wellbeing/happiness 47–50, 53, 121–2, 124; collective 209; consumer goods 4, 21, 22, 126; growth 6, 165, 211; intrinsic values 126, 129; investment 150; novelty/innovation 117; opulence 50–2, 67–72; personal choices for improvement 217; planetary boundaries 141; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; simplicity 129; utilitarianism 50, 52–3, 55, 60 see also capabilities for flourishing western lifestyles 70, 210 White, William 46 Whybrow, Peter 68 Wilhelm, Richard 7 Wilkinson, Richard 71, 205–6 Williams, Tennessee 213 Wilson, Edward 134 wisdom traditions 48, 49, 63, 128, 213–14 work: as participation 140–9, 148, 157, 158; and spend cycle 125; sharing 145, 146, 149, 175 Works Progress Administration, USA 39 World Bank 160 World Values Survey 58 youth unemployment, financial crisis 144–5 zero sum game, growth as 57, 71

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

Annualized, the total comes to more than 2 trillion shares - in dollar terms, I estimate the trading to be worth some $33 trillion. That figure, in turn, is 220 per cent of the $15 trillion market capitalisation of U.S. stocks.41 Moreover, this massive trading is often between fund managers, which makes it truly a zero-sum game within the industry. The idea of a financial transaction tax (related to the Tobin Tax, named after the Nobel Prizewinning economist James Tobin, an early advocate) is to reduce this ‘churn' and make investors hold their stocks for longer, by raising the cost of each sale. It satisfies the conditions for an efficient tax in deterring a practice which imposes deadweight costs - the main obstacle to its introduction being that all large exchanges would have to impose it, to stop trade migrating to those that choose not to.

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Buyout funds performance vs S&P 50045 The fund management industry naturally argues that the returns it can make - seeking ‘alpha' - for clients justify the fees it charges. In an influential article,46 Joanne Hill, a Goldman Sachs partner, identifies conditions in which trying to achieve alpha need not be a zero-sum game -conveniently showing that investment banks' proprietary trading might have some social and economic value. But these conditions include an assumption that the market is divided into traders with short- or long-term horizons, who are pursuing alpha over different time periods and measuring it against different benchmarks.

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Yasuda, ‘The economics of private equity', Review of Financial Studies, 23(6) (2011), pp. 2303-41: https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhq020 45. If ratio of proceeds from PE investments to public investment is > 1, PE is considered superior. Source: Journal of Finance, 69 (5) (October 2014), p. 1860. 46. J. M. Hill, ‘Alpha as a net zero-sum game: How serious a constraint?', Journal of Portfolio Management, 32(4) (2006), pp. 24-32; doi:10.3905/jpm.2006.644189 6. FINANCIALIZATION OF THE REAL ECONOMY 1. https://www.ft.com/content/294ff1f2-0f27-11de-ba10-0000779fd2ac 2. These figures give an approximate idea of the weight of large companies in the economy.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Meg Patrick

To some extent the greater reported happiness of the wealthy may reflect a zero-sum relative status effect, namely that the wealthier people feel better but their possessions make the poor feel worse off. 20 See for instance Dieter (1984), among many other sources. 29 Nonetheless it is unlikely that the entire gains from wealth, or even most of the gains, dissipate in zero-sum games. Wealthier lives are easier and happier in absolute terms in numerous ways, as discussed above, and this is reflected by looking at where most immigrants wish to migrate, namely to the wealthier countries. If a wealthy man buys a Mercedes, his polled neighbor may express greater dissatisfaction with his Volkswagen.

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Arguably the most important gifts of the past generation to the current generation come from wise investments, a belief in rules of just conduct, good political institutions, and good values, among other related historical factors. Growth-enhancing institutions do require hard work, but that investment is a positive-sum rather than a zero-sum game across the generations. Again, the moral intuition which results is the idea of strengthening good rules which are conducive to future economic growth, properly understood, and that is again not so far from common sense morality. 47 For a discussion of the issues surrounding our obligations to save, see Rawls (1999, p.252). 70 Our obligations to the elderly Given the limits on our obligations to the poor, we will have comparable limits on our obligations to the elderly, using the same logic.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle
by Jeff Flake
Published 31 Jul 2017

The old adage holds true: When goods don’t cross borders, guns do. Trade and the global expansion of capitalism have been central to conservative economic philosophy for as long as there has been a conservative movement. But in 2016, nationalism merged with its cousin, populism, and suddenly there were winners and there were losers, trade was a zero-sum game, and enemies of the people were duly identified. The solution to our problems was to erect physical barriers between us and the world as well as metaphorical barriers between Americans, as populists will do. Our multilateral trade deals were suddenly the worst deals in the history of mankind, and other countries were benefiting and we had been left holding the bag—when in truth, all of the countries engaged in trade were doing better.

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If the United States draws the shades and nails up a sign that says CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, these countries will simply go elsewhere. By the spring of 2017, they already were doing so. This part of trade economics is not at all complicated. That may well be the greatest danger of viewing trade as a zero-sum game and every relationship as adversarial—the punch you throw will more than likely strike your own face. Would the United States continue to champion free trade? In an extraordinary move, in Mr. Trump’s first spring in the White House, it was reported that the president’s own advisors would prevail upon the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau—a foreign head of state—to ask the president of the United States not to abandon NAFTA and instead take the more measured approach of renegotiating the agreement.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Tyler Cowen
Published 15 Oct 2018

To some extent, the greater self-reported happiness of the wealthy may reflect a zero-sum relative status effect, namely that the wealthier people feel better, but their possessions make the poor feel worse off. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that all of the gains from wealth, or even most of the gains, dissipate in zero-sum games. Wealthier lives are easier and happier in absolute terms in numerous ways, as discussed above, and as evidenced by a quick look at where most immigrants wish to migrate, namely to the wealthier countries. If a wealthy man buys a Mercedes, his neighbor may express greater dissatisfaction with his Volkswagen.

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Arguably the most important gifts of the past generation to the current generation come from wise investments, a belief in rules of just conduct, good political institutions, and good values, among other related historical factors. Growth-enhancing institutions do require hard work, but that investment is a positive-sum rather than a zero-sum game across the generations. The resulting moral impulse is one of strengthening good rules conducive to future economic growth, properly understood, and here again we approach a common sense morality. Our obligations to the elderly Given the limits on our obligations to the poor, we will have comparable limits on our obligations to the elderly.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

Once you see things from the point of view of comparative advantage, the standard perspective on international competition offered by many in the media starts to look silly. The traditional view is that if one of our trading partners, such as China, becomes more productive, it’s terrible news for us, because it means that that country will steal our jobs. But trade is not a zero-sum game like a football match, where if your opponent wins you lose. The reality is that if one of our trading partners becomes more productive, the goods we are buying from that country become cheaper. This makes us—the consumers—a little richer. Overall, the effect of imports from low-wage countries has been highly uneven, with less skilled workers taking most of the job losses.

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But what is costly from the point of view of an individual company is highly beneficial for the community as a whole, because it means more local jobs. Because of the magnetic attraction of clusters, offspring don’t stray too far from their parents. Research shows that the reproductive process is rarely a zero-sum game in which the young companies gain at the expense of their elders. Instead the process ends up resulting in a net gain in employment for the local community. And it gets even better: the children in turn produce their own children. Thus, from the perspective of local governments, attracting a high-tech job today will result in many more jobs in the future.

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In such a case, the only winners are the owners of the company being courted, since state and local governments end up stuck with the bill. And even when these subsidies make economic sense for a particular county, they do not always make sense for the country as a whole, as competition among municipalities for a given company can turn out to be a zero-sum game for the nation. Empowering Neighborhoods One example of a place-based policy that has been successful at helping struggling communities create jobs and raise salaries is the Empowerment Zone Program. Created in 1993, during the first Clinton administration, the program provided a package of employment tax subsidies and redevelopment funds to “distressed” urban areas.

Thinking in Bets
by Annie Duke
Published 6 Feb 2018

Ideally, our happiness would depend on how things turn out for us regardless of how things turn out for anyone else. Yet, on a fundamental level, fielding someone’s bad outcome as their fault feels good to us. On a fundamental level, fielding someone’s good outcome as luck helps our narrative along. This outcome fielding follows a logical pattern in zero-sum games like poker. When I am competing head-to-head in a poker hand, I must follow this fielding pattern to square my self-serving interpretation of my own outcomes with the outcomes of my opponent. If I win a hand in poker, my opponent loses. If I lose a hand in poker, my opponent wins. Wins and losses are symmetrical.

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Any other interpretation would create cognitive dissonance. Thinking about it this way, we see that the way we field other people’s outcomes is just part of self-serving bias. Viewed through this lens, the pattern begins to make sense. But this comparison of our results to others isn’t confined to zero-sum games where one player directly loses to the other (or where one lawyer loses to opposing counsel, or where one salesperson loses a sale to a competitor, etc.). We are really in competition for resources with everyone. Our genes are competitive. As Richard Dawkins points out, natural selection proceeds by competition among the phenotypes of genes so we literally evolved to compete, a drive that allowed our species to survive.

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F., 246n Slate.com, 6 slot machines, 87–88 smart, being, 62–64, 147 SnackWell’s, 85–86, 179 Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 95n social approval, 132–34 social contract, 121, 125 social media, 60–61, 148 social psychologists, 145–47 social scientists, 172n sociology, 154 Sotomayor, Justice, 144 sports, 108–9 baseball, see baseball football, see football golf, 83, 109 Stanford Law Review, 58 Stanford University, 181n–82n, 185 Stanovich, Keith, 62 start-up companies, 29, 35 State Department, 139–40, 170 statistics and data interpretation, 63–64, 181n Stockholm School of Economics, 149 stock tickers, ticker watching, 191–93, 196, 199, 200 strategic thinking, 211 Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert), 50, 52, 104 Success Equation, The: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing (Mauboussin), 83n sugar, 54, 85, 164–65 suited connectors, 53–55 Sunstein, Cass, 141–42 Super Bowl, 5–7, 10, 22, 46, 48, 165–66, 216–18, 241n–42n Supreme Court, 142–44 surfers, 197 swear jar, decision, 204–7 sweeping terms, 205 Syria, 140 System 1 and System 2, 12, 181n, 183, 203 Teller, Edward, 243n temporal discounting, 181–83, 226 10-10-10 process, 188–89, 191, 199 Tetlock, Phil, 126n, 128–29, 132, 146 Texas Hold’em, 53 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann and Morgenstern), 19 “They Saw a Game: A Case Study” (Hastorf and Cantril), 56–59 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 12, 52 Thomas, Justice, 144 Thoreau, Henry David, 186 ticker watching, 191–93, 196, 199, 200 tilt, 197–200 Time, 56 Timecop, 177–78 time travel, mental, 176, 177–231 backcasting, 218–22, 225, 226 decision swear jar, 204–7 flat tire scenario and, 190–91, 194–96, 200 moving regret in front of decisions, 186–89 Night Jerry and Morning Jerry, 180–87 perspective and, 227 premortems, 221–26 temporal discounting, 181–83, 226 10-10-10 process, 188–89, 191, 199 tilt and, 197–200 and time as tree, 227–31 Ulysses contracts (precommitment), 200–203 see also future; past Today, 7 Trivers, Robert, 91n–92n Trump, Donald, 32–33, 140, 230–31, 245n truth, 137, 169 truthseeking, 55, 70, 108, 110, 112, 115, 117, 120–23, 125, 126, 147, 150–51, 156–57, 172, 204, 207 accountability and, 176 agreement to engage in, 174 communication and, 172 truthseeking groups, see decision groups Tulving, Endel, 178n–79n tumors, 197 Tversky, Amos, 36 Twain, Mark, 144n Twitter, 148 type I and type II errors, 12, 52 Ulysses contracts, see precommitments uncertainty, 20, 26–30, 36, 47, 67–73, 80, 87, 94, 115, 139, 170, 230, 231 denial of, 206 expressing, 172–73, 246n hidden and incomplete information, 20–23, 25, 26, 33–35, 45, 81, 87 illusion of certainty, 204, 206, 207 luck, see luck universalism, 154, 155, 160–64, 173, 205 University of Pennsylvania, 1 USA Today, 5 visual illusions, 14–15, 64, 91 visualization, 223, 225 von Braun, Wernher, 243n von Neumann, John, 18–20, 23, 90, 243n, 246n Wall Street Journal, 32 Washington Post, 6 watching, 96–97, 102 weight gain and obesity, 55, 85–86, 164 weight loss, 221–23 Welch, Suzy, 188 Welles, Orson, 60 West, Richard, 62 White Castle, 135 Wilson, Russell, 5, 48, 218, 227 winning, 112, 130, 160, 224 WKRP in Cincinnati, 47, 49 Woodward, Bob, 143 World Poker Tour, 37 World Series, Bartman play and, 98–100, 114, 229, 247n World Series of Poker (WSOP), 1, 2, 37, 90–91, 106, 123n–24n, 248n “Would You Rather” game, 104–5 wrong, being, 61, 71, 94, 114, 206, 245n fear of being or suggesting, 172–73 redefining, 30–36, 73 “yes, and . . .,” 173–74, 207, 250n zero-sum games, 45, 103 Zolotow, Steve, 248n * Technically, they are continually evolving, but not fast enough to do us any good in our lifetimes. * The deal in Texas Hold’em begins with two cards, facedown, to each player. Following an initial round of betting, all additional cards are community cards, dealt faceup.

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World
by Paul Collier
Published 30 Sep 2013

Because training is costly and workers once trained can leave for other firms, the most profitable strategy for an individual firm is to poach those who are already skilled off other firms. Because poaching is a zero-sum game, industry associations sometimes try to organize a common commitment to training, policed by peer pressure. All firms in an industry accept the need to do their share of training. However, all outcomes that are dependent upon coordination are potentially fragile. A shock could break the pattern. An influx of trained immigrants could constitute such a shock, destabilizing industry-wide training. With an influx of trained immigrants, hiring already-trained workers temporarily ceases to be a zero-sum game because they do not have to be poached from other firms.

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While outsiders to the organizations for which they work, such people are not immoral in their own terms: they are insiders to their clan, using their corruptly acquired money to help their extended family. Similarly, a common critique of Haitian society is that people have become mired in outsider attitudes: passive dependence on external aid, and a zero-sum game narrative in which there is an exaggerated fear of being exploited. So let us accept that outsider attitudes are a problem for many poor societies. What is much less clear is whether migration significantly accentuates this problem, as it appears to do in America’s inner cities. Even if insiders self-select into migration, in most occupations the scale of emigration is too modest to have much impact on the balance of attitudes.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 26 Dec 2005

Specifically , the tit-for-tat strategy is to be nice on the first round of interaction; b u t after that, do to your partner whatever your partner did to you on the previo u s r o u n d . 1 0 Tit for tat takes us way b e y o n d kin altruism. It o p e n s t h e possibility of forming cooperative relationships with strangers. Most interactions among animals (other than close kin) are zero-sum games: O n e animal's gain is the other's loss. But life is full of situations in which cooperation would expand the pie to be shared if only a way could be found to cooperate without being exploited. Animals that hunt are particularly vulnerable to the variability of s u c c e s s : They may find far more food than they can eat in one day, and then find no food at all for three weeks.

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If she knows something about the person or event in question, she is likely to speak up: " O h really? Well, I heard that he . . ." Gossip elicits gossip, and it enables us to keep track of everyone's reputation without having to witness their good and bad deeds personally. Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information. B e c a u s e I'm particularly interested in the role of gossip in our moral lives, I was p l e a s e d when a graduate student in my d e p a r t m e n t , Holly Horn, told me that she wanted to study gossip.

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T h e s e goods are subject to a kind of arms race, where their value comes not so much from their objective properties as from the statement they make about their owner. W h e n everyone wore Timex watches, the first person in the office buy a Rolex stood out. W h e n everyone moved up to Rolex, it took a $ 2 0 , 0 0 0 Patek Philip to achieve high status, and a Rolex no longer gave as m u c h satisfaction. C o n s p i c u o u s c o n s u m p t i o n is a zero-sum game: Each person's move up devalues the possessions of others. Furthermore, it's difficult to persuade an entire group or subculture to ratchet down, even though everyone would be better off, on average, if they all went back to simple watches. Inconspicuous consumption, on the other hand, refers to goods and activities that are valued for themselves, that are usually consumed more privately, and that are not bought for the purpose of achieving status.

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment
by David F. Swensen
Published 8 Aug 2005

If the aggregate mutual-fund performance deficit corresponds to the aggregate active management cost, one reasonable explanation implies that mutual-fund portfolio managers as a group exhibit no active management skill. Skillful security-selection on the part of active equity managers produces returns above the market return. Since active management constitutes a zero-sum game, mutual-fund managers win only if another set of market participants lose. Conversely, inept security-selection on the part of active equity managers produces returns below the market return. In the zero-sum game of active management, underperforming mutual-fund managers subsidize the gains of another set of market participants. Because the costs of playing the active management game correspond closely to the long-term performance deficit, it appears that mutual-fund managers produce results neither better nor worse than the aggregate of the other equity market players.

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Obviously, based on subsequent performance, the overweighters and underweighters turn into winners and losers (or losers and winners). If the stock in question performs well relative to the market, the overweighters win and the underweighters lose. If the stock performs poorly relative to the market, the overweighters lose and the underweighters win. Before considering transaction costs, active management appears to be a zero-sum game, a contest in which the winners’ gains exactly offset the losers’ losses. Unfortunately for active portfolio managers, investors incur significant costs in pursuit of market-beating strategies. Stock pickers pay commissions to trade and create market impact with buys and sells. Mutual-fund purchasers face the same market-related transactions costs in addition to management fees paid to advisory firms and distribution fees paid to brokerage firms.

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In 2002, management fees amounted to approximately1.5 percent of assets. Commissions consumed around 0.25 percent. Market impact extracted an estimated 0.60 percent. In aggregate, a total of 2.35 percent of assets disappeared from the median active investor’s account, representing a high price to pay to play a zero-sum game. Note that the annual 2.35 percent fails to include the debilitating costs of up-front sales loads or deferred contingent sales charges. Investors foolish enough to make a direct contribution to the financial well-being of a financial advisor face much worse odds of winning the active management game.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2010

If this disparity goes on for a long time, one of them will become significantly richer than the other, which may become a source of envy or political friction, but they are both growing steadily better off. The important point is that productivity growth, like so much else in economics, is not a zero-sum game. What would be the effect on America if 500 million people in India became more productive and gradually moved from poverty to the middle class? We would become richer, too. Poor villagers currently subsisting on $1 a day cannot afford to buy our software, our cars, our music, our books, our agricultural exports.

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But the larger philosophical debate will rage on: If the pie is growing, how much should we care about the size of the pieces? The subject of human capital begs some final questions. Will the poor always be with us, as Jesus once admonished? Does our free market system make poverty inevitable? Must there be losers if there are huge economic winners? No, no, and no. Economic development is not a zero-sum game; the world does not need poor countries in order to have rich countries, nor must some people be poor in order for others to be rich. Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. They are poor despite the fact that Bill Gates lives in a big house.

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All the frantic activity on Wall Street or LaSalle Street (home of the futures exchanges in Chicago) fits into one or more of those buckets. The world of high finance is often described as a rich man’s version of Las Vegas—risk, glamour, interesting personalities, and lots of money changing hands. Yet the analogy is terribly inappropriate. Everything that happens in Las Vegas is a zero-sum game. If the house wins a hand of blackjack, you lose. And the odds are stacked heavily in favor of the house. If you play blackjack long enough—at least without counting cards—it is a mathematical certainty that you will go broke. Las Vegas provides entertainment, but it does not serve any broader social purpose.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis
by Benjamin Kunkel
Published 11 Mar 2014

Another solution would have been to create new jobs, turning out new commodities, to soak up excess currency. But this could only have been achieved at the cost, unthinkable to business, of greater power for labor. In the event, the international economy of the long downturn ever more closely approximated a zero-sum game in which no economy’s success could be purchased except at another’s expense. (See Brenner’s account of the seesawing fortunes of Germany, Japan, and the US.) The path toward prosperity for later-developing large economies lay in exporting “tradeables” to the international market. In Germany and Japan, and then in China, catering to external markets won out over nurturing internal demand.

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If the loaning of money at interest, stigmatized as usury during the Middle Ages, has seemed a more tolerable practice during much of the history of capitalism, its acceptance has been purchased through growth: increased income for rentiers didn’t necessarily imply a corresponding decrease for everyone else, only a share in the common expansion. The more nearly property relations approach a zero-sum game, the less we will be able to distinguish between what Adam Smith called productive and consumptive loans, the former contributing to the borrower’s prosperity and the latter merely draining it. Positive real interest rates per se will come to seem consumptive or parasitic, a straightforward transfer of wealth from debtor to creditor.

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest
by Ted Seides
Published 23 Mar 2021

Yes, the absolute skill of investors is higher than it has ever been, but the breadth of that skill across so many outstanding participants has narrowed the relative skill against each other. It is harder to outperform the market than it has ever been. Passive management proponents all point out that investing in the public markets is a zero-sum game. For every investor who wins, another must lose. In aggregate, active managers earn the market return and charge a fee along the way, turning the zero sum game into a negative sum game. The case for active management The case for passive management is nearly bulletproof in theory. It is also nearly irrelevant in the practice of institutional asset management today.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?
by Raj Raghunathan
Published 25 Apr 2016

Happiness Is Our Nature How could it be that mindfulness mitigates negativity even as it enhances positivity? There appear to be several reasons for this. One reason has to do with something I call the BAA phenomenon, which is short for Behavior Affects Attitude. We all know that our attitudes affect our behavior. For instance, we can all see how a person who believes that “life is a zero-sum game”—that one can only win if someone else loses—is more likely to seek superiority than one who believes that “life’s pie can be grown.” Likewise, we can also see how a person who trusts others by default is more likely to be willing to sign off a deal on a handshake than one who distrusts others by default.

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As you can see from the figure above, I’ve labeled the first set of routes the “scarcity” route and the second set the “abundance” route. The word “scarcity” captures an important element common to all three of the first set of routes. A person who seeks superiority over others is someone who believes that life is a zero-sum game. This person thinks that the things (wealth, power, fame, etc.) she needs to be happy are scarce, which is why she ends up seeking superiority over others. If she didn’t perceive these things to be scarce, but believed they were in fact abundant, she wouldn’t be as motivated to seek superiority over others.

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A Win-Win-Win-Win Solution To summarize, it appears that the recipe for a happy and fulfilling life is, in fact, not just a “win-win-win” solution, but a “win-win-win-win” solution. Specifically, apart from boosting happiness levels, chances of success, and altruism at the personal level, it is likely to boost meaningful productivity at the societal level. Those who believe that “life’s a zero-sum game” and “people are lazy by nature” will find it difficult to come to terms with the idea that there’s seemingly no catch in the recipe for happiness. “If,” they may ask, “the recipe for happiness offers a win-win-win-win solution, how come no one seems to know this? Why hasn’t the recipe caught on?

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least
by Antti Ilmanen
Published 24 Feb 2022

So the first AQR paper I wrote – with my colleague Dan Villalon – was deliberately called “Alpha Beyond Expected Returns.” We began with a picture of apple harvesters (Figure 1.3) and the following introduction: Investors spend much of their time on selecting active investments or active managers, which is nearly a zero-sum game. While doing so, they underutilize diversification, risk management, and effective implementation. We call these less glamorous activities collectively as sources of “alpha beyond expected returns” where alpha is loosely defined as improved risk-adjusted returns. In today's low-rate environment, it is even more important that investors do not let any source of alpha go to waste.

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PE managers strive to create real value through active ownership and governance of firms, or what Kaplan-Stromberg (2009) call governance engineering, financial engineering, and operational engineering. Active PE managers may conceivably help transform companies (“grow the pie”), while active public equity managers arguably compete in a zero-sum game. At first blush, the long-run performance of US buyouts has been extraordinary. Their funds outperformed the S&P500 index by 2–3% annually over 30+ years, and this is after 5–6% annual all-in fees,9 and for all buyout funds – not just the top quartile.10 Gross-of-fee returns or top-quartile manager returns are even more impressive.

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Finally, some try to combine the best of both approaches through “quantamental” investing or thematic investing. Active Manager Performance Sharpe (1991) has famously argued that even as a matter of arithmetic, active managers' higher costs mean that these managers must collectively underperform passive managers (since each group collectively holds the market). Active management is a zero-sum game before fees, a negative-sum game after fees. This argument can be challenged by recognizing that (i) passive investing also involves turnover and costs,6 and (ii) active investors do not only include (delegated) active managers but also retail and institutional direct investing. Direct investors are collectively large (they hold more than half of global equities), their performance is rarely measured, and they are a plausible negative alpha source (since they may not be as well-incentivized or as well-resourced as delegated managers).

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

Companies depending on big data must necessarily reduce the spontaneity of their customers, so that they are satisfied with what amounts to fewer available choices. It’s a digitally complexified version of the one-size-fits-all values of industrialism. On the surface, the increase in customers for a product looks like growth. But it’s a limited, zero-sum game, in which the reduction in new possibilities cuts both ways. Many of the companies I’ve visited have been cutting back on expensive, unpredictable research and development (R & D) and spending resources instead on big data analysis. Why ideate in an open-ended fashion, they argue, when they’ve already got the data on what consumers are going to want next quarter?

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The problem with trying to get all human activity back on the books is that the books themselves are not neutral. They are artifacts of a very specific moment in human history—the beginning of the Renaissance—when the two-column ledger was instituted and everything came to be understood as a credit or a debit in a zero-sum game of capital management. Feeding more activity to the ledger simply cedes more of humanity and business alike to a growth-centric industrial model that was invented to thwart us to begin with. That’s the problem with any of the many new ways we have of earning income through previously off-the-books activities.

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There’s a lot of hope here, if for no reason other than the fact that the best choices for your own and your business’s future sustainability are the very same choices that make our collective economy more resilient and responsive to long-term human interests. Unlike industrialism, genuinely sustainable economics is not an either-or, zero-sum game. As I hope I’ve shown, digital commerce can be a whole lot more than taking traditional corporate capitalism to the next level. Actually—or at least potentially—it’s retrieving something much older and, to my mind, more positive for people and businesses alike. While the unimaginative big businesses of today see in the Internet a new way to automate labor, devalue human contributions, securitize wealth, build platform monopolies, and stage spectacular exits, stakeholders in tomorrow’s economy should be able to see an opportunity to participate in self-sustaining, highly reciprocal, peer-to-peer, worker-owned, and community-defined marketplaces.

Learn Algorithmic Trading
by Sebastien Donadio
Published 7 Nov 2019

And are there any naive strategies that worked in the past that we can use by way of reference? As you read in the first chapter of this book, mankind has been trading assets for centuries. Numerous strategies have been created to increase the profit or sometimes just to keep the same profit. In this zero-sum game, the competition is considerable. It necessitates a constant innovation in terms of trading models and also in terms of technology. In this race to get the biggest part of the pie first, it is important to know the basic foundation of analysis in order to create trading strategies. When predicting the market, we mainly assume that the past repeats itself in future.

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Let's take a look at the risks involved before we look at what factors lead to increasing/decreasing these risks in the business of algorithmic trading. Risk of trading losses This is the most obvious and intuitive one—we want to trade to make money, but we always run through the risk of losing money against other market participants. Trading is a zero-sum game: some participants will make money, while some will lose money. The amount that's lost by the losing participants is the amount that's gained by the winning participants. This simple fact is what also makes trading quite challenging. Generally, less informed participants will lose money to more informed participants.

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To summarize this section, losing the trading edge when other participants discover the same signals that are working for us is a normal part of the business, but there is no direct solution to this problem, other than trying our best to keep discovering new trading signals ourselves to stay profitable. Profit decay due to exit of losing participants Trading is a zero-sum game; for some participants to make money, there must be less informed participants that lose money to the winning participants. The problem with this is that participants that are losing money either get smarter or faster and stop losing money, or they continue losing money and eventually exit the market altogether, which will hurt continued profitability of our trading strategies and can even get to a point where we cannot make any money at all.

Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century
by Jonathan Sacks
Published 19 Apr 2010

You are left not with less but with more. The reason is that love, friendship and influence are things that exist only by virtue of sharing. I call these covenantal goods—goods such that the more I share, the more I have. In the short term at least, wealth and power are zero-sum games. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. Covenantal goods are non-zero-sum games, meaning that if I win, you also win. Wealth and power, economics and politics, the market and the state, are arenas of competition. Covenantal goods are arenas of co-operation. The home of covenantal goods is not the state or the market but civil society: families, communities, schools, congregations, fellowships (chevrot), communities and society itself, once we have clearly differentiated society from state.

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If you take the left, then I will go to the right; or, if you go to the right, then I will go to the left’ (Gen. 13:8–9). Abraham was willing to make concessions for the sake of peace. So must Israel, and so most of its population still believe.16 A fundamental falsehood permeates almost every discussion of the Israel–Palestine conflict, namely that it is a zero-sum game in which one side loses and the other side wins. That is precisely what it is not. From peace both sides gain. From violence both sides suffer. That is why not only Israelis but also those who genuinely care for the Palestinians and for their children’s right to a future must give their support to peace.

The Flat White Economy
by Douglas McWilliams
Published 15 Feb 2015

The Economist claimed “That is contemptibly naive and also a shame”.13 Nigel Farage leader of UKIP and never one to be short of a pithy comment responded in a tweet “What utter drivel, highlighting a major lack of critical thinking and compassion”.14 There is a second way in which inequality can be a problem in itself – if the economy operates such that either production or consumption is a zero-sum game. On the production side, the issue is whether those who become wealthy do so at the expense of others. Here there seems to be a correlation between concern about inequality in and of itself with those countries where there has been a feudal history – for example most of Europe – and conversely those newer societies which do not have a feudal history.

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There is fairly good statistical information on the relationship between wealth creation and the extent to which that wealth is taken by the government in taxation.15 So in general it is reasonable to suppose that in an information society much of the wealth created is additional rather than being taken from someone else as in a feudal society. In these circumstances redistribution to reduce inequality alone is likely to destroy a proportion of the wealth that is redistributed. It is not a zero-sum game. Because of the different historical sources of wealth, public opinion in relatively new economies like the US, Hong Kong and Singapore that have not experienced a feudal system appears much less concerned about inequality than opinion in countries with a feudal history like much of Europe, where I suspect that because of the feudal origins of society, wealth is considered highly suspect by a significant proportion of the population.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 10 Nov 2011

Finally, the white cell seemed to be impressed with Russia’s tenacity on the alternative currency, especially its overture to OPEC, and awarded the country additional national power points. This was a complete turnaround from day one, when Russia’s play had been ridiculed. China was awarded more points mostly for doing nothing. It was a case study in how to win a zero-sum game just by keeping your head down while everyone else blundered around. The United States lost national power, partly because of Russia’s dollar assault, but also because it appeared that East Asia was coalescing around a China-Japan bloc that would eventually include most of the region and exclude the United States from its key decisions on trade and capital flows.

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One of the peculiarities of paper money is that it is simultaneously an asset of the party holding it and a liability of the bank issuing it. Gold, on the other hand, is typically only an asset, except in cases—uncommon in the 1920s—where it is loaned from one bank to another. Adjustment transactions in gold are therefore usually a zero-sum game. If gold moves from England to France, the money supply of England decreases and the money supply of France increases by the amount of the gold. The system could function reasonably well as long as France was willing to accept sterling in trade and redeposit the sterling in English banks to help maintain the sterling money supply.

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Its adherents rely on closed markets and closed capital accounts to achieve their goal of accumulating wealth at the expense of others. Classical mercantilism rests on a set of principles that seem strange to modern ears. The main forms of wealth are tangible and found in land, commodities and gold. The acquisition of wealth is a zero-sum game in which wealth acquired by one nation comes at the expense of others. International economic conduct involves granting advantages to internal industries and imposing tariffs on foreign goods. Trading is done with friendly partners to the exclusion of rivals. Subsidies and discrimination are legitimate tools to achieve economic goals.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

He has a decade to double his money. Where does the additional $100,000 come from? Ultimately, from other people and businesses who are in the same position, spending money that they have borrowed. Even the wages that workers receive to buy things with were borrowed somewhere up the chain. But this seems to suggest a zero-sum game. Each borrower must win some other borrower’s money in order to pay back the bank. If the bank has loaned out $100,000 to ten different businesses, all competing to earn the money they need to pay back their loans, then at least half of them have to fail. Unless, of course, someone simply borrows more money from the bank, by proposing an additional business or expansion.

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But the more we ponder the future in this way, the more paralyzed we become by the prospect of the long now—frozen with that plastic bottle over the trash can. Inconvenient truths tend to create more anxious neurotics than they do enlightened stakeholders. Those most successfully navigating the short forever seem to be the ones who learn to think wider, not longer. We must be able to expand our awareness beyond the zero-sum game of individual self-interest. It’s not the longer time horizon that matters so much to alleviating our present shock as it is our awareness of all the other prisoners in the same dilemma. This is why the commons offers us not only the justification for transcending self-interested behavior but also the means to mitigating the anxiety of the short forever.

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This was the climax of just one episode of The Walking Dead, which—like many others—spawned countless pages of online discussion. The Prisoner’s Dilemma–like clarity of the scenario reassures modern audiences the way Cain and Abel simplified reality for our ancestors. But in our case, there’s no God in judgment; rather, it’s the zero-sum game of people with none of civilization’s trappings to mask the stark selfishness of every choice, and no holy narrative to justify those choices. The zombie legend originated in the spiritual practices of Afro-Caribbean sects that believed a person could be robbed of his soul by supernatural or shamanic means and forced to work as an uncomplaining slave.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety
by Gideon Rachman
Published 1 Feb 2011

But he embraced a version of Bill Clinton’s view of a “win-win world,” in which globalization and rising prosperity potentially laid the foundation for a new era of peace and international harmony. He wrote: “Competition in the nineteenth century for political influence and territorial control was a zero-sum game. Competition in the second half of the twentieth century could become a positive-sum game. Growing economies could benefit, not harm, each other.”12 Unlike many thinkers in the West, Mahbubani was not a believer in democratic-peace theory. As far as he was concerned, democracy did not have much to do with it.

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One American who teaches at a Chinese university and is deeply sympathetic to the country nonetheless told me in 2007 that he was “disturbed by how many of the kids I teach have been taught that war with America is inevitable.”18 On his first visit to China, Barack Obama stuck doggedly to the mantras of the win-win world that he had inherited from Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We welcome China’s efforts to play a greater role on the world stage,” he declared. “Power does not need to be a zero-sum game and nations need not fear the success of each other.”19 And yet this is not entirely true. A more powerful China will inevitably threaten America’s ability to play the role in Asia and the Pacific to which it has become accustomed. This reality of growing rivalry with China was beginning to be reflected in U.S. foreign policy by the end of 2010.

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But when the G20 gets close to the really hard issues, zero-sum logic takes over. Fearful that it will be put under pressure to revalue its currency, China has effectively prevented all serious discussion of “global economic imbalances.” National interest and ideology also turn a potential win-win situation over climate change into a zero-sum game. In principle, all nations have an overriding shared interest in stopping global warming. But in fact all governments treat climate change as an argument about sharing economic pain—a lose-lose situation. Politicians often speak hopefully about the potential economic gains from “green growth”—all those jobs insulating houses and producing hybrid cars.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

The founding claim of economics is that, where everyone is free to look out for themselves in a competitive market, the net effect will be positive. The argument for free trade and flexible markets rests on this scientific proposition, backed up by statistical economic evidence. The expert claim is that the free market is a “positive-sum game” (in contrast to a “zero-sum game”), in which one set of competitors can become extremely rich, without this having any negative effect on everybody else. By this account, there is no reason for the poor to resent the rich, as the fortunes of one party have not caused the misfortunes of another. While rational to an economist, this argument is psychologically naive.

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The answer to this is found in moral psychology, not economics: their sense of self-worth depends on comparing themselves to each other and to their previous earnings, rather than by looking at their money in the aggregate. The hypocrisy of privileged elites on this issue is palpable. In one’s own day-to-day life, the economy feels like a zero-sum game in which one side wins and the other loses, regardless of what experts might say, a feeling that engulfs the rich just as much as the poor. We are all susceptible to the logic of resentment in our own lives, even those of us who adopt a perspective of cool scientific objectivity toward the lives of others.

…

(James), 140 whooping cough, 67 WikiLeaks, 196 William III & II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 55 World Bank, 78 World Economic Forum, 164 World War I (1914–18), 109–10, 130, 137, 143, 153, 159 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 132, 137, 138, 143, 147, 180, 222 Yellen, Janet, 33 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 22, 196 Yorkshire, England, 77 Zero to One (Thiel), 149 zero-sum games, 88, 89 Zuckerberg, Mark, 150, 156, 176–8, 181, 186, 188, 197–9 ALSO BY WILLIAM DAVIES The Limits of Neoliberalism The Happiness Industry Copyright © 2018 by William Davies First American Edition 2019 Originally published in Great Britain under the title Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

Inequality and immobility thus become self-reinforcing. Downward mobility is not a wildly popular idea, to say the least. But it is a stubborn mathematical fact that, at any given time, the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population. Relative intergenerational mobility is necessarily a zero-sum game. For one person to move up the ladder, somebody else must move down. Sometimes that will have to be one of our own children. Otherwise the glass floor protecting affluent kids from falling acts also as a glass ceiling, blocking upward mobility for those born on a lower rung of the ladder. The problem we face is not just class separation, but class perpetuation.

…

Americans were likely to be better off than their parents but no more likely to move up or down the rungs of the income ladder. Politically, there is a critical difference between the two kinds of mobility. There is no limit to the number of people who can be absolutely upwardly mobile; everybody could, in theory, enjoy a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But relative mobility is by definition a zero-sum game—one reason it is more controversial. FIGURE 4-1 The Inheritance of Income Status Source: R. Chetty, N. Hendren, K. Kline, and others, “Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129 (2014): 1553–623. There are lots of ways to measure and illustrate relative mobility rates, including elasticity of income or earnings, rank-rank slopes, conditional transition probabilities, and rank directional mobility.

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

It is rearview-mirror monetary policy reflecting the need of recumbent sectors for protection against more-creative domestic and foreign rivals. By seeking to impart a bias of inflation to prices, the commodity basket tends to a zero-sum vision that fosters trade wars of devaluation. The basket of commodities is the one part of the economy that operates as a zero-sum game. As it erodes through the advance of innovation, its prices tend to drift upward, skewing the time value of money. The redemptive force of gold is its neutrality in time and thus its orientation toward the future. Hayeks would substitute an anachronistic commodity basket for a predictable deflation based on the scarcity of time and abundance of learning.

…

And while Americans supposedly fret over the threat of foreign trade, the world suffers a rare seven-year 60 percent drop in the rate of trade growth in the midst of an alleged recovery. The class-fraught rhetoric of both parties confirms an economy split along class lines, yet no class can prosper alone for long. We are all in this together, in a crucible of change up and down. A zero-sum game, in which any advance for some comes at the expense of others, zeroes out future growth for all. Middle-class prosperity consists not only in a sense of accomplishment and security but also in ownership and progress, in a productive triad of Main Street with Wall Street and Silicon Valley. With the rise of the welfare state and the surge of payroll and healthcare taxes, wealth cannot consist of wages alone.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

The net conclusion of all this was that Mick would go to Facebook, while Zynga would get James and the company. The major problem here was that both Zynga and Facebook had to make concessions to get the deal done, but neither wanted to subsidize the other’s acquisition by offering more value for the hybrid sale. They perceived themselves to be locked in a zero-sum game with a company they didn’t particularly like. The final terms, which I never got out of Mick, were some weird combo of cash up front, equity on separate vesting schedules in both companies, and a corollary deal that got the investors paid. As I would come to learn, my situation wasn’t unusual, though not generally talked about.

…

After all, they often stood by you when nobody else did and, like Sacca, potentially helped get the company sold. Thus, founders face a moral choice that’s quite ticklish. They can opt to reward their investors for their investments in time and money, but they’re essentially paying them out of their wallet. The deal is very much a zero-sum game between founders and investors in the final stages. To give you an idea of just how indifferent the acquiring company is to investors, keep in mind that Sacca was reputedly Twitter’s largest equity shareholder after its founders, and a vocal champion of the company. He had helped arrange its last funding round, and, somewhat notoriously, was helping insiders sell their stakes in Twitter early to Wall Street speculators.

…

Somerset, 200 Mayer, Marissa, 78 Mayfield Capital, 154, 156, 159, 162–63 McAfee, 382 McCorvie, Ryan, 16–17 McDonald’s, 82, 450 McEachen, Matthew (“MRM”), 41, 46, 62–63 call to, 123 CEO position, 249 chaos monkey suggestion, 103 codebase and, 66, 73, 184, 234 coding, 146 comrade-in-arms, 91 as daredevil, 136–37 deal details and, 251–52 earnestness, 68 Facebook and, 223, 225 family, 135, 205 getting to know, 88 irritation, 102–3 lost with, 109 paying off mortgage, 494 as resourceful savior, 100–101 as steadfast, 67 McGarraugh, Charlie, 14–15 McLean, Malcom, 447 media publishers, 387 MediaMath, 390 Menlo Park, 84 bedroom community, 338 conferences, 119 headquarters, 469 moving to, 337 schools, 306 meritocracy, 74 Merkle, 384 mesothelioma, 81 Miami drug trade, 304 Michelangelo, 334 Microsoft Adchemy and, 153–54, 161–62 Atlas, 383, 453–55 calendar, 340 dogfooding, 43 monopolist, 286 program managers, 272 middle managers, 359 Miller, Arthur, 104 Miller, Frank, 434 Milton, John, 475 minimum viable product (MVP), 434 miracles, 51 misleading, offensive, or sexually inappropriate (MOSI), 310 Mixpanel, 62 mobile commerce, 484–89 mobile data, 382, 477, 484, 486 Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), 448 monetary value, 317–19 monetization bet, 4 data-per-pixel, 274 digital, 184 Facebook, 5, 209, 275, 278, 298, 318, 425, 444 folly, 361–72 Google, 186 growth, 141 influences, 9 savvy, 486–89 tug-of-war, 379 Twitter, 190 zero-sum game, 319 money fuck-you money, 102, 415–16 investors, 74 outside, 155 pre-money valuation, 212 seed, 96 of VCs, 174 Moore’s law, 25 MoPub, 476–77, 479–81 morality, 226, 256, 284 Morgenstern, Jared, 218 Morishige, Sara, 183 Morris, Robert Tappan, 60–61 Mortal Kombat 3, 178 Moscone, George, 181 Moskovitz, Dustin, 284 Motwani, Rajeev, 138 Museum of Natural History, 366 My Life as a Quant (Derman), 16 MySpace, 283–84 N00b, 269 Nanigans, 480–81 Narasin, Ben, 128–31, 143–44 NASDAQ, 405, 410 National Socialism, 356 native ad formats, 448–49 Neko, 482 Netflix, 83, 103, 328 Netscape Navigator, 286 Neustar, 384, 386 New Rich, 357 New York Times, 448, 486 New Zealand, 318 News Feed addictive, 482 ads, 482–84, 488, 492 click-through rates, 487 content, 309 creation, 2 distribution, 364 as magic real estate, 362 spamming users, 372 versions, 444 newspaper advertising, 36–37 Nielsen, 385 1984 (Orwell), 433 noncash valuation, 212 no-shop contract, 201 Nukala, Murthy crossing paths, 167–68 ego, 42–43 greed, 44 hazing by, 71 immigrant worker, 72 lecture from, 65–66 manipulative rage, 136 pep rally, 36 saying good-bye to, 73 self-preservation and, 162–63 tantrums, 45 as tyrant, 158 vindictiveness, 134 wooing by, 154 Obama, Barack, 299–300 obscenity, 268 OkCupid, 54 Olivan, Javier, 410 Omnicom, 437, 443 on-boarding, 260–67, 271 one shot, one kill motto, 298 one-on-one, 434, 457, 469 online dating, 54–55 Opel, John, 148 Open Graph, 280, 364 optimization, 276, 302 Oracle investors, 111 job at, 193 logo, 124 product shindigs, 181 recruiting, 70 Orkut, 379 Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, 193, 203, 253 Orwell, George, 433 outside money, 155 Ovid, 316 Oxford English Dictionary, 80 Page, Larry, 112, 428, 431 Pahl, Sebastien, 119 Palantir, 272 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 265–66 Palo Alto bosom of, 116 climate, 123 downtown, 333, 338 East, 404 hub, 109 old, 112, 158 posh, 84 shuttles, 289, 339 Stanford grads, 63 Pamplona running of bulls, 106–7 Pan-Arabism, 356 Pansari, Ambar, 210 Paper, 283 Parse, 155 Patel, Satya, 249–50 Patton, 369 Payne, Jim, 476 PayPal, 78, 124 personal wealth, 415 personally identifiable information (PII), 395 photo sharing, 286, 490–91, 493 photo-comparison software, 310 Pickens, Slim, 102 Piepgrass, Brian, 374 pings, 188, 327, 422 PMMess, 347–51, 407, 409 poker playing, 396–97 polyandry, 483 Polybius, 172, 316, 336 Pong, 150 Ponzi scheme, 16 pornography, 167, 262, 268, 312, 314, 315 post-valuation, 212 pregnancy, 58–59 pre-money valuation, 212 La Presse, 37 privacy Facebook and, 316–29 Irish Data Privacy Audit, 278, 320–23 PRIZM Segments, 385 product development, 47, 94, 191, 220, 334, 370, 389 product managers (PMs) as Afghan warlords, 273 earning money, 302 everyday work, 294 Facebook, 4, 6–7, 10, 91, 97, 202, 210, 271–79 Google, 192 habitat, 341 high-value, 246 ideal, 219 information and, 295 internal and external forces and, 316–17 last on buck-passing chain, 327 managing, 276 stupidity, 313 tech companies, 272 tiebreaker role, 292 product marketing manager (PMM), 277, 366 product navigators, 272 production, 94 product-market fit, 175 programmatic media-buying technology, 38 Project Chorizo, 296 pseudorandomness, 75 publishers, 37, 39 Putnam, Chris, 284 Qualcomm, 70 quants, 16–18, 24, 29, 141, 207 Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS), 149 Rabkin, Mark, 3, 312, 389, 398, 435 Rajaram, Gokul, 8, 10 accepting offer from, 248 banter with, 472–73 as boss, 3 bribery, 471 FBX and, 435 go big or go home ethos, 300 in great debate, 459 influence, 202 insubordination toward, 465 interview with, 221–22 leadership, 309 loss of trust, 468 lot with, 373 management of, 434 middle manager, 463–64 one-on-one and, 469 as product leader, 276–77 riding by, 346 stripping of duties, 452 word of, 252 Ralston, Geoff, 93 Rapportive, 96–97, 106 real-time bidding (RTB), 40–41 real-time data synchronization, 38 Red Rock Coffee, 84 RedLaser, 51 Reesman, Ben, 308, 389, 399–400, 475, 477 relativity, 25 replicating portfolio, 247–48 retargeting, 9, 381, 395, 438, 461 return of advertising spend (ROAS), 81 revenue dashboards, 274–75, 295–96 Right Media, 37–38 The Road Warrior, 134 Roetter, Alex, 185, 190, 493–94 romantic liaisons, 55–56 Romper Stomper, 202 Rosenblum, Rich, 21–22 Rosenn, Itamar, 368 Rosenthal, Brian, 389, 390 Ross, Blake, 444 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 303 rounds, 156 routing system, 324 Rubinstein, Dan, 312–13 Ruby on Rails, 155 Russia, 375–76 Sacca, Chris, 128, 141, 143 acquisition advice, 187–88, 212–13, 245–47 on deals, 205–7 ignoring inquiries, 201 pseudoangel, 113, 117–19 wisdom, 202 Safari, 484 safe sex, 58 safeguarding role, 315 sailboat living, 307, 332, 337–38 salaries, 358 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), 181 Sandberg, Sheryl, 2, 10 data joining and, 465 gatekeeper, 4–5 intimates, 3–4 leadership, 410 managerial prowess, 311–13 meetings, 371, 382, 459 PowerPoint and, 7 recommendations to, 462 schmoozing, 367 wiles of, 408 Sarna, Chander, 67–68, 71, 72 sausage grinder, 296 scale, 300 Scalps@Facebook, 314 scavenging foray, 116 schadenfreude, 16–17 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 282 Schrage, Elliot, 3–4, 410 Schreier, Bryan, 123–25 Schrock, Nick, 400 Schroepfer, Mike, 2 Schultz, Alex, 374 scientific racism, 122 Scoble, Robert, 100 Scott, George C., 24, 369 security, 314–15 seed money, 96 Sequoia, 122–25, 130, 159 severance package, 470–71 severity-level-one bug (SEV1), 323 sexual molestation, 17 Shaffer, Justin, 219–21, 444 Shakespeare, William, 120, 427, 456 Shapiro, Scott, 378, 459 Shelly, Percy Bysshe, 337 Shockley, William, 122 shuttles, 289, 339 Siegelman, Russell, 146, 201, 213, 397 angel investor, 110–13 commitment, 141–43 negotiations, 116–17 Silicon Valley.

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening
by John Elder Robison
Published 6 Apr 2016

I sure didn’t want to end up like those two, but I didn’t know how much power I had over my fate. The Thompson quote felt disturbingly apt—my emotions were taking me for a ride, and all I could do was see where it led. * Flowers for Algernon was the basis for the Academy Award-winning 1968 movie Charly, starring Cliff Robertson. The Zero-Sum Game WE’VE ALL HEARD this myth: humans only use 10 percent of our brainpower. Usually, when people say that, they are suggesting that if we could learn to use the idle 90 percent we would become intellectual giants. Various supplements and therapies have been hawked over the years in pursuit of this lofty goal, but none of them has turned out to enrich minds, though I’m sure a few enriched their marketers.

…

I hated the idea of losing my special abilities, but I also felt alone so much of the time. And TMS had relieved that loneliness, at least temporarily. I had a return visit to the lab scheduled for more TMS in the not-too-distant future. But I was torn now that I’d come to believe that changing my brain might well be a zero-sum game. When I went back to the TMS lab for the last round of stimulations in their initial study, I was ready for anything. In earlier sessions I’d seen my emotions amped up and my senses fine-tuned. What would come next? The answer, to my dismay, was . . . nothing. The first round of TMS study concluded quietly, without a bang.

…

That’s what my next session would be—the hospital’s first off-label use of TMS to treat autism, one whose findings would guide a larger study. I was excited and hopeful but also a little bit afraid as I returned to the lab on August 12, the day before I turned fifty-one. The possibility of pain or medical catastrophe didn’t scare me anymore, but I was still preoccupied with the “zero-sum game” idea, the thought that enhancing my emotional sensitivity could somehow dull my mechanical awareness. In the absence of any proof one way or the other, in the months that had passed that idea had taken firm root in my mind. My new emotional insight seemed like just such a trade-off, given the emotional fragility I’d also had to contend with.

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World
by Shaun Rein
Published 27 Mar 2012

As more Americans lost their jobs, China came to be viewed as a scapegoat for U.S. unemployment, rather than for the real reasons: poor regulation of Wall Street; a bickering political system; and average Americans’ addiction to debt, which went on for far too long. Now one hears the constant refrain from politicians and commentators on TV that China is stealing U.S. manufacturing jobs and that Americans should only buy products made in America. For these talking heads, China’s rise is a zero-sum game with the United States. While such arguments appeal to patriotic pride, giving in to these sentiments hurts Americans more than it helps them. Without China, many American families would not be able to afford quality furniture or the latest technology. If businesses like Laura or Apple were forced to bring their factories back to America, their prices would rise tenfold, causing rampant inflation and further hurting consumer sentiment and it is even doubtful these jobs would build consumer confidence if they came back.

…

They also adhere to the view that companies and countries constantly need to evolve and innovate to seize advantages in changes in the world, rather than erecting tariffs and other trade barriers in order to maintain their strength. This group tends to view China as a mix of white knight and mystical superhero who can magically save the world’s economy and increase global security. The other camp views China’s rise as a zero-sum game that will negatively impact the Western world’s ideological and economic dominance. They fear that China is a job stealer that manipulates currency in a mercantilist economic policy, and that it is a potential military enemy, to the detriment of America. They also feel that the Communist ideological strain in China, and the nation’s stance on human rights, are misguided at best but most likely evil, and that both threaten the American way of life.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

No, we’d think they were spoiled brats who needed to toughen up and own their lot in life. It may not always be easy for them, but expecting to be rescued is not independence. And independence is pivotal to being a classical liberal. So stop fixating on how many victim points you have (or don’t have)—it’s a zero-sum game. Instead, just do your thing in this wonderful country of ours. After all, at this rate, we might not have it for very long . . . DON’T TAKE YOUR RIGHTS FOR GRANTED In case you hadn’t noticed, the left wants you to believe that the United States is a lethal cocktail of imperialism, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, and capitalist greed designed to enslave the masses.

…

As Sonny Bunch wrote in The Washington Free Beacon: There isn’t anything wrong with living a political life. Politics is important; political decisions have consequences; and passionately arguing for your preferred political outcomes is nothing to be ashamed of. [But] a politicized life is a different beast, however. It treats politics as a zero-sum game or a form of total warfare in which the other side must be obliterated. It alters every aspect of your being: where you shop; what you watch on TV; what sort of music you listen to; who you associate with. If you’re not with the politicized being, you’re against him—and if you’re against him, he is well within his rights to ruin you personally and economically.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

As shown in the figure below, the share of GDP going to wages has fallen from nearly 54% in 1970 to 44% in 2013, while the share going to corporate profits went from about 4% to nearly 11%. Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs banker, aptly describes this as “something approaching a zero-sum game between financial wealth-holders and the rest of America.” Zero-sum games don’t end well. “The one percent in America right now is still a bit lower than the one percent in pre-revolutionary France but is getting closer,” says French economist Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Lazonick believes his research demonstrates that this trend “is in large part responsible for a national economy characterized by income inequity, employment instability, and diminished innovative capability—or the opposite of what I have called ‘sustainable prosperity.’”

…

We haven’t yet seen the equivalent of the “relationship banking team” in on-demand transportation (though there are signs of what that might be in Uber’s early experiments in making house calls to deliver flu shots and bringing elderly patients to doctors’ appointments). Uber and Lyft are on their way to becoming a generalized urban logistics system. It’s important to realize that we are still exploring the possibilities inherent in the new model. This is not a zero-sum game. The number of things that people can do for each other once transportation is cheap and universally accessible also goes up. This is the same pattern that we’ve seen in the world of media, where network business models have vastly increased the number of content providers despite centralizing power at firms like Google and Facebook.

…

Louis, April 2, 2017; Corporate Profits After Tax (without IVA and CCAdj) (CP), retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred. stlouisfed.org/series/CP, April 2, 2017; Gross Domestic Product (GDP), retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed. org/series/GDP, April 2, 2017. 246 “something approaching a zero-sum game”: Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers (New York: Crown, 2016), 18. 246 “the one percent in pre-revolutionary France”: Rana Foroohar, “Thomas Piketty: Marx 2.0,” Time, May 9, 2014, http://time.com/92087/thomas-piketty-marx-2-0/. Retrieved April 2, 2017, http://piketty. pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/media/Time%20-%20Capital%20in%20the %20Twenty-First%20Century.pdf. 247 “‘sustainable prosperity’”: Lazonick, “Stock Buybacks,” 2. 247 more of the compensation moved to stock: Foroohar, Makers and Takers, 280. 247 options had to be disclosed, but not valued: Hal Varian, “Economic Scene,” New York Times, April 8, 2004, retrieved April 2, 2017, http://people.ischool.berkeley. edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2004-04-08.html. 248 “profit extracted through harm to others”: Umair Haque, “The Value Every Business Needs to Create Now,” Harvard Business Review, July 31, 2009, https://hbr.org/2009/07/the-value-every-business-needs. 248 disinformation firms used by the tobacco industry: Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011). 249 “left holding the bag”: George Akerlof and Paul Romer, “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (1993), http://pages.stern.nyu. edu/~promer/Looting.pdf. 250 “The customer is the foundation of a business”: Peter F.

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

Intelligence and drive are the keys to success in most business pursuits, but this is not strictly true in trading. Intelligence and drive are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for trading success. Many people think of trading as a zero-sum game and that makes them feel optimistic. Since almost everyone believes themselves to be better than average in almost all pursuits, the thought is that if something is a zero-sum game, all you have to do is be better than the next guy to win. Wrong. Trading is a negative sum game. When I was day trading equities, most traders were gross positive and net negative in most periods. They could take money out of the market, but not enough to cover their brokerage, bid/offer spread and other slippage.

…

The most damaging of all forms of trader kryptonite is biased or bad thinking and we will discuss bias in depth in Chapter 7. This chapter will focus on everything else that holds traders back, other than irrational and biased thinking. When thinking about why traders lose money, the starting point is simple. Trading is not a zero-sum game; it is a negative sum game. There are external costs (technology, hardware, research, data, personnel, etc.) and transaction costs (commissions, bid/offer, slippage) that eat away at your performance, day after day. If you generate small gains, your alpha will leak away in a steady stream of payments to vendors and market makers.

…

When you buy and sell stocks at zero commission, you are still paying a toll of somewhere between 0.02% and 0.50% (2bps to 50bps) due to the bid/ask spread. Some stocks are much wider than 0.50% but you probably should not be trading those. Spreads and commissions are the main reason trading is a negative-sum game, not a zero-sum game. Spread is the invisible enemy, like a slow leak in a tire. It costs you a ton of P&L but it can be very hard to observe or measure correctly. Tiffany is an active day trader. She executes 15 round-trips per day (15 buys and 15 sells) and the stock she specializes in (Take Two Interactive, TTWO) has an average bid/ask of 38bps.

Succeeding With AI: How to Make AI Work for Your Business
by Veljko Krunic
Published 29 Mar 2020

Unified modeling language (UML)—A standard for the description of the structure and behavior of software systems using visual diagrams. See OMG’s UML site [189] for details. Unsupervised learning—A type of ML in which patterns are found in the unlabeled data. One example of unsupervised learning is clustering. Zero sum game—A game in which the success of one player comes at the expense of other players. In zero sum games, my gain is your loss, and vice versa. appendix B Exercise solutions This appendix provides solutions for the exercises in all of the chapters. To help you reference the questions, I repeat those questions for each chapter and then provide the answers beneath the questions.

…

Foremost are the costs to the people whose jobs disappear. There are also costs to your company, not just monetary, but also in the goodwill of both the public and your remaining employees. It’s important to keep that human perspective in mind when you talk about automation of your processes, and to understand that this scenario is often a zero-sum game. If you’re limiting yourself when thinking about AI only to scenarios in which you’re replacing jobs with AI, then you’re actually missing an opportunity. AI can allow you to create new businesses that weren’t possible or economical before. This scenario generates new jobs—not only jobs building and supporting that AI system, but also all other jobs that come with such a business.

Brave New World of Work
by Ulrich Beck
Published 15 Jan 2000

This conception of globalization is ‘simple’ and ‘linear’, because it accepts largely without question the basic premise of territoriality and applies it to the very globalization which calls that basic premise into question. Two further assumptions underlie ‘simple’ globalization. First, the relationship between transnational and national actors or spaces is conceived as a zero-sum game: that which is won transna-tionally – sovereignty, military decision-making power, democratic qualities – must be lost by the national space. It might almost be said that the transnational here appears as an enemy ‘of the third kind’. Globalization threatens national sovereignty and the identity of the ‘homeland’, but it does so not through open rivalry, con-quest or subjugation but by ‘subversively’ intensifying economic dependence, transnational decision-making powers and multicultural influences.

…

In varying degrees, however, their leap into the future always lands too short, still within the magic circle of the work society – and they also appear inadequate for a number of other major reasons. Feminization of work All scenarios in which multiple activity and multiple tracks replace ‘monogamous work’ (Peter Gross) easily end up in a zero-sum game of gender-divided labour. They make a virtue out of necessity by elevating shadow activities – housework, parental work, self-employed work, voluntary work – into the centre and source of meaning beyond the work society. The road to hell is often paved with good intentions. What is here pictured as the society of the future may accordingly be identified and criticized as precarious feminization of the world of work.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
by Johan Norberg
Published 31 Aug 2016

But the overall trends are strong. Increasing wealth and health and smaller families seem to have made us value life more, and this has resulted in more humanitarian attitudes and a stronger interest in peace. Commerce and trade has made countries more interested in mutually beneficial exchange than in zero-sum games. To this we may add an entirely new phenomenon among affluent liberal democracies: something we might call a true peace. Their people and leaders can’t even dream of going to war against each other again, even traditional arch enemies like France and Germany. It seems that democracies very rarely go to war against each other, perhaps because voters rarely want war, leaders rarely gain politically from it, and perhaps also because democracy’s rule-based domestic negotiations have been externalized.

…

Their father was not stupid, but he was bound to a concrete way of thinking which had no room for hypothetical worlds where we explore consequences and rethink moral commitments.6 Additional factors behind increased tolerance are open markets and rising affluence. As Voltaire pointed out, at the Royal Exchange in London the Jew, the Muslim and the Christian transacted with and trusted each other and each gave the name infidel only to the bankrupts. Adam Smith and the classical economists showed that the economy does not have to be a zero-sum game. If all transactions are voluntary, no deal is ever made unless both sides believe they will benefit. In a commercial transaction, foreigners and ethnic and religious minorities are not necessarily our enemies, since we do not have to fight them or discriminate against them to protect ourselves.

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
by Branko Milanovic
Published 15 Dec 2010

The birth of fascism in Italy in 1922, with its many imitators in Central and Eastern Europe, further “downplayed” the role of economics because fascist states, while being capitalist (in the sense that they protected private property rights even more fiercely than the liberal regimes they overthrew), imposed a much greater role for the state in the economy and tended to see trade in mercantilist terms, that is, as a zero-sum game, not as mutually beneficial. The chaos of the civil war in China and the brutal colonization of Africa (again, a noneconomic action) further limited the scope of “free” economics. And the final nail in the coffin was the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Thus, economists believe that the interwar period can teach us, if anything, that politics à l’outrance cannot be good for economic development.

…

Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1971), chap. 2, pt. 3 (emphasis in the original). 7 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 7-8. 8 This is the so-called median-voter hypothesis developed by Kevin Roberts, “Voting over Income Tax Schedules,” Journal of Public Economics 8 (1977): 329-340, and Allan Meltzer and Scott Richard, “A Rational Theory of the Size of Government,” Journal of Political Economy 89 (1981): 914-927. 9 It could even happen that there is no real redistribution but that the effects on growth still remain negative. For example, in order to prevent the political takeover by the poor, the rich can combine and through lobbying buy votes and legislation, thus preventing the redistribution. But this effort at lobbying, a non-productive activity par excellence (because it is a zero-sum game, concerned only with redistribution and not creation of new wealth), will be a sheer waste from the point of view of economic growth, and a slower growth will ensue again. 10 See Oded Galor, “Income Distribution and the Process of Development,” European Economic Review 44 (2002): 706-712; and Oded Galor and Omer Moav, “From Physical to Human Capital Accumulation: Inequality and the Process of Development,” Review of Economic Studies 71 (2004): 1001-1026. 11 “He” in this dialogue is Adeimanus, Socrates’ older brother. 12 Plato, The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin, 1973), pt.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

Once urban environments are created, people sort themselves, selecting the environment that best enables them to lead the lifestyle the want. People who want to cycle will move to places where cycling is easier. People who want to park will do likewise. ———————— In one sense, the amount of space in a right-of-way is a zero-sum game. In another, because that space is not fully utilized, better allocation of that space makes this a positive-sum game, the gain for 'the winners' outweighs the loss for 'the losers'. The trick, which is why local city officials and city planners are handsomely rewarded in their occupations, is to share that gain somehow so as to convince 'the losers' to not fight what is best for society as a whole

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The antagonism between the two draws from a great struggle that has been playing out in the twentieth century between Mass Motorization and Mass Transit.337 It is a conflict that continues to this day and has spawned a morality play in the culture wars. While transit and cars mostly serve different markets, at the margins they compete for users, roadspace, funding, and the hearts and minds of travelers. They are competing on old turf though. While limited resource issues still suggest a zero-sum game, new modes and new fusions of existing modes will change the calculus. Transit advocates, fortunately, can now stop trying to put the (transit) genie back in the bottle because the bottle itself has now changed radically. Given the demise of modal warfare, more reliable transport services will form around the passenger rather than the facility or vehicle.

Humankind: Solidarity With Non-Human People
by Timothy Morton
Published 14 Oct 2017

—Karl Marx Now we have a holism we can live with, an implosive, subscendent holism. Utilitarian holism, the holism of populations, is explosive—the whole is especially different (better or worse) than the part. There is no such thing as society! Or, specific people don’t matter! Utilitarian holism sets up a zero-sum game between the actually existing lifeform and the population. One consequence is the trolley problem: it is better to kill one person tied to the tracks by diverting the trolley than it is to kill hundreds of people on the trolley who will go off a cliff if we don’t divert the trolley. There’s the left-wing variant: talk of wholes is necessarily violent (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and so on) because what exists are highly differentiated beings that are radically incommensurable.

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There’s the left-wing variant: talk of wholes is necessarily violent (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and so on) because what exists are highly differentiated beings that are radically incommensurable. In this leftist thought mode, there’s as little chance of imagining you’re a member of a group as in neoliberal ideology! Gaian holism, the current ecological-political holism, also sets up a zero-sum game. An actually existing lifeform is a replaceable component. There is the right-wing version of this, often called Mother Nature. How dare we assume that we humans are more powerful than Mother Nature! If the Earth warms, Mother Nature will just replace her extinct parts. Then we have the correlationist versions of explosive holism.

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms
by Mark Spitznagel
Published 9 Aug 2021

On the other hand, without insurance, his geometric average fortune would be 3,000 rubles plus 10,000 rubles in proceeds on 95 trips, and on 5 trips he would only have his original 3,000 rubles (10,000 rubles in commodities lost to Captain Jack). We thus get a Bernoullian geometric expected value, like in the Petersburg wager, of: Strangely, the insurance contract is not a zero‐sum game. The merchant has a geometric expected value gain (from 12,081 rubles to 12,200 rubles, or +119 rubles per shipment) and the insurance underwriter has an actuarial arithmetic expected value gain (of 300 rubles per shipment). Thus, the granting of the insurance contract represents a gain (measured in their own frameworks) for both the merchant and the insurer—it's a win–win, mutually advantageous arrangement.

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And with a –10% average insurance return (putting very large profits in the pocket of the Schrödinger's demon insurance underwriter, by the way), the per‐roll geometric return to the insured is still as high as about 1%. This is what the Petersburg merchant never saw when considering whether to insure his cargo shipments against pirates and the sea: insurance is most certainly not a zero‐sum game. Perhaps Bernoulli should have instead described the logarithmic concavity of curve of his objective function as nature's admonition to either avoid or insure the dice. A GLIMPSE OF TREASURE Let's summarize what you have seen in our deductive games of dice up to this point. (And if you skipped the math, you can catch up here, although that means you'll just have to trust me, and you missed out on all the dramatic reveals—poor you!)

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry and the journalist Robert Wright have explained how evolution can lead to greater and greater degrees of cooperation.19 Repeatedly in the history of life, replicators have teamed up, specialized to divide the labor, and coordinated their behavior. It happens because replicators often find themselves in non-zero-sum games, in which particular strategies adopted by two players can leave them both better off (as opposed to a zero-sum game, where one player’s profit is another player’s loss). An exact analogy is found in the play by William Butler Yeats in which a blind man carries a lame man on his shoulders, allowing both of them to get around. During the evolution of life this dynamic has led replicating molecules to team up in chromosomes, organelles to team up in cells, cells to agglomerate into complex organisms, and organisms to hang out in societies.

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Our mental circle of respect-worthy persons expanded in tandem with our physical circle of allies and trading partners. As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can’t kill someone and trade with him too. Non-zero-sum games arise not just from people’s ability to help one another but from their ability to refrain from hurting one another. In many disputes, both sides come out ahead by dividing up the savings made available from not having to fight. That provides an incentive to develop technologies of conflict resolution, such as mediation, face-saving measures, measured restitution and retribution, and legal codes.

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If so, the number sense evolved to grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the minds that grasp them. Perhaps the same argument can be made for morality. According to the theory of moral realism, right and wrong exist, and have an inherent logic that licenses some moral arguments and not others.12 The world presents us with non-zero-sum games in which it is better for both parties to act unselfishly than for both to act selfishly (better not to shove and not to be shoved than to shove and be shoved). Given the goal of being better off, certain conditions follow necessarily. No creature equipped with circuitry to understand that it is immoral for you to hurt me could discover anything but that it is immoral for me to hurt you.

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 19 Jun 2005

There is little to be gained from buying US Steel simply because it is a steel stock or IBM simply because it is a computer stock. Investors demand higher returns for stocks with risks that cannot be diversified away—stocks that move up and down in sympathy with the portfolio—but they do not expect to earn a premium for stocks with risks that can be diversified away. Holding stocks with risks like that turns out to be a zero-sum game, with some investors winning what others lose. If that is what the world is like, then security analysts trained in the tradition of Graham and Dodd will soon be obsolete. If beta is all that matters in determining expected returns, and if beta can be estimated with a hand-held calculator, who needs security analysis?

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He then lists his views of the investment management business, reflecting both the theoretical sophistication he had acquired and his realistic sense of what the security markets are all about. He emphasizes the difference between earning an above-market return by taking above-average risks and winning at the expense of other players who lose more than the winners win because “the costs of trading make the contest less than a zero-sum game.” He expresses skepticism about winning consistently at the expense of other players in a market that is “extremely efficient,” because it is so difficult to tell the smart winners from those who are just lucky. He warns about the “quicksand premise that increasing knowledge about a company guarantees greater forecasting success” and scorns the “trend and fetish that skillful account managers should reduce the number of names in their portfolios so as to be conversant with their individual holdings.”

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He refers to certain “unattractive motivations”: defense of entrenched power, fear of the unknown, intellectual laziness, and naive pride of place. These motivations were most apparent in the stubborn refusal to understand that one investors gain against the rest of the market had to be another investor’s loss, and that active investment management is a zero-sum game, and less than zero after transaction costs are figured in. This disagreeable but logically irrefutable feature of investing was a challenge to the fraternity’s conviction that they could all be winners. It was what had bruised my ego that day in New York when Sharpe subjected me to his persistent interrogation.

Competition Demystified
by Bruce C. Greenwald
Published 31 Aug 2016

Price competition within the industry is likely to be intense, and it will be impossible to maintain relatively high prices. In an extreme version of this reward system, some firm cultures prize performance relative to competitors above other achievements. Gains in market share become more important than the growth that comes simply because the industry is expanding. Since relative performance is a zero-sum game, firms in such an industry will compete relentlessly. There is virtually no hope for a cooperative outcome to the prisoner’s dilemma game of price and feature competition. Only when the culture of the firms within an industry concentrates on profits and on avoiding unnecessary risk does cooperation to the benefit of all become possible.

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FIGURE 11.2 The matrix (or normal) form of the prisoner’s dilemma In contrast, if the joint payoffs are the same for all the outcomes, then there is no space for cooperation because the competitors have nothing to gain from it. In these cases, competition should and will be unrelenting. These competitive situations are conventionally described as “zero-sum” games (although “constant-sum” is more accurate). Any gain that one competitor makes can only be at the expense of its rivals. These games tend to arise when the people making the decisions care primarily about relative performance—about market share rather than revenues, profits compared to the competition rather than absolute profits, winning rather than doing well.

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management marketing strategy monopoly benefits operating margins profitability real estate returns, Target v. warehouse club Walton, Bud Walton, Sam Warehouse clubs War games Welch, Jack Wellfleet Windows Macintosh v., Woodruff, Edward World War IIstrategy Xbox Xerox Yahoo! Yield management Zero-sum games *The Justice Department had demanded that AT&T restructure in some way, but the company itself was deeply involved in formulating the strategy by which the Regional Bell Operating Companies were spun off. *Most differentiated products also compete in markets where there are no barriers to entry, so differentiation, as we will illustrate, is not sufficient to protect a firm from the ravages of a highly competitive market.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century
by Torben Iversen and David Soskice
Published 5 Feb 2019

At the top end there is no doubt that financialization of the economy, coupled with the extraordinary fortunes made by top professionals and entrepreneurs in the new high-tech sectors, has stretched the income and wealth distribution, as documented by Piketty (2014) and others. But it is a mistake to think about this as a zero-sum game. In the most extreme case of rising top-end inequality, data in the United States from the Internal Revenue Service show that the share of federal income tax revenues paid by the top one percent has risen from about twenty percent in the early 1980s to nearly forty percent in the 2000s. The latest figures released by the IRS are for the year 2014 and show that 39.5 percent of federal income tax revenues were paid by the top one percent of earners, while 19.9 percent came from the top .1 percent.23 The bulk of total federal income tax revenues, seventy-one percent, were accounted for by the top ten percent of earners.

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One the one hand, they demand redistribution from the educated middle classes, whom they cannot hope to join; on the other hand, they see no commonality in interests with those at the very bottom. The poor are lazy or “undeserving,” while the rich are gaming the system. Furthermore, since upward mobility is seen as impossible, jobs and income become perceived as a zero-sum game where immigrants are viewed as unwelcome competitors. Sometimes this competition is real. While the share of immigrants is not a strong predictor of wages—in large part because most immigrants settle in the cities—the balance of the evidence suggests that there are some substitution effects among those with lower skills (Ottaviano and Peri 2012).

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See also specific country advanced capitalist sectors (ACS), 258, 259, 279n4 African Americans, 84, 109, 226, 283n4, 283n13 Alphabet, 262 Amazon, 155, 265 American International Group (AIG), 210 analytic skills, 186 antitrust law, 153, 285n5 Antitrust Paradox, The (Bork), 153 Apple, 265, 280n13 apprentices, 61, 64–65, 68, 71, 104, 110, 127, 179–80, 230 aristocracy, 53–54, 64, 67, 72, 74, 81, 83, 86–87, 90, 98 artificial intelligence (AI): black box problem and, 264; capitalism and, 260–72; colocation and, 261, 266–72; cospecificity and, 262–66; explainable (XAI), 264; Google and, 262, 265, 287n1; limits of, 263, 269; manual jobs and, 264–65; multinational companies (MNCs) and, 267–68, 271; politics of future and, 272–73; production networks and, 263; robots and, 260–62; skilled labor and, 261–62, 265–68, 271–72; technology and, 260–72 artisans, 61, 63–65, 70, 79, 94–95, 98 Asia, 26–27; knowledge economies and, 142, 144, 222, 229, 235, 241, 243; specialization and, 267 assembly lines, 104, 108 Australia: Acts of Parliament and, 88; democracy and, 38, 56–57, 61, 62, 88–89, 283n8, 283n9; Fordism and, 106; Gini coefficients and, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 153, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242 Austria: democracy and, 56, 59, 61, 62–63, 77, 99; Dollfuss and, 77; Fordism and, 106, 147–48, 150, 154; Gini coefficients and, 36; knowledge economies and, 230, 233, 245; military and, 279n2; populism and, 230, 233, 245; protocorporatist countries and, 59, 62–63, 77, 99; taxes and, 17 authoritarianism: Asian, 26; democracy and, 4, 37, 53, 74, 78, 88–100; Germany and, 4, 74, 99, 279n1; libertarian, 45; military and, 279n2; populism and, 234 Autor, David H., 193, 260 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 208 bankruptcy, 114, 170, 210 Bartels, Larry M., 22, 24, 167–68 Basel II, 208 Beck, Nathaniel, 132 Beckett, Terence, 170 Belgium: democracy and, 56, 57, 61, 62–63; Fordism and, 106, 121; Gini coefficients and, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 233, 245; populism and, 233, 245; protocorporatist countries and, 62–63; taxes and, 17 Benn, Tony, 169 Bentham, Jeremy, 81–82 Bernanke, Ben, 207 big-city agglomerations, 194–200 biotechnology, 141, 175, 184 Blackbourn, David, 75, 92 black box, 4, 264 Blair, Tony, 33, 171, 209 Blais, André, 93 Blanchard, Olivier, 132 Bohr, Niels, 260 Boix, Carles, 35, 37, 55–56, 58, 94, 100 Bork, Robert, 153 bourgeoisie, 60, 72, 83–84, 283n7 Braverman, Harry, 14, 186, 188 Bretton Woods, 151, 207 Brexit, 130, 245, 248, 250, 276 Bright, 85 British Motor Company, 170 Brüning, Heinrich, 77 Brustein, William, 93 Brynjolfsson, E., 260 Bryson, Alex, 105 Caminada, Koren, 133 Canada: British North American Act and, 87–88; democracy and, 38, 56–57, 61, 62, 87, 283n15; Earl of Durham report on, 87; Fordism and, 106; Gini coefficients and, 25, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; median income and, 25; populism and, 245; Tories and, 87 Cantwell, John, 193, 279n1 capitalism: artificial intelligence (AI) and, 260–72; colocation and, 159, 261, 266–72; competition and, 1, 6, 11–12, 16, 26, 30–31, 33, 40, 122, 128, 131, 139, 152, 163, 177, 182, 186, 218, 258, 261; decentralization and, 39, 49, 122, 152, 186, 275; decommodification and, 9; democratic politics’ strengthening of, 30–35; Denmark and, 39, 148, 203; economic geography and, 2–3, 7–8, 18, 20, 31, 48, 147, 159, 185, 192; education and, 7, 10, 12, 20, 26–28, 31, 37–38, 45, 54, 60, 102, 128, 131, 143, 159, 161, 165, 225, 228, 234, 237, 250–51, 257; financial crisis and, 177, 206–14; France and, 17, 148, 182; Germany and, 4, 10–11, 17, 49, 55, 77; growth and, 2–3, 8, 13, 16, 30–32, 38, 79, 97, 125, 156, 163, 218, 247, 261; industrialization and, 4, 37–38, 53, 58, 60, 101, 124, 203; inequality and, 1, 5, 9, 20, 22, 24–26, 40–41, 125, 139, 261, 268, 273–74, 282n22; inflation and, 253, 285n9; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 261, 266, 276; innovation and, 2, 6–12, 19, 31–34, 47, 128, 131, 157, 206, 258, 281n18; institutional frameworks and, 31–34, 47–49, 128–29, 131, 146; Italy and, 4, 77, 148; Japan and, 4, 11, 49, 55, 148, 282n2; labor market and, 1, 6, 12, 31, 38, 46–47, 122, 125, 128, 152, 186, 229, 258; liberalism and, 1–2, 32, 49, 60, 97, 100–1, 137, 143, 213–14, 228; low-skilled labor and, 265–66; majoritarianism and, 22; managerial, 103; manufacturing and, 2, 14, 33, 142, 203; middle class and, 2–3, 20, 22, 41, 53, 97, 101, 162, 225, 227, 257–58, 273; mobility and, 8, 16, 30, 35, 50, 145, 280n11; nation-states and, 4–13, 30, 46–50, 77, 136, 139, 159, 161, 206, 249, 261, 267–68, 272, 279n4; political economy and, 2–9, 12, 17, 24, 34, 45–48, 97, 112, 129, 131, 137, 160, 167, 214, 227, 251, 275; as political force, 139; politics of future and, 272–77; puzzle of rise of, 35–38; puzzle of varieties of, 38–40; redistribution and, 1, 18–20, 31–32, 35, 37, 39–40, 47, 51, 55, 124, 128–31, 137, 261, 273; research and, 2, 10, 12, 37, 48, 139, 159, 165, 234; semiskilled labor and, 261; shocks and, 6, 10, 30, 54, 125, 136, 138, 140, 156, 159, 214; skill clusters and, 2, 7, 49, 145, 185, 192, 261; skilled labor and, 2–3, 6–8, 12–15, 19–20, 30–34, 37–38, 47–50, 53–54, 58, 60, 97, 101–2, 128, 137, 139, 144–47, 157–58, 172, 185–86, 192, 218, 250–51, 258, 261, 280n6; South Korea and, 4, 26, 148; specialization and, 2, 6, 8, 17, 40, 139, 145, 147, 161, 192, 258, 267, 270–71, 276–77; Sweden and, 19, 39, 49, 148; symbiotic forces and, 5–9, 14, 20, 32, 53–54, 102, 130–31, 159, 165, 206, 249–53, 258, 259, 270, 272; taxes and, 16–17, 24, 34–35, 40, 51, 73, 167, 206, 261, 280n12; unemployment and, 51, 117, 172, 282n22; United Kingdom and, 10, 13, 19, 32, 38, 148, 152, 172, 206, 209; United States and, 13, 16–17, 24–25, 38, 47, 148, 152, 186, 209, 275, 277; voters and, 11–14 (see also voters); weakened democratic state and, 1, 30, 93–94, 124–25, 128; welfare and, 8, 16–19, 31, 39–40, 46, 122, 125, 128, 131, 137, 167, 234, 261, 279n5, 282n22 Catholicism, 56, 61, 63, 68, 77, 83, 87, 92, 94–95 causal identification, 280n7 Cavaille, Charlotte, 220, 237 central banks, 121–22, 142, 151–52, 170, 172, 176, 207 centralization: democracy and, 53, 58, 63, 66–67, 69, 70, 73, 96, 99, 101, 276, 283n8; Fordism and, 103–10, 113, 116–21; knowledge economies and, 146, 151–52, 156, 173, 186, 202, 209, 231, 243, 252; populism and, 231, 243, 252; skilled labor and, 53, 58, 67, 69, 96, 99, 101, 110, 119–20, 173, 186; unions and, 49, 53, 58, 63, 67, 69–70, 73, 96, 99, 101, 105, 107–10, 113, 116, 119, 122–23, 152, 156, 172, 174, 283n8; United Kingdom and, 49 centrism, 100, 113, 128 Chandlerian corporations, 5, 7, 15, 17–18, 37, 103, 267 China, 26, 27, 142, 209, 211, 223, 279n3 Chirac, Jacques, 183 Christian democratic parties, 44, 63, 92–95, 114–14, 116, 124–32, 221, 229, 251 Clayton Act, 153 Cohen, Yinon, 119 Cold War, 78, 111 collateral debt obligations (CDOs), 209–10 collective bargaining, 67, 69, 73, 92, 103, 107, 137, 176, 179 Collier, Ruth Berins, 56, 57, 85, 282n3 colocation: artificial intelligence (AI) and, 261, 266–72; capitalism and, 159, 261, 266–72; economic geography and, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 159, 185–88, 261, 266–72; education and, 2, 7, 261, 272; knowledge economies and, 159, 185–88; knowledge-intensive businesses (KIBs) and, 187–88, 190; reputation and, 267; skill clusters and, 2–3, 7, 15–16, 185, 261, 272; technology and, 266–72 communism, 5, 49, 55, 79, 115, 182, 186, 218 comparative advantage, 31, 49, 51, 128, 131, 268 competition: barriers to, 18, 154, 285n5; capitalism and, 1, 6, 11–12, 16, 26, 30–31, 33, 40, 122, 128, 131, 139, 152, 163, 177, 182, 186, 218, 258, 261; decentralized, 18, 96, 122, 146–49, 152, 163, 186, 190, 217; democracy and, 89, 96, 254, 257–58, 261; education and, 12, 21, 26, 31, 52, 80, 89, 119, 128, 131, 156, 166, 177, 181, 194, 198, 222–23, 257, 285n9; Fordism and, 115, 119, 122, 128, 131; foreign, 14, 173, 177, 194, 223, 285n5; globalization and, 1, 28, 50, 156; growth and, 16, 31, 115, 162–63, 170, 177, 218, 261, 285n9; innovation and, 6, 10–12, 31–35, 47, 128, 131, 173, 182–83, 258, 285; intellectual property and, 31, 128, 131; knowledge economies and, 139, 146, 149, 152–56, 162–63, 166–69, 173, 177, 181–82, 186, 194, 198, 208, 218, 222–23, 226, 236, 285n5, 285n6, 285n9; labor market and, 1, 6, 12, 31, 70, 122, 128, 152–56, 177, 183, 186, 190, 223; for land, 89; low-wage countries and, 18, 28, 119, 181, 222; market rules and, 6, 12, 21, 40, 163, 173; multinational enterprises (MNEs) and, 154; outsourcing and, 118, 193–94, 222; politics and, 1, 11–12, 29–30, 96, 139, 169, 181, 223, 236, 257–58, 285n9; populism and, 218, 222–23, 226, 236; product market, 152–56; skilled labor and, 6, 12, 18, 21, 30–34, 66, 96, 119, 128, 146, 157, 181, 186, 194, 198, 218, 222–23, 258; socialism and, 11; trade and, 26, 31, 128, 131, 153–55, 218, 285n5, 285n9; unions and, 6, 33, 66, 68, 80, 96, 119, 152, 169–72, 177, 181, 186; welfare and, 31, 40, 52, 122, 128, 131, 223, 285n6; World Values Survey (WVS) and, 168, 235–36, 245; zero-sum games and, 222–23 Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, 155–56 Confederation of British Industry (CBI), 169–70 conservatism: democracy and, 58, 72–85, 88–90, 98; education and, 38, 79, 83, 89, 98, 219; Fordism and, 115, 121, 124, 128, 134; institutional frameworks and, 32; knowledge economies and, 169–72, 218–19; landowner influence and, 38; populism and, 218–19; United Kingdom and, 32 Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs): Denmark and, 171–76; flexicurity and, 174; Fordism and, 102–4, 123, 125, 127; Germany and, 176–81; knowledge economies and, 152, 169, 171–81, 198, 232; populism and, 232; reforms and, 171–81 cospecificity: advanced capitalist democracies (ACD) and, 14–17; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 261–66; electoral systems and, 280n6; location, 14–17; skilled labor and, 7–15, 20, 37, 47–50, 69, 99, 101, 115, 123, 196, 259, 261; specialization and, 14–17; technology and, 7, 12, 14, 20, 37, 48, 50, 103, 159, 261–62; wages and, 49–50; welfare and, 49–50 Crafts, 32–33 credit default swaps (CDSs), 209–10 Crouch, Colin, 58–59, 62, 67 Czechoslovakia, 4, 36 DA, 66 Danish Social Democrats, 74, 77 debt, 15, 121, 172, 209 decentralization: analytic skills and, 186; authoritarianism and, 99; capitalism and, 39, 49, 122, 152, 186, 275; competition and, 18, 96, 122, 146–49, 152, 163, 186, 190, 217; democracy and, 96, 262, 275–76; Fordism and, 122–23; Germany and, 94, 283n11; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 3, 163, 186, 190, 276; knowledge economies and, 3, 18, 138, 144, 146–52, 156, 163, 172–74, 180, 183–84, 186, 190, 193, 196, 212, 217, 225, 234, 275; populism and, 217, 225, 234; skilled labor and, 96, 123, 138, 144, 146, 148, 172, 183–86, 190, 193, 212, 225, 262, 276; United States and, 49 decommodification, 9 deficits, 113, 121, 172, 286n10, 286n12 deindustrialization, 18, 43, 103, 117–20, 124, 134–35, 180, 203, 224 democracy: aristocracy and, 53–54, 64, 67, 72, 74, 81, 83, 86–87, 90, 98; aspirational, 6, 12–13, 20–21, 32, 167, 214, 219, 272; Australia and, 38, 56–57, 61, 62, 88–89, 283n8, 283n9; Austria and, 56, 59, 61, 62–63, 77, 99; Belgium and, 56, 57, 61, 62–63; Canada and, 38, 56–57, 61, 62, 87, 283n15; centralization and, 53, 58, 63, 66–67, 69, 70, 73, 96, 99, 101, 276, 283n8; class conflict and, 54; coevolving systems and, 46–52; communism and, 5, 49, 55, 79, 115, 182, 186, 218; competition and, 89, 96, 254, 257–58, 261; by concession, 72–79; conservatism and, 58, 72–85, 88–90, 98; decentralization and, 96, 262, 275–76; decommodification and, 9; Denmark and, 56, 57, 61, 62–63, 66, 71, 74–76, 78; deregulation and, 96, 98; economic geography and, 92, 268, 274, 276–77; education and, 12, 14, 20, 24–27, 37–38, 41, 45, 53–55, 60, 70–72, 79–83, 88, 90, 94–101, 131, 138, 143, 158–61, 165, 181, 225, 228–29, 235, 247, 250–51, 257–62, 265–66, 270–77, 283n11, 283n13; egalitarian, 30, 81–82, 96, 120, 139, 163, 239; electoral systems and, 90–97, 100–1; elitism and, 53–61, 67, 70–71, 75–76, 79–90, 96–101; Fordism and, 274, 277; France and, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62–63, 70, 81, 83, 87, 94–95, 283n9; fundamental law of, 158, 168; Germany and, 55–56, 57, 61, 62–68, 71–91, 94, 99, 382n11; globalization and, 258, 267, 272; growth and, 8, 68, 78–79, 92, 97, 261, 267, 276; human capital and, 53, 58, 101; immigrants and, 88–89, 275; income distribution and, 56; industrialization and, 4, 37, 53–62, 65–66, 79, 83, 88–92, 98, 101; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 261, 266, 276; innovation and, 87, 258, 262, 267, 271; institutional frameworks and, 97; Ireland and, 62, 282n2; Italy and, 77, 91, 99, 276, 282n2; labor market and, 64, 66, 96–98, 260, 266, 268, 273; liberalism and, 56–62, 67–71, 79–90, 96–101, 282n3, 283n14; literature on, 55–60; low-skilled labor and, 97–98, 265–66; majoritarianism and, 60, 71, 91–93, 97–98, 100–1; manufacturing and, 80; middle class and, 3, 20, 22–23, 35, 44, 53–55, 60, 63, 71–74, 84–85, 90, 96–101, 115, 158, 163, 168, 257–58, 273–74; mobility and, 59, 258, 275–76; modernization and, 55, 57, 66, 70, 79–83, 87, 89, 98; multinational companies (MNCs) and, 267–68, 271; nation-states and, 4–5, 8, 13, 46, 136, 159, 161, 213, 215, 249, 261, 267–68, 272, 279; Netherlands and, 56, 57, 61, 62–63; Norway and, 56, 57, 61, 62, 282n3; party system and, 93, 101; political economy and, 59, 97; politics of future and, 272–77; populism and, 13, 45, 129, 136, 215, 217, 226, 228, 248–51, 275; production and, 54, 60, 64–66, 69, 72–73, 83, 93–94, 258, 262–63, 267–71; proportional representation (PR) systems and, 19, 34, 44–45, 60–61, 91, 93, 97, 100–1, 112–13, 125–28, 132, 134, 135, 212, 217, 229, 251; protocorporatist countries and, 59–79, 82–83, 89–92, 98–101, 228, 283n11; public goods and, 54, 60, 79–90, 98, 258, 275; puzzle of rise of, 35–38; redistribution and, 1, 8, 18–20, 32, 35, 37, 40, 55–56, 60, 69–71, 74–79, 90–91, 95–100, 115, 124, 158, 221, 259, 261–62, 273–74, 282n3, 284n2; research and, 55, 66–67, 72, 262, 264, 268, 287n1; semiskilled labor and, 61, 64–65, 68–69; shocks and, 54; skilled labor and, 3, 6, 8, 12, 20, 31, 37–38, 44, 53–54, 58–71, 79, 84–85, 90, 96–101, 115, 158, 185–86, 250, 258–62, 265–68, 271–72, 276–77; socialism and, 11, 56, 61–63, 68, 71, 75, 94, 97, 100, 137, 181–82, 215, 218; social networks and, 258, 261, 268, 270–71, 274–75; South Korea and, 78; specialization and, 67, 258, 267, 270–71, 276–77; state primacy of, 46–48; strengthening of capitalism by, 30–35; Sweden and, 56, 57, 61, 62, 67, 71–76, 78; Switzerland and, 56, 57, 61, 62–63, 282n3; symbiotic forces and, 5–9, 14, 20, 32, 53–54, 102, 130–31, 159, 165, 206, 249–53, 258, 259, 270, 272; taxes and, 73, 261, 267–68, 271; technology and, 70, 92, 259–63, 267–72, 277; trade and, 258, 267; unemployment and, 74–77, 92, 96; unions and, 53, 58–80, 90–92, 95–101, 274, 282n3, 283n8; United Kingdom and, 38, 54–65, 73, 80–90, 277, 283n9; United States and, 13, 24, 38, 55–57, 59, 62–64, 70, 83, 88, 96, 107, 147–48, 186, 215, 220, 275, 277; unskilled workers and, 62–63, 67–71, 96–97, 101; upper class and, 35; voters and, 75, 81, 90, 96–100, 111–13, 125, 129–30, 133, 260, 272–73; wages and, 266, 268, 273; weakened democratic state and, 1, 30, 93–94, 124–25, 128; welfare and, 94, 96, 261, 273; working class and, 53–79, 81, 83, 89–92, 96–101, 282n3, 283n9 Democrats, 226 Denmark: British disease and, 172; capitalism and, 39, 148, 203; Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) and, 171–76; democracy and, 56, 57, 61, 62–63, 66, 71, 74–76, 78; Fordism and, 106, 120, 129; Gini coefficients and, 25, 36; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 175; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 169, 171–76, 181, 203, 221, 233, 245; median income and, 25; populism and, 221, 233, 245; segregation and, 203; taxes and, 17 deregulation: competition and, 1, 6, 12, 31, 70, 122, 128, 152, 177, 183, 186, 190, 223; democracy and, 96, 98; Fordism and, 120, 122; globalization and, 1; knowledge economies and, 145, 173, 183; labor market and, 1, 96, 122, 183 Deutsch, Franziska, 37, 55 Deutsch, Julian, 37, 55 dictatorships, 273, 281n18 Disraeli, Benjamin, 81, 85, 96 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 77, 279n2 Douglas, Roger, 171 Downs, Anthony, 112 dualism, 282n25 Due, Jesper, 63, 66 Earth Is Flat, The (Friedman), 188 Ebert, Friedrich, 75–76 EC Internal Market, 173 economic geography: capitalism and, 2–3, 7–8, 18, 20, 31, 48, 147, 159, 185, 192; colocation and, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 159, 185–88, 261, 266–72; democracy and, 92, 268, 274, 276–77; education and, 2–3, 7, 52, 138, 140, 161, 195, 197, 200–6, 224, 274, 276; Fordism and, 109, 116; growth and, 3, 31, 116; knowledge economies and, 138, 140, 144–47, 159, 161, 185, 188, 191–92, 195–97, 200–6, 224; location cospecificity and, 14–17; mobility and, 2, 8, 18, 20, 39–40; multinational enterprises (MNEs) and, 2–3, 40, 192, 279n1; political economy and, 2–3, 8, 48–49, 140; populism and, 224; rebirth of cities and, 224–27; skilled labor and, 2–3, 7–8, 15, 20, 31, 48, 109, 116, 144–47, 185, 191–92, 195–96, 276–77; social networks and, 48–49, 185, 195, 274; specialization and, 8, 14–17, 39, 144, 146–47, 192, 276–77 Economist, The (journal), 180 education: ability grouping and, 230; Asia and, 26–27; big-city agglomerations and, 194–200; capitalism and, 7, 10, 12, 20, 26–28, 31, 37–38, 45, 54, 60, 102, 128, 131, 143, 159, 161, 165, 225, 228, 234, 237, 250–51, 257; church control over, 87; colocation and, 2, 7, 261, 272; competition and, 12, 21, 26, 31, 52, 80, 89, 119, 128, 131, 156, 166, 177, 181, 194, 198, 222–23, 257, 285n9; conservatism and, 38, 79, 83, 89, 98, 219; democracy and, 12, 14, 20, 24–27, 37–38, 41, 45, 53–55, 60, 70–72, 79–90, 94–101, 131, 138, 143, 158–61, 165, 181, 225, 228–29, 235, 247, 250–51, 257–62, 265–66, 270–77, 283n11, 283n13; economic geography and, 2–3, 7, 52, 138, 140, 161, 195, 197, 200–6, 224, 274, 276; elitism and, 30, 38, 53–54, 60, 70–71, 79, 83–84, 89–90, 98, 101, 141, 179, 184, 214, 235, 243, 248, 251; Ferry reforms and, 87; Fordism and, 104, 109–11, 118–19, 127–31, 143; Forster Elementary Education Act and, 86; France and, 70, 81, 83, 94, 104, 166, 177, 233; Germany and, 80, 82, 87, 89, 166, 179, 181, 232, 283n11; higher, 14, 31, 41–44, 55, 70, 89, 119, 128, 131, 139–43, 146, 156, 163–65, 174–80, 184–86, 192, 195–97, 214, 219, 225, 228–32, 238–41, 252, 255–56, 265, 272–77, 284n2, 284n4, 285n9, 286n11; immigrants and, 45, 89, 194, 217, 223, 226, 283n13; income and, 14, 24, 41–42, 55, 89–90, 139, 167–68, 181, 192, 217, 228, 231–32, 238, 240, 246, 252, 271–74, 284n4, 286n12; investment in, 10, 12, 20–21, 37, 52, 54, 98, 101–4, 109–11, 119, 146–48, 159, 163, 181, 186, 234, 252, 257, 266, 271, 283n13, 284n4, 285n9; Italy and, 166, 248; Japan and, 166, 232, 241, 284n4; knowledge economies and, 138–48, 156–68, 174–81, 184–86, 191–200, 204, 214, 217, 219, 222–25, 228–47, 250–52, 255–56, 284n2, 284n4, 285n9, 286n11, 286n12, 287n1; labor market and, 12, 28, 31, 41, 53–54, 60, 70, 72, 83, 89–90, 96, 98, 104, 128, 165, 174, 177, 191, 223, 225, 229, 260; liberalism and, 45, 60, 71, 79, 82–83, 89–90, 101, 104, 138, 143, 156, 175, 208, 212–14, 228–29, 232, 241, 243, 284n3, 286n11; middle class and, 3, 20, 24, 41–43, 53–55, 60, 71, 84, 90, 98, 101, 128, 158, 168, 203, 222–25, 235, 238–40, 243–44, 249, 251, 257–58, 273–74, 286n11, 287n1; politics of future and, 272–77; populism and, 217, 219, 222–25, 228–47, 250–52, 287n1; private spending and, 231–32; research and, 10, 12, 20–21, 28, 48, 55, 72, 146, 159, 165, 234, 262; school quality and, 231; Scotland and, 283n12; segregation and, 43, 119, 140, 161, 192, 195, 197, 200–6, 214, 231; skill clusters and, 2–3, 7, 139, 141, 145, 148, 185, 190–95, 198, 223, 261; skilled labor and, 7, 12, 20–21, 31, 37–38, 41, 54, 60, 70–71, 79, 84, 90, 101–4, 119, 127–30, 139, 142, 158, 174–76, 179–81, 184–85, 191–95, 198, 217, 222–25, 228–35, 238–40, 246, 250–52, 266; social networks and, 2, 51–52, 139, 145, 185, 191–99, 204–5, 217, 225, 234, 261, 270–71, 274–75; South Korea and, 26, 28, 166, 232, 241, 284n4; specialization and, 14, 191, 271; student tracking and, 230–31; training and, 7, 10, 14, 31, 44, 82, 89–90, 101, 104, 109, 111, 128, 131, 174, 176, 179, 181, 204, 223, 228–29, 232–33, 241–43, 252, 257, 275, 277, 280n10; United Kingdom and, 38, 130, 166, 177, 231–32, 277; United States and, 24, 38, 55, 70, 83, 109, 127, 130, 166, 177, 195, 223, 230–32, 241, 275; upper class and, 43; VET system and, 176, 179–80; vocational, 31, 44, 68, 82, 89, 92, 104, 109, 113, 127–28, 131, 174, 176, 179, 228–30, 233, 242–43, 251–52, 257; voters and, 12–13, 21, 38, 45, 90, 158, 164, 167–68, 219, 234, 247, 273; welfare and, 31, 42, 45, 52, 94, 96, 116, 128, 131, 146, 167, 223, 234, 261, 287n1; women and, 87, 116, 141, 151, 174, 184, 195, 238 Education Act, 89 egalitarianism, 30, 81–82, 96, 120, 139, 163, 239 electoral systems: choice of, 90–97; coevolving systems and, 46; cospecificity and, 280n6; democracy and, 90–97, 100–1; Fordism and, 103, 111, 124–25; knowledge economies and, 163–68, 212, 217–18, 228; populism and, 217–18, 228, 251; voters and, 22 (see also voters) Elgin, Lord, 88 elitism: aristocracy and, 53–54, 64, 67, 72, 74, 81, 83, 86–87, 90, 98; bourgeoisie and, 60, 72, 83–84, 283n7; democracy and, 53–61, 67, 70–71, 75–76, 79–90, 96–101; education and, 30, 38, 53–54, 60, 70–71, 79, 83–84, 89–90, 98, 101, 141, 179, 184, 214, 235, 243, 248, 251; Fordism and, 111; knowledge economies and, 9, 141, 158, 179, 184, 214, 216, 226, 235, 243–44, 248–51, 287n3; landowners and, 38, 57, 80–89, 95, 98, 158; modernization and, 38, 57, 79–80, 83, 89, 98; monarchies and, 72–73, 81, 87; populism and, 216, 226, 235, 243–44, 248–51, 287n3; projects of, 56–60, 90; working class and, 53–60, 67, 71, 79, 83, 90, 96, 98–101, 226 Elkins, Zachary, 161 Elkjaer, Mads Andreas, 167–68, 281n14 encapsulation, 227, 243, 249 enfranchisement, 84–90 Engerman, Stanley L., 80, 84, 89 Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian England (Searle), 85 entrepreneurs, 42, 65, 85, 183, 217, 275 Esping-Andersen, Gösta, 1, 30, 93–94, 124–25, 128 ethnic issues, 52, 91, 160, 205, 275, 277, 280n8 European Central Bank, 122 European Monetary System (EMS), 122 European Union (EU), 51, 122, 145, 153, 170–71, 177, 245, 248, 250 exchange rates, 121–22, 148, 152, 209, 212 Facebook, 155 factory workers, 61, 65–66, 70 feeder towns, 108–9, 224 Ferry reforms, 87 financial crisis: collateral debt obligations (CDOs) and, 209–10; credit default swaps (CDSs) and, 209–10; export-oriented economies and, 211–12; Great Depression and, 45, 99, 214, 218, 247; Great Moderation and, 151, 207; Great Recession and, 206, 214, 247, 250, 276; high leveraged financial institutions (HLFIs) and, 207–13; Keynesianism and, 207; knowledge economies and, 177, 206–14; liberalism and, 207–13; value-added sectors and, 206–9 financialization, 149–51 Finland: Fordism and, 106; Gini coefficients and, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 241, 242, 245; median income and, 25; taxes and, 17 Fioretos, Orfeo, 10–11 Five Star Movement, 248, 276 flexicurity, 174 Foot, Michael, 169 Ford, Martin, 260 Fordism: advanced sector and, 130–31; assembly lines and, 104, 108; Austria and, 106; Belgium and, 106, 121; big-city agglomerations and, 194; centralization and, 103–10, 113, 116–21; Chandlerian corporations and, 5, 7, 15, 17, 103, 267; compensation and, 123–29; competition and, 115, 119, 122, 128, 131; conservatism and, 115, 121, 124, 128, 134; Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) and, 102–4, 123, 125, 127; decentralization and, 122–23; democracy and, 274, 277; Denmark and, 106, 120, 129; deregulation and, 120, 122; economy of, 103–17; education and, 104, 109–11, 118–19, 127–31, 143; electoral systems and, 103, 111, 124–25; elitism and, 111; fall of, 117–30, 277; Finland and, 106; France and, 104–5, 106, 181–82; Germany and, 106, 107, 121, 129; growth and, 109–16, 125, 133, 135; industrialization and, 103, 108, 117–20, 124, 134–35; inequality and, 107, 116–20, 125, 213; inflation and, 120–21; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 102; innovation and, 104, 128, 131; institutional frameworks and, 128–31; Ireland and, 106, 121; Italy and, 106, 120–21, 132; Japan and, 106, 109, 284n4; knowledge economies and, 140–43, 146–49, 152, 154, 160, 169, 181–82, 189, 192, 194, 200–1, 214–25, 237–40, 248–49, 277; labor market and, 103, 118, 122–28, 152; liberalism and, 103–5, 115, 125, 127; Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) and, 103, 112, 125, 127–29; low-skilled labor and, 119–20, 126; macroeconomic policies and, 120–23; majoritarianism and, 103, 112–13, 124–32; manufacturing and, 103, 108–9, 118; mass production and, 43, 104, 108; middle class and, 43, 112, 115, 117, 123, 125, 128, 142, 160, 201, 219, 222–25, 238, 248; mobility and, 16, 118, 124, 221; modernization and, 104, 109, 114; national champions and, 154; Netherlands and, 106, 121; Norway and, 106, 130; OECD countries and, 107, 117, 125, 133; party system and, 113, 123–24; populism and, 113, 130, 216, 218–25, 237–40, 248–49; production and, 43, 103–4, 108–11, 115–17, 123, 127; proportional representation (PR) systems and, 112–13, 124–28; public goods and, 113; redistribution and, 103, 111–12, 115, 123–25, 128–29; reputation and, 112–13; research and, 103, 108, 110; second-order effects and, 129–30; segmentation and, 123–24; segregation and, 109, 119; semiskilled labor and, 12, 102–5, 112, 115, 118–20, 123–24, 127, 129; shocks and, 125–27, 132–35; skilled labor and, 12, 14, 16, 102–5, 109–12, 115–30, 222–25, 277; social protection and, 123–29; specialization and, 108; Sweden and, 106, 107, 117, 120, 129; symbiotic forces and, 102, 130–31; taxes and, 110–13, 124; technology and, 5, 7, 14–15, 50, 102–6, 109, 117–19, 124, 127–28, 131, 140–43, 154, 192, 194, 222, 277; trade and, 114, 128, 131; unemployment and, 105, 107, 110, 117, 120–21, 124–27, 133, 135, 284n2; unions and, 105–16, 119–23, 127, 284n3; United Kingdom and, 105–8, 120, 123, 130; United States and, 105–9, 117–20, 123, 127, 130; unskilled workers and, 104–5, 118; wages and, 104–24, 127, 284n2; welfare and, 110–11, 115–28, 131; women and, 116–17; working class and, 109, 115, 129, 131 foreign direct investment (FDI): globalization and, 40, 198; Helpman-Melitz model and, 284n3; knowledge economies and, 139, 145, 147, 148, 154, 163, 193, 198–99, 200, 284n3, 285n5, 285n9; skilled labor and, 3, 139, 145, 147, 193, 198; trade and, 154, 163, 285n5, 285n9 Forster Elementary Education Act, 86 France: capitalism and, 17, 148, 182; Chirac and, 183; democracy and, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62–63, 70, 81, 83, 87, 94–95, 283n9; education and, 70, 81, 83, 94, 104, 166, 177, 233; Fordism and, 104–5, 106, 181–82; Gini coefficient for, 36; guild system and, 59, 63; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 182; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 169, 177, 181–83, 202, 221, 233, 236, 239, 242, 245, 248; Le Chapelier laws and, 59; Legitimists and, 86; Macron and, 183; Mitterrand and, 182; mobility and, 59; Orleanists and, 86; Paris Commune and, 86; polarized unionism and, 62; populism and, 183, 221, 233, 236, 239, 242, 245, 248; postwar, 11; protocorporatist countries and, 59, 62; Third Republic and, 57, 81, 86–87 Freeman, Christopher, 5 free riders, 127 free trade, 17, 155 Frey, Carl Benedikt, 260 Friedman, Thomas, 145, 188 Galenson, Walter, 63–65, 73 game theory, 188–89, 222–23 gender, 116–17, 129, 192, 225, 238, 255–56, 280n8, 287n1 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 114 geographic segregation, 109, 140, 161, 185, 195, 197, 200–6 German Democratic Party (DDP), 77 German People’s Party (DVP), 77 Germany: authoritarianism and, 4, 74, 99, 279n1; banking sector of, 176–77; Bismarkian welfare state and, 176; capitalism and, 4, 10–11, 17, 49, 55, 77; Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) and, 176–81; decentralization and, 94, 283n11; democracy and, 55–56, 57, 61, 62–68, 71–91, 94, 99, 382n11; education and, 80, 82, 87, 89, 166, 179, 181, 231–32, 283n11; electoral system and, 91; Fordism and, 106, 107, 121, 129; Gini coefficents for, 25, 36; Grand Coalition governments of, 177; Harz reforms and, 178–79; Hitler and, 77, 99, 219; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 176, 180; knowledge economies and, 142, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 169, 176–81, 191, 207, 209, 219, 221, 230, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245; Kohl government and, 178; Kulturkampf and, 94–95; Landesbanken and, 176–77; median income and, 23, 25; Mittelstand and, 68, 92, 95, 179, 191; Nazism and, 75, 77, 99, 219, 279n2; October Revolution and, 75–76; populism and, 181, 219, 221, 230, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245; protocorporatist countries and, 62–63, 65, 68, 71, 74, 77, 99, 238n11; Schroeder government and, 178; Social Democratic Party (SDP) and, 68, 74, 76–77, 78; Socialist Republic of Bavaria and, 75; Sparkassen and, 176–77; VET system and, 176, 179–80; Weimar Republic and, 75–77; working class pressure in, 74–79; World War I and, 4, 56; World War II and, 4, 55–56, 76 Ghent system, 78 Gilens, Martin, 22, 24, 167–68 Gini coefficients: Australia and, 36; Austria and, 36; Belgium and, 36; Denmark and, 25, 36; disposable income and, 22–23, 25; Finland and, 36; Ireland and, 36; Netherlands and, 25, 36; Norway and, 25, 36; redistribution and, 22–23, 25, 36, 117, 118, 141, 221; South Korea and, 36; Spain and, 36; Sweden and, 25, 36; taxes and, 22, 141; United Kingdom and, 25, 36 globalization: advanced capitalist democracies (ACD) and, 38–40; capitalism and, 2–3, 7–8, 18, 20, 31, 48, 147, 159, 185, 192; competition and, 1, 28, 50, 156; democracy and, 258, 267, 272; deregulation and, 1; foreign direct investment (FDI) and, 40, 198; inequality and, 1, 3, 22, 26; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 3, 143, 156, 175, 198; knowledge economies and, 137, 142–44, 148–49, 151, 156, 198, 206, 234, 245; liberalism and, 1, 51, 142–43, 155, 162–63, 208, 213; liberalization and, 1; multinational enterprises (MNEs) and, 2–3, 15, 18, 25, 28, 40, 139, 154, 192, 279n1; populism and, 234, 245; privatization and, 1; production and, 5, 40, 51, 258; Rodrik on, 22; specialization and, 3, 8, 17, 40, 51, 198, 258; strategic complimentarities and, 17–18; strength of democratic state and, 1–2, 50–51; symbiosis and, 8; varieties of advanced capitalism and, 38–40; weakened democratic state and, 1 Glyn, Andrew, 282n22 Google, 175, 262, 265, 287n1 Gordon, Robert, 260–61 Governments, Growth, and Markets (Zysman), 181 Great Depression, 45, 99, 214, 218, 247 Great Gatsby Curve (GGC), 220–23, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76 Great Inversion, 224 Great Moderation, 151, 207 Great Recession, 206, 214, 247, 250, 276 Grey, Lord, 86 growth: capitalism and, 2–3, 8, 13, 16, 30–32, 38, 79, 97, 125, 156, 163, 218, 247, 261; competition and, 16, 31, 115, 162–63, 170, 177, 218, 261, 285n9; democracy and, 8, 68, 78–79, 92, 97, 261, 267, 276; economic geography and, 3, 31, 116; Fordism and, 109–16, 125, 133, 135; GDP, 38, 133, 261; industrialization and, 68, 92, 111, 115, 177, 181, 194; knowledge economies and, 51, 142, 156, 162–64, 168, 170–71, 177, 179, 181, 192, 194, 218, 221, 226, 237, 247–48, 285n8, 285n9; mobility and, 13, 30, 247, 276; populism and, 218, 221, 226, 237, 247–48; recession and, 5, 206, 214, 247–50, 276; skilled labor and, 8, 13, 31, 68, 97, 110, 115–16, 218, 261; social networks and, 51, 92; technology and, 3, 5, 13, 38, 162, 194, 226, 261; voters and, 2, 13, 23, 32, 111, 113, 164, 168, 247 guild systems, 59, 63–64, 69–70, 90–91, 93, 96, 98 Hacker, Jacob, 282n22 Hall, Peter A., 129, 216, 251 Hallerberg, Mark, 121, 151 Häusermann, Silja, 234 Hayek, Friedrich A., 5–6, 9, 11, 279n4 Healthcare NeXT, 262 health issues, 32, 79, 82–84, 86, 110, 198, 204–5, 262, 275 Hechter, Michael, 93 hegemony, 8, 113, 137 Helpman-Melitz model, 284n3 Herrigel, Gary, 93–94 heterogeneity, 17–20, 54, 133 highly leveraged financial institutions (HLFIs), 207–13 Hitler, Adolf, 77, 99, 219 Hochschild, Arlie R., 223, 226 Hong Kong, 4, 26, 279n3 housing, 41, 79, 177, 197, 200, 201, 203, 206, 225–26, 231, 275 Hovenkamp, Herbert, 153 human capital, 3, 53, 58, 101, 206, 229, 281n18 IBM, 175, 186 immigrants: closing access to, 43; democracy and, 88–89, 275; education and, 45, 89, 194, 217, 223, 226, 283n13; knowledge economies and, 136, 160, 193–94, 206, 215–17, 223, 226–27, 234, 237, 249; outsourcing and, 118, 193–94, 222; populism and, 45, 216–17, 223, 226–27, 234, 237, 239, 249; squattocracy and, 88 income distribution, 21, 25, 56, 116, 181, 221, 252, 274 industrialization: capitalism and, 4, 37–38, 53, 58, 60, 101, 124, 203; deindustrialization and, 18, 43, 103, 117–20, 124, 134–35, 180, 203, 224; democracy and, 4, 37, 53–62, 65–66, 79, 83, 88–92, 98, 101; feeder towns and, 108–9, 224; Fordism and, 103, 108, 117–20, 124, 134–35; growth and, 68, 92, 111, 115, 177, 181; knowledge economies and, 180–81, 203, 224; Nazism and, 75, 77; populism and, 224; protocorporatist countries and, 60–62, 65, 79, 89–90, 98, 101; urban issues from, 83–84 Industrial Relations and European State Traditions (Crouch), 58 industrial revolution, 5, 12, 58, 293, 295 inequality: capitalism and, 1, 5, 9, 20, 22, 24–26, 40–41, 125, 139, 261, 268, 273–74, 282n22; fall in, 5, 35; Fordism and, 107, 116–20, 125, 213; globalization and, 1, 3, 22, 26; Italy and, 36; knowledge economies and, 41–45, 139–41, 192, 197, 219–23, 228; majoritarianism and, 22; middle class and, 3, 20, 22–23, 41–43, 140, 222–23, 228, 273, 281; populism and, 219–23, 228; poverty and, 3, 5, 18–19, 25, 43, 47, 109, 117, 142, 221, 237; redistribution and, 1, 3, 20, 40–46, 140, 220, 222, 273; rise in, 1, 3, 9, 23, 40–46, 282n25; Robin Hood Paradox and, 220; undeserving poor and, 43, 142, 160, 216, 222, 227; United Kingdom and, 36; upper class and, 41, 158, 261; welfare and, 3, 8, 18–21, 31, 39–40, 42, 43, 115, 123–25, 128, 131, 137, 223, 261, 273, 282n22 inflation: capitalism and, 253, 285n9; Fordism and, 120–21; knowledge economies and, 151–52, 153, 163, 168–73, 176, 178, 202, 207, 234 Information and Communication Technology (ICT): capitalism and, 261, 266, 276; decentralization and, 3, 163, 186, 190, 276; democracy and, 261, 266, 276; Denmark and, 175; Fordism and, 102, 118; France and, 182; Germany and, 176, 180; globalization and, 198; knowledge economies and, 136–44, 156, 163, 171, 175–76, 180–90, 193, 195, 198, 214, 238, 249; outsourcing and, 118, 193–94, 222; physical skills and, 193; populism and, 238, 249; revolution of, 3, 5, 102, 136–43, 156, 163, 171, 176, 182–88, 193, 195, 198, 214, 238, 249, 276; routine tasks and, 193; shocks and, 136, 138, 214; skilled labor and, 41, 102, 185–86, 190, 193, 195, 198, 218, 276; smart cities and, 194–95; societal transformation and, 138–43 Inglehart, Ronald, 235, 246, 287n1 innovation: assembly lines and, 104, 108; capitalism and, 2, 6–12, 19, 31–34, 47, 128, 131, 157, 206, 258, 281n18; competition and, 6, 10–12, 31–35, 47, 128, 131, 173, 182–83, 258, 285; democracy and, 87, 258, 262, 267, 271; Fordism and, 104, 128, 131; knowledge economies and, 141, 152, 157–58, 173–75, 180–83, 196, 198, 205–7; manufacturing and, 33; middle-income trap and, 27; multinational enterprises (MNEs) and, 2, 40, 279n1; patents and, 7, 12–15, 26, 27, 145, 201, 281n15, 285n6; political economy and, 2, 7–8, 34, 183; production and, 10, 40, 262, 271; productivity and, 19, 34; public goods and, 35, 258; research and, 2, 12, 40; skilled labor and, 2, 6–12, 19, 27, 31–34, 104, 128, 141, 174, 196, 198, 258, 262, 271, 281n18; specialization and, 8, 14, 198, 267, 271 institutional frameworks: capitalism and, 31–34, 47–49, 128–29, 131, 146; comparative advantage and, 31, 33, 49, 51, 131; democracy and, 97; Fordism and, 128–31; knowledge economies and, 138, 146, 150, 156; unions and, 32–33 intellectual property, 31, 128, 131, 145 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 42 International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), 208 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 38, 149–50 Ireland: capitalism and, 4; democracy and, 62, 282n2; Fordism and, 106, 121; Gini coefficients and, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 170, 230, 233; laborist unionism and, 62; middle-income trap and, 26; patents and, 27; taxes and, 17 Israel, 4, 25, 26, 28, 36, 81, 85, 96, 166 ISSP data, 165, 168 Italy: capitalism and, 4, 77, 148; democracy and, 77, 91, 99, 276, 282n2; education and, 166, 248; Five Star Movement and, 248, 276; Fordism and, 106, 120–21, 132; Gini coefficents for, 25, 36; inequality and, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245, 248; Lega and, 248, 276; median income and, 25; Mussolini and, 77; populism and, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245, 248; postwar, 4; taxes and, 17 Iversen, Torben, 124, 135, 168, 211, 229, 251, 281n14 Japan: Abe and, 218; authoritarianism and, 279n2; capitalism and, 4, 11, 49, 55, 148, 282n2; education and, 166, 232, 241, 284n4; Fordism and, 106, 109, 284n4; Gini coefficients and, 25, 36; Keiretsu and, 182; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 182, 207, 209, 218, 221, 232, 233, 236, 239, 241, 242, 244, 284n4; LDP and, 218; median income and, 25; populism and, 218, 221, 232, 233, 236, 239, 241, 242, 244; postwar, 4; tertiary educational spending and, 231–32 Johnson, Simon, 282n22 journeymen, 61, 65 Kalyvas, Stathis N., 92, 95 Katz, Jonathan N., 133 Katznelson, Ira, 62–63, 70, 283n13 Kees Koedijk, Jeroen Kremers, 154–55 Keynesianism, 115, 121, 145, 201, 207, 286n12 Kitschelt, Herbert, 234 knowledge economies: analytic skills and, 186; Asia and, 142, 144, 222, 229, 235, 241, 243; Australia and, 147–48, 150, 153, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242; Austria and, 230, 233, 245; Belgium and, 147–48, 150, 154, 233, 245; big-city agglomerations and, 194–200; Canada and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; centralization and, 146, 151–52, 156, 173, 186, 202, 209, 231, 243, 252; changing skill sets and, 184–94; colocation and, 159, 185–88; competition and, 139, 146, 149, 152–56, 162–63, 166–69, 173, 177, 181–82, 186, 194, 198, 208, 218, 222–23, 226, 236, 285n5, 285n6, 285n9; conservatism and, 169–72, 218–19; cooperative labor and, 152–56; Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) and, 152, 169, 171–81, 198, 232; decentralization and, 3, 18, 138, 144, 146–52, 156, 163, 172–74, 180, 183–84, 186, 190, 193, 196, 212, 217, 225, 234, 275; Denmark and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 169, 171–76, 181, 203, 221, 233, 245; deregulation and, 145, 173, 183; economic geography and, 138, 140, 144–47, 159, 161, 185, 188, 191–92, 195–97, 200–6; education and, 138–48, 156–68, 174–81, 184–86, 191–200, 204, 214, 217, 219, 222–25, 228–47, 250–52, 255–56, 284n2, 284n4, 285n9, 286n11, 286n12, 287n1; electoral systems and, 163–68, 212, 217–18, 228; elitism and, 9, 141, 158, 179, 184, 214, 216, 226, 235, 243–44, 248–51, 287n3; embedded, 137–38, 143–56, 161–83, 185, 188, 191–92, 195, 205, 214, 225, 251; financial crisis and, 177, 206–14; financialization and, 149–51; Finland and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 241, 242, 245; first-order effects and, 120, 129, 132–33, 216; Fordism and, 140, 142–43, 146–49, 152, 154, 160, 169, 181–82, 189, 192, 194, 200–1, 214, 216, 219–25, 237–38, 240, 248–49, 277; foreign direct investment (FDI) and, 139, 145, 147, 148, 154, 163, 193, 198–99, 200, 284n3, 285n5, 285n9; France and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 169, 177, 181–83, 202, 221, 233, 236, 239, 242, 245, 248; Germany and, 142, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 169, 176–81, 191, 207, 209, 219, 221, 230, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245; globalization and, 137, 142–44, 148–49, 151, 156, 198, 206, 234, 245; Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) and, 220–23, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76; growth and, 51, 142, 156, 162–64, 168, 170–71, 177, 179, 181, 192, 194, 218, 221, 226, 237, 247–48, 285n8, 285n9; human capital and, 206, 229; immigrants and, 136, 160, 193–94, 206, 215–17, 223, 226–27, 234, 237, 249; industrialization and, 180–81, 203, 224; inequality and, 41–45, 139–41, 192, 197, 219–23, 228; inflation and, 151–52, 153, 163, 168–73, 176, 178, 202, 207, 234; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 3, 5, 136–43, 156, 163, 171, 175–76, 180–90, 193, 195, 198, 214, 238, 249; innovation and, 141, 152, 157–58, 173–75, 180–83, 196, 198, 205–7; institutional frameworks and, 138, 146, 150, 156; Ireland and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 170, 230, 233; Italy and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245, 248; Japan and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 182, 207, 209, 218, 221, 232, 233, 236, 239, 241, 242, 244, 284n4; Korea and, 284n4; labor market and, 140, 152, 173–78, 183, 186, 190, 223, 229; liberalism and, 137–38, 141–56, 159, 161–83, 207–14, 228–29, 232, 241, 243, 250, 284n3, 286n11; Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) and, 152, 169, 181, 198, 230, 232; low-skilled labor and, 180, 194, 200, 212–13, 218, 223, 238, 249; macroeconomic management and, 151–52; majoritarianism and, 213, 217, 243–44, 251; manufacturing and, 142, 169, 182, 194, 197, 200–3, 224, 241; middle class and, 140, 142, 158, 163, 168, 201, 203, 218–28, 234–51; mobility and, 145, 207, 214, 217–23, 227–32, 239–42, 247, 249; modernization and, 174; multinational companies (MNCs) and, 7, 145, 147, 193, 200, 267–68, 271; multinational enterprises (MNEs) and, 2–3, 15, 40, 139, 154, 192; nation-states and, 139, 159, 161, 206, 213, 215; Netherlands and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 230, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245; Norway and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; OECD countries and, 153–54, 175, 196, 230–32, 233, 250; open financial markets and, 152; outsourcing and, 118, 193–94, 222; party system and, 21, 44, 51–52; physical skills and, 193; political construction of, 161–83; political decisions leading to, 156–61; political economy and, 51, 164–68, 181, 220, 226, 235; populism and, 136, 138, 140–42, 146, 161, 171, 175, 181–85, 195, 202, 205, 214–23, 226–28, 235–53, 254–56; privatization and, 154, 173; production and, 143, 152, 161, 180, 183, 224–25, 234–35, 247, 249; proportional representation (PR) systems and, 132–34, 135, 212, 217, 229, 251; public goods and, 52, 143–48, 152, 157, 167, 225; reconfigurability and, 185, 191, 214, 224; redistribution and, 48, 137, 140, 158, 168, 220, 222, 225, 234–37, 241; regulation index and, 285n5; relational skills and, 187; reputation and, 158, 163–64, 182–83, 188, 190–91; research and, 139, 146, 159, 164–65, 179, 187, 189, 196, 200, 204, 234, 285n9; routine tasks and, 193; second-order effects of, 129, 216; segregation and, 43, 107, 140, 161, 185, 192, 195, 197, 200–6, 214, 231; semiskilled labor and, 142, 172–73, 212, 238–40; shocks and, 136–40, 143, 156–59, 181, 185, 194, 214; skill clusters and, 139, 141, 144–48, 183, 185, 190–98, 200, 223; skilled labor and, 137–49, 157–58, 172–200, 211–13, 217–35, 238–41, 246, 249–52, 255–56; smart cities and, 194–95; socialism and, 137, 181–82, 215, 218; social networks and, 139, 145, 185, 188, 191–92, 195–97, 200, 204–6, 217, 225, 246; societal transformation from, 138–43; socioeconomic construction of, 183–99; South Korea and, 147–48, 150, 154, 156, 166, 232, 233, 236, 239, 241, 242; Spain and, 154, 166, 201, 221, 233, 236, 242, 248; specialization and, 139, 144–47, 161, 190–93, 198, 200, 281n21; Sweden and, 147–48, 150, 153–54, 166, 173, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; Switzerland and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; tacit knowledge and, 2, 39, 145, 263; taxes and, 141, 157–58, 165, 167, 172, 206, 221–22, 225, 231, 281n21; technology and, 138–44, 147, 154–62, 175–76, 184–86, 192–94, 198–99, 214, 222, 226, 232, 234, 238, 246, 249, 284n1, 284n3, 285n6; trade and, 142, 145, 153–55, 163, 172–73, 180, 211–13, 218, 250; unemployment and, 170–72, 174, 178, 180, 207, 248–49, 255–56, 285n8; unions and, 152, 169–83, 212, 228, 251; United Kingdom and, 142, 147–48, 150, 152, 154, 161–63, 166, 169–77, 180–81, 194, 200–1, 204, 206, 209, 218, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245, 250; United States and, 141–42, 147–56, 162, 166, 169, 171, 177, 186, 194–95, 198, 202, 209, 215, 218–23, 230, 232, 236, 241, 244, 277; unskilled workers and, 193, 246, 255; voters and, 24, 138, 140, 158–59, 163–64, 167–68, 183, 213–19, 234–36, 245, 247; wages and, 151, 160, 172–76, 181, 196, 211–12, 219, 222–23, 227, 229; welfare and, 137, 146, 167, 176, 214, 223, 234, 249, 285n6, 285n8, 287n1; women and, 141, 151, 174, 176, 184, 195, 238; working class and, 201, 225, 231, 239, 251; World Values Survey (WVS) and, 168, 235–36, 245 knowledge-intensive businesses (KIBs), 187–90, 190 Kristal, Tali, 119 Krueger, Alan B., 220 Kulturkampf, 94–95 Kurzweil, Raymond, 264 Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Braverman), 186 labor market: active labor market programs (ALMPs) and, 126–27, 135, 284n1; analytic skills and, 186; apprentices and, 61, 64–65, 68, 71, 104, 110, 127, 179–80, 230; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 260–72; artisans and, 61, 63–65, 70, 79, 94–95, 98; assembly lines and, 104, 108; big-city agglomerations and, 194–200; capitalism and, 1, 6, 12, 31, 38, 46–47, 122, 125, 128, 152, 186, 229, 258; Catholicism and, 56, 61, 63, 68, 77, 83, 87, 92, 94–95; collective bargaining and, 67, 69, 73, 92, 103, 107, 137, 176, 179; comparative advantage and, 31, 49, 51, 128, 131, 268; competition and, 12 (see also competition); craft skills and, 32, 53, 61–71, 79, 82, 90–91, 96, 98, 101, 104, 172; democracy and, 64, 66, 96–98, 260, 266, 268, 273; deregulation and, 1, 96, 122, 183; dualism and, 282n25; education and, 12, 28, 31, 41, 53–54, 60, 70, 72, 83, 89–90, 96, 98, 104, 128, 165, 174, 177, 191, 223, 225, 229, 260; flexicurity and, 174; Fordism and, 103, 118, 122–28; globalization and, 162–63 (see also globalization); guild systems and, 59, 63–64, 69–70, 90–91, 93, 96, 98; immigrants and, 45, 88–89, 136, 160, 193–94, 206, 215–17, 223, 226–27, 234, 237, 249, 275, 283n13; journeymen and, 61, 65; knowledge economies and, 140, 152, 173–78, 183, 186–90, 223, 229; laziness and, 222, 237, 254; manual jobs and, 76, 78, 226, 238–40, 246, 255–56, 264–65; mobility and, 8, 13, 59 (see also mobility); monopolies and, 6, 24, 47, 54, 64, 68, 87, 99, 114, 155, 186; outsourcing and, 118, 193–94, 222; pensions and, 41, 92, 178–79; politics of future and, 272–77; populism and, 223, 229; relational skills and, 187; retirement and, 110, 151, 201; revisionist history and, 283n9; robots and, 18, 141, 143, 184, 193, 260–66, 273; rules for, 6, 10, 12, 28, 38; semiskilled labor and, 12 (see also semiskilled labor); September Compromise and, 66; skilled labor and, 2–3, 12 (see also skilled labor); strikes and, 73, 75, 108, 116; tacit knowledge and, 2, 39, 145, 263; trade and, 17, 155 (see also trade); training and, 7, 10, 14, 31, 44, 82, 89–90, 101, 104, 109, 111, 128, 131, 174, 176, 179, 181, 204, 223, 228–29, 232–33, 241–43, 252, 257, 275, 277, 280n10; undeserving poor and, 43, 142, 160, 216, 222, 227; unemployment and, 16, 282n22, 284n2, 285n8 (see also unemployment); unions and, 6 (see also unions); vocational learning and, 31, 44, 68, 82, 89, 92, 104, 109, 113, 127–28, 131, 174, 176, 179, 228–30, 233, 242–43, 251–52, 257; welfare and, 31, 46, 96, 118, 120, 122–23, 125, 128, 176, 223, 279n5; women and, 5, 174, 176 Labour Party, 68, 169, 171 Landesbanken, 176–77 landowners, 38, 57, 80–89, 95, 98, 158 Lange, David, 171 Lapavitsas, Costas, 150 Latin America, 29, 56, 257 laziness, 222, 237, 254 Lega, 248, 276 Lehmann Brothers, 210 Le Pen, Marine, 183 Lewis-Black, Michael S., 164, 167, 285n8 liberalism: capitalism and, 1–2, 32, 49, 60, 97, 100–1, 137, 143, 213–14, 228; democracy and, 56–62, 67–71, 79–90, 96–101, 282n3, 283n14; education and, 45, 60, 71, 79, 82–83, 89–90, 101, 104, 138, 143, 156, 175, 208, 212–14, 228–29, 232, 241, 243, 284n3, 286n11; embedded, 51, 97, 137–38, 143–56, 159–83, 214; financial crisis and, 207–13; Fordism and, 103–5, 115, 125, 127; globalization and, 1, 51, 142, 155, 162–63, 208, 213; knowledge economies and, 137–38, 141–56, 159, 161–83, 207–14, 228–29, 232, 241, 243, 250, 284n3, 286n11; majoritarianism and, 33, 49, 60, 71, 97, 100–3, 125, 213, 243; middle class and, 2, 60, 71–72, 90, 96–97, 100–1, 115, 286n11; neoliberalism and, 1–2, 286n11; populism and, 228–29, 232, 241, 243, 250; protoliberal countries and, 59–61, 68, 90, 97, 100–1, 228; public goods and, 79–90; regulated, 143, 149; trade, 51, 62, 142, 155, 163, 173, 213, 250, 284n3; United Kingdom and, 32 Liberal Market Economies (LMEs): Fordism and, 103, 112, 125, 127–29; knowledge economies and, 152, 169, 181, 198, 230, 232; populism and, 230, 232 libertarians, 45, 225, 234, 237, 240, 249 Lib-Lab political parties, 62–63 Lindblom, Charles, 5–6, 11, 19, 34, 280n9 Lindert, Peter H., 81, 220, 283n11 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 4, 37, 55, 71–72, 79, 113 Lizzeri, A., 79–80, 86 LO, 19, 66, 108 loans, 110, 148, 173, 209–11 Local Government Act, 86 Louca, Francisco, 5 low-skilled labor: capitalism and, 265–66; democracy and, 97–98, 265–66; Fordism and, 119–20, 126; knowledge economies and, 180, 194, 200, 212–13, 218, 223, 238, 249; populism and, 218, 223, 238, 249; robots and, 18; unions and, 19, 47, 50, 66, 70–71, 96, 98–99, 119, 127, 181 low-wage countries, 18–19, 28 Luddites, 226 Luebbert, Gregory, 62, 69, 282n3 Lutheran Church, 72 Maastricht Treaty, 122 McAfee, A., 260 machine-based technological change (MBTC), 262 Macron, Emmanuel, 183 majoritarianism: capitalism and, 22; cross-class parties and, 125; decommodification and, 9; democracy and, 60, 71, 91–93, 97–98, 100–1; Fordism and, 103, 112–13, 124–32; inequality and, 22; institutional patterns and, 33, 49, 132, 251; knowledge economies and, 213, 217, 243–44, 251; liberalism and, 33, 49, 60, 71, 97, 100–3, 125, 213, 243; populism and, 217, 243–44, 251; proportional representation (PR) systems and, 19, 44–45, 60, 93, 100–1, 124–26, 128, 132, 217, 251; taxes and, 24, 44, 113, 124; Westminster systems and, 19 Manning, Alan, 193 Manow, Philip, 44, 92–93, 95–96, 124 manual labor, 76, 78, 226, 238–40, 246, 255–56, 264–65 manufacturing: Asian, 5, 14, 241; capitalism and, 2, 14, 33, 142, 203; democracy and, 80; feeder towns and, 108–9, 224; Fordism and, 103, 108–9, 118; innovation and, 33; knowledge economies and, 142, 169, 182, 194, 197, 200–3, 224, 241; populism and, 200–3, 224, 241; research and, 15, 200; skilled labor and, 15, 33, 44–45, 109, 118, 194, 224 Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work (Vogel), 11 Marks, Gary, 68 Martin, Cathie Joe, 63 Marxism, 11, 34, 46, 62, 279n4, 280n8, 280n9 materialism, 217, 234–35, 238 median income, 23, 25 Medicare, 24, 42 Melitz model, 211–12 Meltzer-Richard model, 3 Mezzogiorno, 93 microprocessors, 14, 140, 284n1 Microsoft, 155, 186, 262 middle class: capitalism and, 2–3, 20, 22, 41, 53, 97, 101, 162, 225, 227, 257–58, 273; democracy and, 3, 20, 22–23, 35, 44, 53–55, 60, 63, 71–74, 84–85, 90, 96–101, 115, 158, 163, 168, 257–58, 273–74; education and, 3, 20, 24, 41–43, 53–55, 60, 71, 84, 90, 98, 101, 128, 158, 168, 203, 222–25, 235, 238–40, 243–44, 249, 251, 257–58, 273–74, 286n11, 287n1; encapsulation and, 227, 243, 249; Fordism and, 43, 112, 115, 117, 123, 125, 128, 142, 160, 201, 219, 222–25, 238, 248; Gini coefficients and, 23; Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) and, 220, 221, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76; growth and, 2–3, 97, 115, 163, 168, 226; hollowing out of, 160, 219, 222, 238; inequality and, 3, 20, 22–23, 41–43, 140, 222–23, 228, 273, 281; knowledge economies and, 24, 140, 142, 158, 163, 168, 201, 203, 218–28, 234–51; liberalism and, 2, 60, 71–72, 90, 96–97, 100–1, 115, 286n11; lower, 22, 35, 42, 63, 72, 90, 98, 124, 128, 142, 158, 201, 223, 235, 238, 244, 248, 251, 273; Medicare and, 42; middle-income trap puzzle and, 8, 26–30; neoliberalism and, 2; new, 3, 43, 218, 222, 224–27, 234, 238–41, 246, 247; old, 3, 43, 140, 142, 203, 219, 222–28, 234, 237–40, 243–44, 247, 249, 287n1; populism and, 218–28, 234–51; rebirth of cities and, 224–27; redistribution and, 3, 20, 35, 42, 60, 71, 90, 98, 100, 112, 115, 123–25, 140, 158, 168, 220, 222, 225, 234, 237, 241, 273–74; skilled labor and, 3, 20, 27, 30, 35, 41–44, 71, 85, 90, 96–101, 112, 115, 123, 125, 142, 158, 193, 222, 224, 235, 239–41, 249; Social Security and, 42; taxes and, 21, 42, 124, 158, 222, 225; technology and, 3, 21, 29–30, 41, 117, 139, 222, 226, 249; upper, 2, 41–44, 72, 125, 158, 168; voters and, 2–3, 20–22, 44, 90, 96–100, 125, 140, 158, 168, 273 military, 8, 28, 33, 73, 75, 86–87, 279n2, 281n18 Mittelstand, 68, 92, 95, 179, 191 Mitterrand, François, 182 mobility: capital, 8, 16, 30, 35, 50, 145, 280n11; democracy and, 59, 258, 275–76; economic geography and, 2, 8, 18, 20, 39–40; Fordism and, 16, 118, 124, 221; France and, 59; Great Gatsby Curve (GGC), 220–23, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76; growth and, 13, 30, 247, 276; implicit social contract and, 221–22; income classes and, 220–22; intergenerational, 13, 21, 124, 219–22, 228, 230, 232, 241–42, 275–76; knowledge economies and, 145, 207, 214, 217–23, 227–32, 239–42, 247, 249; populism and, 217–32, 239–42, 247, 249; skilled labor and, 8, 13, 20–21, 39, 124, 217, 222, 228, 232, 239, 249; as strengthening state, 50–51; taxes and, 221 modernization, 19; democracy and, 55, 57, 66, 70, 79–83, 87, 89, 98; elitism and, 38, 57, 79–80, 83, 89, 98; Fordism and, 104, 109, 114; knowledge economies and, 174; protocorporatist countries and, 79, 83; Whigs and, 80 monarchies, 72–73, 81, 87 monopolies, 6, 24, 47, 54, 64, 68, 87, 99, 114, 155, 186 Morrison, Bruce, 80 mortgages, 151, 173, 209 Muldon, Rob “Piggy”, 171 multinational companies (MNCs): artificial intelligence (AI) and, 267–68, 271; democracy and, 267–68, 271; knowledge economies and, 7, 145, 147, 193, 200, 267–68, 271; technology and, 48 multinational enterprises (MNEs): changing roles of, 279n1; competition and, 154; economic geography and, 2–3, 40, 192, 279n1; globalization and, 2–3, 15, 18, 25, 28, 40, 139, 154, 192, 279n1; immobility of, 2; innovation and, 1, 40, 279n1; knowledge economies and, 2–3, 15, 40, 139, 154, 192; skill clusters and, 192–93; skilled labor and, 28; specialization and, 192–93 Municipal Corporations Act, 86 Mussolini, Benito, 77 Nannestad, Peter, 164 nanotechnology, 141, 184 nationalism, 216, 218, 227 National Reform League, 86 nation-states: advanced capitalist democracies (ACD) and, 9–11; capitalism and, 4–13, 30, 46–50, 77, 136, 139, 159, 161, 206, 249, 261, 267–68, 272, 279n4; democracy and, 4–5, 8, 13, 46, 136, 159, 161, 213, 215, 249, 261, 267–68, 272, 279; FDI globalization and, 40; knowledge economies and, 139, 159, 161, 206, 213, 215; skilled labor and, 8, 30, 48, 139, 261; strong role of, 9–11; symbiotic forces and, 5–9, 20, 32, 53–54, 130–31, 159, 206, 249–53, 259 Nazism, 75, 77, 99, 219, 279n2 neoliberalism, 1–2, 286n11 Netherlands: democracy and, 56, 57, 61, 62–63; Fordism and, 106, 121; Gini coefficients and, 25, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 230, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245; median income and, 25; populism and, 230, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245; protocorporatist countries and, 62–63; taxes and, 17; tertiary educational spending and, 231–32 New South Wales, 94–95 New Zealand: Acts of Parliament and, 88; democracy and, 38, 56–57, 61, 62, 87–89, 283n8; Douglas and, 171; Education Act and, 89; Fordism and, 106, 132; Gini coefficients and, 25, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 153, 166, 171, 221, 233, 236, 242; Lange and, 171; male suffrage and, 89; Muldoon and, 171; as outlier, 23; patents in, 27 Nolan, Mary, 65–66 Nord, Philip, 59 Norris, Pippa, 235, 246, 287n1 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 155 Norway: democracy and, 56, 57, 61, 62, 282n3; Fordism and, 106, 130; Gini coefficients and, 25, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; median income and, 25; populism and, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; taxes and, 17 October Revolution, 75–76 OECD countries, 25, 38; education and, 14; Fordism and, 107, 117, 125, 133; knowledge economies and, 153–54, 175, 196, 230–32, 233, 250, 286n13; populism and, 230–32, 233, 250; taxes and, 17, 280n13 Oesch, Daniel, 234 oil crisis, 120, 171, 181 ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, 132 Osborne, Michael A., 260 outliers, 23, 232, 241 outsourcing, 118, 193–94, 222 overlapping generation (OLG) logic, 7 Paldam, Martin, 164 Panduro, Frank, 203 Paris Commune, 86 parliamentarianism, 58 partisanship, 32, 47, 91, 112, 129, 164, 171, 174 party system: democracy and, 93, 101; Fordism and, 113, 123–24; knowledge economies and, 21, 44, 51, 51–52; voters and, 21 (see also voters) patents, 7, 12–15, 26, 27, 145, 201, 281n15, 285n6 pegging, 121 pensions, 41, 92, 178–79 Persico, N., 80, 86 physical skills, 193 Pierson, Paul, 282n22 Piketty, Thomas, 1, 16, 20, 22, 30, 41–42, 117, 137, 139, 141, 163, 261, 273, 280n11, 282n22 PISA scores, 196 plantations, 38, 84 police, 96, 173–75 political economy: broad concepts of markets and, 46; capitalism and, 2–9, 12, 17, 24, 34, 45–48, 97, 112, 129, 131, 137, 160, 167, 214, 227, 251, 275; democracy and, 59, 97; economic geography and, 2–3, 8, 48–49, 140; innovation and, 2, 7–8, 34, 183; knowledge economies and, 51, 164–68, 181, 220, 226, 235; literature on, 2, 4, 6–8, 48, 114, 164, 167, 281n19; populism and, 45; spatial anchors and, 48–49 Politics Against Markets (Esping-Andersen), 30 populism: Austria and, 230, 233, 245; Belgium and, 233, 245; centralization and, 231, 243, 252; competition and, 218, 222–23, 226, 236; conservatism and, 218–19; Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs) and, 232; cross-national variance and, 241–44; decentralization and, 217, 225, 234; democracy and, 13, 45, 129, 136, 215, 217, 226, 228, 248–51, 275; Denmark and, 221, 233, 245; economic geography and, 224; education and, 217, 219, 222–25, 228–47, 250–52, 287n1; electoral systems and, 217–18, 228, 251; elitism and, 216, 226, 235, 243–44, 248–51, 287n3; Fordism and, 113, 130, 216, 218–25, 237–40, 248–49; France and, 183, 221, 233, 236, 239, 242, 245, 248; Germany and, 181, 219, 221, 230, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245; globalization and, 234, 245; Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) and, 220–23, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76; growth and, 218, 221, 226, 237, 247–48; immigrants and, 45, 216–17, 223, 226–27, 234, 237, 239, 249; importance of economic progress and, 247–48; industrialization and, 224; inequality and, 219–23, 228; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 238, 249; Italy and, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245, 248; Japan and, 218, 221, 232, 233, 236, 239, 241, 242, 244; knowledge economies and, 136, 138, 140–42, 146, 161, 171, 175, 181–85, 195, 202, 205, 214–23, 226–28, 235–53, 254–56; labor market and, 223, 229; laziness and, 222, 237, 254; liberalism and, 228–29, 232, 241, 243, 250; Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) and, 230, 232; libertarians and, 45, 225, 234, 237, 240, 249; low-skilled labor and, 218, 223, 238, 249; majoritarianism and, 217, 243–44, 251; manufacturing and, 200–3, 224, 241; materialism and, 217, 234–35, 238; middle class and, 218–28, 234–51; mobility and, 217–23, 227–32, 239–42, 247, 249; nationalism and, 216, 218, 227; national variation and, 228–34; Netherlands and, 230, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245; new materialism and, 234–35; Norway and, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; OECD countries and, 230–32, 233, 250; political alignment and, 219–27; political cleavage and, 146, 181, 183, 228, 236–39, 241; political economy and, 45; postmaterialism and, 234–35; proportional representation (PR) systems and, 217, 229, 251; public goods and, 225; rebirth of cities and, 224–27; redistribution and, 220, 222, 225, 234–37, 241; regression analysis and, 236, 239–40, 246, 254–55; Republicans and, 218, 244–45; research and, 234; Robin Hood Paradox and, 220; root cause of, 13; rural areas and, 218, 224, 238–41, 287n1; semiskilled labor and, 238–40; sexuality and, 216–18, 225, 237, 243, 249, 254; skilled labor and, 52, 217–35, 238–41, 246, 249–52, 255–56; social contract and, 221–27; socialism and, 218; social networks and, 217, 225, 246; South Korea and, 232, 233, 236, 239, 241, 242; Sweden and, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; Switzerland and, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; symbiotic forces and, 249–53; taxes and, 221–22, 225, 231; technology and, 222, 226, 232, 234, 238, 246, 249; trade and, 218, 250; Trump and, 215, 218–20, 237, 243–45, 248; undeserving poor and, 43, 142, 160, 216, 222, 227; unemployment and, 248–49, 255–56; unions and, 228, 251; United Kingdom and, 13, 218, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245, 250; United States and, 13, 130, 171, 195, 215, 218–23, 230, 232, 236, 241, 244, 275; unskilled workers and, 246, 255–56; upper class and, 222, 227, 237, 253; values and, 239–41; voters and, 217–19, 234–36, 244–47, 250, 256; wages and, 219, 222–23, 227, 229; welfare and, 45, 223, 234, 249, 287n1; women and, 238; working class and, 225, 231, 239, 251; World Values Survey (WVS) and, 235–36, 245 postmaterialism, 234–35 Poulantzas, Nicos, 6, 9, 11, 19, 39, 279n4 poverty, 3, 5, 18–19, 25, 43, 47, 109, 117, 142, 221, 237 Power, Anne, 200 privatization, 1, 18, 154, 173 production: artificial intelligence (AI) and, 263; assembly lines and, 104, 108; broad market notions and, 46; clusters and, 40, 49, 183, 270–71; democracy and, 54, 60, 64–66, 69, 72–73, 83, 93–94, 258, 262–63, 267–71; feeder towns and, 108–9, 224; Fordism and, 43, 103–4, 108–11, 115–17, 123, 127; globalization and, 5, 40, 51, 258; innovation and, 10, 40, 262, 271; knowledge economies and, 143, 152, 161, 180, 183, 224–25, 234–35, 247, 249; skilled labor and, 10, 18, 35, 43, 49–50, 60, 64–65, 69, 104–5, 115, 123, 127, 180, 183, 225, 249, 258, 262, 267, 271; specialization and, 51, 108, 161, 258, 267–71; Vernon’s life-cycle and, 18 productivity, 19, 34, 118–19, 247, 261, 272 proportional representation (PR) systems: Christian democratic parties and, 44; democracy and, 19, 34, 44–45, 60–61, 91, 93, 97, 100–1, 112–13, 125–28, 132, 134, 135, 212, 217, 229, 251; Fordism and, 112–13, 124–28; green parties and, 45; knowledge economies and, 132–34, 135, 212, 217, 229, 251; liberalism and, 97; majoritarianism and, 19, 101; multiparty, 34, 44; negotiation-based environment and, 93; populism and, 217, 229, 251; redistribution and, 91; Westminster system and, 19 protectionism, 28, 41, 169 Protestantism, 61, 68 protocorporatist countries: Austria, 59, 62–63, 77, 99; Belgium, 62–63; Catholicism and, 56, 61, 63, 68, 77, 83, 87, 92, 94–95; democracy and, 59–72, 74, 77, 79, 82–83, 89–92, 98–101, 228, 283n11; entrepreneurs and, 65; France and, 59, 62; Germany and, 62–63, 65, 68 71, 74, 77, 99, 238n11; industrialization and, 60–62, 65, 79, 89–90, 98, 101; Marx and, 62; modernization and, 79, 83; Netherlands, 62–63; skilled labor and, 60, 64–66, 79, 90, 98, 101; Ständestaat group and, 59–60, 65–66, 70, 90–91, 93; Switzerland, 62–63; working class and, 60–79 protoliberal countries, 59–61, 68, 90, 97, 100–1, 228 Prussia, 72, 93 public goods: democracy and, 54, 60, 79–90, 98, 258, 275; Fordism and, 113; innovation and, 35, 258; knowledge economies and, 52, 143–48, 152, 157, 167, 225; liberalism and, 79–90; populism and, 225; role of state and, 10 Public Health Acts, 86 race to the bottom, 51, 122 Rasmussen, Poul Nyrup, 173 recession, 5, 206, 214, 247–50, 276 reconfigurability, 185, 191, 214, 224 redistribution: capitalism and, 1, 18–20, 31–32, 35, 37, 39–40, 47, 51, 55, 124, 128–31, 137, 261, 273; democracy and, 1, 8, 18–20, 32, 35, 37, 40, 55–56, 60, 69–71, 74–79, 90–91, 95–100, 115, 124, 158, 221, 259–62, 273–74, 282n3, 284n2; Fordism and, 103, 111–12, 115, 123–25, 128–29; Gini coefficients and, 22–23, 25, 36, 117, 118, 141, 221; inequality and, 1, 3, 20, 40–46, 140, 220, 222, 273; knowledge economies and, 48, 137, 140, 158, 168, 220, 222, 225, 234–37, 241; middle class and, 3, 20, 35, 42, 60, 71, 90, 98, 100, 112, 115, 123–25, 140, 158, 168, 220, 222, 225, 234, 237, 241, 273–74; populism and, 220, 222, 225, 234–37, 241; proportional representation (PR) systems and, 91; skilled labor and, 8, 20, 31, 35, 37, 47, 71, 90, 98–100, 103, 115, 123, 125, 128, 158, 220, 222, 241, 259, 261; social insurance and, 8; taxes and, 35, 40, 51, 124, 158, 221–22, 225; voters and, 3, 19–21, 32, 43, 90, 98, 100, 125, 140, 158, 273; welfare and, 3, 8, 18–21, 31, 39–40, 43, 115, 123–24, 128, 131, 137, 261, 273 Reform Acts, 56, 80–81, 85–86 Reform Crisis 1865–7, The (Searle), 85 Reform League, 86 Reform Party, 88 regional theory, 11 regression, 99–100, 132–35, 236, 239–40, 246, 254–55 Rehn-Meidner model, 19 relational skills, 187 Republicans, 38, 57, 59, 87, 218, 244–45, 282n24 reputation: colocation and, 267; consultants and, 286n15; Fordism and, 112–13; knowledge economies and, 158, 163–64, 182–83, 188, 190–91; Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) and, 112; political, 4, 12, 29, 32, 34, 112–13, 158, 163–64, 182–83, 188, 190, 258, 259, 280n9; skill clusters and, 190–91; social networks and, 191; subconscious signals and, 190 research: capitalism and, 2, 10, 12, 37, 48, 139, 159, 165, 234; democracy and, 55, 66–67, 72, 262, 264, 268, 287n1; education and, 10, 12, 20–21, 28, 48, 55, 72, 146, 159, 165, 234, 262; Fordism and, 103, 108, 110; innovation and, 2, 12, 40; knowledge economies and, 139, 146, 159, 164–65, 179, 187, 189, 196, 200, 204, 234, 285n9; manufacturing and, 15, 200; populism and, 234; skilled labor and, 2, 12, 21, 28, 37, 39, 48, 66–67, 139, 179, 187, 196, 268 retirement, 110, 151, 201 Robin Hood Paradox, 220 Robinson, James, 9, 35, 37, 56, 58, 71–72, 74, 76, 85–86, 99, 282n3 robots, 18; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 260–62; great technology debate and, 260–66; knowledge economies and, 141, 143, 184, 193; politics of future and, 273 Rodrik, Dani, 16, 22, 128 Rokkan, Stein, 66, 94, 97, 100, 113 Rueda, D., 45, 282n25 Rueschemeyer, Dieter, 56, 72–73, 75, 77, 280n6, 283n7 Ruggie, John G., 51, 143 rust belt, 224 Scheve, Kenneth, 221 Schlüter, Poul, 172 Schumpter, Joseph A., 6, 9, 11, 279n4 Scotland, 283n12 Searle, G., 85 segregation: centripetal and centrifugal forces in, 200–6; cultural choices and, 205–6; educational, 43, 119, 140, 161, 192, 195, 197, 200–6, 214, 231; Fordism and, 109, 119; geographic, 109, 140, 161, 185, 195, 197, 200–6; health and, 204–5; knowledge economies and, 43, 140, 161, 185, 195, 197, 200–6, 214, 231; private services and, 203–4; social networks and, 205–6; transport systems and, 201–3 semiskilled labor: capitalism and, 261; democracy and, 61, 64–65, 68–69, 261; Fordism and, 12, 102–5, 112, 115, 118–20, 123–24, 127, 129; knowledge economies and, 142, 172–73, 212, 238–40; populism and, 238–40; segmentation of, 43–44; technology and, 41, 43, 65, 102–5, 118–19, 127, 238, 261; undeserving poor and, 43; unions and, 61, 64–65, 68–69, 105, 119–20, 123, 172–73 September Compromise, 66 service sectors, 16, 31, 44, 51, 119, 157, 194, 200, 204, 219, 285n5 settler colonies, 84–90 sexuality, 52, 216–18, 225, 237, 243, 249, 254, 269 Sherman Act, 153 shocks: capitalism and, 6, 10, 30, 54, 125, 136, 138, 140, 156, 159, 214; democracy and, 54; Fordism and, 125–27, 132–35; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 136, 138, 214; knowledge economies and, 136–40, 143, 156–59, 181, 185, 194, 214; supply, 30; technology and, 6, 30, 136, 138, 140, 143, 159, 185, 194 Simmons, Beth, 161 Singapore, 4, 26–28, 221, 282n3 Single European Act, 145, 170–71 Single Market, 122 skill-biased technological change (SBTC), 41, 238, 262, 265–66 skill clusters: big-city agglomerations and, 194–200; capitalism and, 2, 7, 49, 145, 185, 192, 261; colocation and, 2–3, 7, 15–16, 185, 261; democracy and, 261; education and, 2–3, 7, 139, 141, 145, 148, 185, 190–95, 198, 223, 261; knowledge economies and, 139, 141, 144–48, 183, 185, 190–98, 200, 223; multinational enterprises (MNEs) and, 2, 192–93; reputation and, 190–91; social networks and, 28, 139, 191–92; specialization and, 190–91; sub-urbanization and, 141 skilled labor: analytic skills and, 186; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 261–62, 265–68, 271–72; capitalism and, 2–3, 6–8, 12–15, 19–20, 30–34, 37–38, 47–50, 53–54, 58, 60, 97, 101–2, 128, 137, 139, 144–47, 157–58, 172, 185–86, 192, 218, 250–51, 258, 261, 280n6; centralization and, 53, 58, 67, 69, 96, 99, 101, 110, 119–20, 173, 186, 279n1; colocation and, 2, 7, 261, 272; competition and, 6, 12, 18, 21, 30–34, 66, 96, 119, 128, 146, 157, 181, 186, 194, 198, 218, 222–23, 258; cospecificity and, 7–15, 20, 37, 47–50, 69, 99, 101, 115, 123, 196, 259, 261; craft skills and, 32, 53, 61–71, 79, 82, 90–91, 96, 98, 101, 104, 172; decentralization and, 96, 123, 138, 144, 146, 148, 172, 183–86, 190, 193, 212, 225, 262, 276; democracy and, 3, 6, 8, 12, 20, 31, 37–38, 44, 53–54, 58–71, 79, 84–85, 90, 96–101, 115, 158, 185–86, 250, 258–62, 265–68, 271–72, 276–77; economic geography and, 2–3, 7–8, 15, 20, 31, 48, 109, 116, 144–47, 185, 191–92, 195–96, 276–77; education and, 7, 12, 20–21, 31, 37–38, 41, 54, 60, 70–71, 79, 84, 90, 101–4, 119, 127–30, 139, 142, 158, 174–76, 179–81, 184–85, 191–95, 198, 217, 222–25, 228–35, 238–40, 246, 250–52, 266; Fordism and, 12, 14, 16, 102–5, 109–12, 115–30, 222–25, 277; foreign direct investment (FDI) and, 3, 139, 145, 147, 193, 198; growth and, 8, 13, 31, 68, 97, 110, 115–16, 218, 261; Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and, 41, 102, 185–86, 190, 193, 195, 198, 218, 276; innovation and, 2, 6–12, 19, 27, 31–34, 104, 128, 141, 174, 196, 198, 258, 262, 271, 281n18; knowledge economies and, 137–49, 157–58, 172–200, 211–13, 217–35, 238–41, 246, 249–52, 255–56; manufacturing and, 15, 33, 44–45, 109, 118, 194, 224; middle class and, 3, 20, 27, 30, 35, 41–44, 71, 85, 90, 96–101, 112, 115, 123, 125, 142, 158, 193, 222, 224, 235, 239–41, 249; mobility and, 8, 13, 20–21, 39, 124, 217, 222, 228, 232, 239, 249; nation-states and, 8, 30, 48, 139, 261; overlapping generation (OLG) logic and, 7; physical skills and, 193; politics of future and, 272–77; populism and, 52, 217–35, 238–41, 246, 249–52, 255–56; production and, 10, 18, 35, 43, 49–50, 60, 64–65, 69, 104–5, 115, 123, 127, 180, 183, 225, 249, 258, 262, 267, 271; protocorporatist countries and, 60, 64–66, 79, 90, 98, 101; rebirth of cities and, 224–27; redistribution and, 8, 20, 31, 35, 37, 47, 71, 90, 98–100, 103, 115, 123, 125, 128, 158, 220, 222, 241, 259, 261; relational skills and, 187; research and, 2, 12, 21, 28, 37, 39, 48, 66–67, 139, 179, 187, 196, 268; social insurance and, 8, 35, 50, 67, 123, 125, 127, 192; social networks and, 2, 28, 48, 139, 145, 185, 191–92, 195, 197, 225, 258, 261, 267–68, 271; specialization and, 14 (see also specialization); tacit knowledge and, 2, 39, 145, 263; technology and, 3, 7, 10–14, 20, 30–31, 37, 41, 43, 48, 50, 70, 96, 102–5, 118–19, 127–28, 138–40, 144, 147, 157, 175–76, 185–86, 192–94, 198–99, 222, 232, 238, 261, 268, 277; unions and, 6, 19, 33, 47, 50, 53, 58, 60–71, 96–101, 105, 110, 119–20, 123, 127, 172–73, 176, 181, 186, 251; upper class and, 43–44, 125; upskilling and, 102, 123, 129, 174–75, 178, 228, 232, 250–51; wages and, 6, 18, 33, 41, 50, 61, 64, 67, 104–5, 110, 115, 118–24, 127, 172–76, 181, 212, 222–23, 229, 266 Slomp, Hans, 62 smart cities, 194–95 social contract, 161, 221–27 social democratic parties: Denmark and, 76–77, 181; Germany and, 62–63, 68, 72–77, 181; Norway and, 282n3; Sweden and, 19, 72, 74, 76; unions and, 6, 19, 61–63, 67–68, 72, 74, 76, 114, 181, 282n3 Social Democratic Party (SPD) [Germany], 68, 74, 76–77, 78 Social Democratic Party (Sweden), 19 social insurance, 21; democracy and, 67; Fordism and, 111; skilled labor and, 8, 35, 50, 67, 123–25, 127, 192 socialism: competition and, 11; democracy and, 11, 56, 61–63, 68, 71, 75, 94, 97, 100, 137, 181–82, 215, 218; knowledge economies and, 137, 181–82, 215, 218; populism and, 218 social justice, 115, 237 social networks: cultural choices and, 205–6; democracy and, 258, 261, 268, 270–71, 274–75; economic geography and, 48–49, 185, 195, 274; education and, 2, 51–52, 139, 145, 185, 191–99, 204–5, 217, 225, 234, 261, 270–71, 274–75; growth and, 51, 92; knowledge economies and, 139, 145, 185, 188, 191–92, 195–97, 200, 204–6, 217, 225, 246; populism and, 217, 225, 246; reputation and, 191; segregation and, 205–6; skilled labor and, 2, 28, 48, 139, 145, 185, 191–92, 195, 197, 225, 258, 261, 267–68, 271 Social Security, 24, 42, 50, 118, 174, 184 socio-optimists, 260, 266, 275 socio-pessimists, 260, 266 Sokoloff, Kenneth L., 80, 84, 89 Soskice, David, 124, 135, 211 South Korea: capitalism and, 4, 26, 148; democracy and, 78; education and, 26, 28, 166, 231–32, 241, 284n4; Gini coefficients and, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 156, 166, 232, 233, 236, 239, 241, 242, 284n4; middle-income trap and, 26; military and, 28; patents and, 27; populism and, 232, 233, 236, 239, 241, 242; skilled labor and, 28 Soviet Union, 139, 142, 156, 186, 241, 285n7 Spain: Gini coefficients and, 36; knowledge economies and, 154, 166, 201, 221, 233, 236, 242, 248; patents and, 27; taxes and, 17 Sparkassen, 176–77 specialization: advanced capitalist democracies (ACD) and, 14–17; Asia and, 267; capitalism and, 2, 6, 8, 17, 40, 139, 145, 147, 161, 192, 258, 267, 270–71, 276–77; cospecificity and, 14–17; cross-country comparison and, 39; democracy and, 67, 258, 267, 270–71, 276–77; economic geography and, 8, 14–17, 39, 144, 146–47, 192, 276–77; education and, 14, 191, 271; Fordism and, 108; globalization and, 3, 8, 17, 40, 51, 198, 258; heterogenous institutions and, 6; innovation and, 8, 14, 198, 267, 271; knowledge economies and, 2–3, 139, 144–47, 161, 190–93, 198, 200, 281n21; location cospecificity and, 14–17; multinational enterprises (MNEs) and, 192–93; patterns of, 192–93; production and, 51, 108, 161, 258, 267–71; skill clusters and, 190–91; as strengthening state, 50–51 Ständestaat group, 59–60, 65–66, 70, 90–91, 93 Standing, Guy, 142 Stasavage, David, 221 Stegmaier, Mary, 164, 167, 285n8 Steinmo, Sven, 16 Stephens, Evelyne Huber, 56, 229 Stephens, John, 56, 229, 280n6 Streeck, Wolfgang, 1, 16, 22, 30, 137, 163, 206, 281n17, 282n22 strikes, 73, 75, 108, 116 suffrage, 72–74, 76, 80, 87–89 Susskind, Daniel, 260 Susskind, Richard, 260 Swank, Duane, 16, 39, 101 Sweden: capitalism and, 19, 39, 49, 148; democracy and, 56, 57, 61, 62, 67, 71–76, 78; Fordism and, 106, 107, 117, 120, 129; Gini coefficients and, 25, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 153–54, 166, 173, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; median income and, 25; populism and, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; Social Democratic Party and, 19; taxes and, 17 Swenson, Peter, 108 Switzerland: democracy and, 56, 57, 61, 62–63, 282n3; Gini coefficient of, 36; knowledge economies and, 147–48, 150, 154, 166, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; populism and, 221, 233, 236, 242, 245; protocorporatist countries and, 62–63; taxes and, 280n13; unions and, 106 symbiotic forces: democracy and, 5–9, 14, 20, 32, 53–54, 102, 130–31, 159, 165, 206, 249–53, 258, 259, 270, 272; Fordism and, 102, 130–31; knowledge economies and, 159, 165, 206, 249–53; populism and, 249–53 tacit knowledge, 2, 39, 145, 263 Taiwan, 4, 26–28, 78, 156 tariffs, 89, 114, 285n5 taxes: capitalism and, 16–17, 24, 34–35, 40, 51, 73, 167, 206, 261, 280n12; democracy and, 73, 261, 267–68, 271; Fordism and, 110–13, 124; Gini coefficients and, 22, 141; government concessions and, 18; Internal Revenue Service and, 42; knowledge economies and, 141, 157–58, 165, 167, 172, 206, 221–22, 225, 231, 281n21; majoritarianism and, 24, 44, 113, 124; middle class and, 21, 42, 124, 158, 222, 225; mobility and, 221; populism and, 221–22, 225, 231; redistribution and, 35, 40, 51, 124, 158, 221–22, 225; Republican reform and, 282n24; rich and, 22, 24, 261, 280n13; shelters and, 280n13; transfer systems and, 21–22, 112, 158; United Kingdom and, 17, 141, 206; United States and, 16–17, 24, 42, 141; upper class and, 42; value added, 34, 206; welfare and, 16–17, 21, 40, 42, 167 technology: artificial intelligence (AI) and, 260–72; assembly lines and, 104, 108; biotechnology and, 141, 175, 184; change and, 5, 13, 40–45, 50, 124, 138–41, 155, 162, 192, 199, 222, 232, 246, 249, 259, 262; codifiable, 7, 12, 14–15, 238; colocation and, 261, 266–72; cospecificity and, 7, 12, 14, 20, 37, 48, 50, 103, 159, 261–66; debates over future, 259–72; democracy and, 70, 92, 259–63, 267–72, 277; Fordism and, 5, 7, 14–15, 50, 102–6, 109, 117–19, 124, 127–28, 131, 140–43, 154, 192, 194, 222, 277; growth and, 3, 5, 13, 38, 162, 194, 226, 261; ICT and, 3 (see also Information and Communication Technology (ICT)); income distribution and, 21, 40; industrial revolution and, 5, 12, 58, 293, 295; investment in, 3, 20, 30, 37–38, 50, 109, 142, 147, 156, 175, 272; knowledge economies and, 138–44, 147, 154–62, 175–76, 184–86, 192–94, 198–99, 214, 222, 226, 232, 234, 238, 246, 249, 284n1, 284n3, 285n6; Luddites and, 226; manual jobs and, 264–65; microprocessors and, 14, 140, 284n1; middle class and, 3, 21, 29–30, 41, 117, 139, 222, 226, 249; multinational companies (MNCs) and, 48; nanotechnology, 141, 184; outsourcing and, 118, 193–94, 222; overlapping generation (OLG) logic and, 7; patents and, 7, 12–15, 26, 27, 145, 201, 281n15, 285n6; populism and, 222, 226, 232, 234, 238, 246, 249; robots and, 18, 141, 143, 184, 193, 260–66, 273; self-driving vehicles and, 265; semiskilled labor and, 41, 43, 65, 102–5, 118–19, 127, 238, 261; shocks and, 6, 30, 136, 138, 140, 143, 159, 185, 194; skilled labor and, 3, 7, 10–14, 20, 30–31, 37, 41, 43, 48, 50, 70, 96, 102–5, 118–19, 127–28, 138–40, 144, 147, 157, 175–76, 185–86, 192–94, 198–99, 222, 232, 238, 261, 268, 277; smart cities and, 194–95; trade and, 3, 7, 31, 50, 128, 131, 142, 284n3; transfer and, 18, 31, 38, 48, 128, 131; vocational training and, 31, 44, 68, 82, 89, 92, 104, 109, 113, 127–28, 131, 174, 176, 179, 228–30, 233, 242–43, 251–52, 257; voters and, 6, 13, 20, 159, 234, 260, 272 techno-optimists, 260, 269–70, 275, 277 techno-pessimists, 260–61 Teece, David J., 7, 12 Thatcher, Margaret, 33, 149, 163, 169–71, 182, 209 Thelen, Kathleen, 62–64, 219 Third Republic, 57, 81, 86–87 Tiebout, Charles M., 252 Tories, 87 trade: barriers to, 50, 114, 154, 285n5; competition and, 26, 31, 128, 131, 153–55, 218, 285n5, 285n9; democracy and, 258, 267; FDI and, 154, 163, 284n3, 285n5, 285n9; Fordism and, 114, 128, 131; free, 17, 155; knowledge economies and, 142, 145, 153–55, 163, 172–73, 180, 211–13, 218, 250; liberalism and, 51, 62, 142, 155, 163, 173, 213, 250, 284n3; NAFTA and, 155; open, 27, 154; populism and, 218, 250; protectionism and, 28, 41, 169; technology and, 3, 7, 31, 50, 128, 131, 142, 284n3 Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), 155–56 transport systems, 201–3 Trump, Donald, 130, 156, 211, 215, 218–20, 237, 243–45, 248, 276 Über, 265 undeserving poor, 43, 142, 160, 216, 222, 227 unemployment: automatic disbursements and, 133, 284n2; capitalism and, 51, 117, 172, 282n22; countercyclical policies and, 16; democracy and, 74–77, 92, 96; Fordism and, 105, 107, 110, 117, 120–21, 124–27, 133, 135, 284n2; knowledge economies and, 170–72, 174, 178, 180, 207, 248–49, 255–56, 285n8; social protection and, 51 unions: centralization and, 49, 53, 58, 63, 67, 69–70, 73, 96, 99, 101, 105, 107–10, 113, 116, 119, 122–23, 152, 156, 172, 174, 283n8; centralization/decentralization issues and, 49–50, 53, 58, 63, 67–70, 73, 96, 99, 101, 105–10, 113, 116, 119, 122–23, 152, 172, 174, 186, 283n8; competition and, 6, 33, 66, 68, 80, 96, 119, 152, 169–72, 177, 181, 186; craft, 61, 63, 67–71, 101, 172; democracy and, 53, 58–80, 90–92, 95–101, 274, 282n3, 283n8; exclusion of, 67, 70, 98; Fordism and, 105–16, 119–23, 127, 284n3; hostile takeovers and, 33; institutional frameworks and, 32–33; knowledge economies and, 152, 169–83, 212, 228, 251; laborist unionism and, 62; low-skilled labor and, 19, 47, 50, 66, 70–71, 96, 98–99, 119, 127, 181; polarized unionism and, 62; populism and, 228, 251; power and, 32, 66–67, 69, 73–76, 99, 105, 108, 112–13, 119, 169, 172, 186; predatory, 6; Rehn-Meidner model and, 19; segmented, 62, 105, 113; semiskilled labor and, 61, 64–65, 68–69, 105, 119–20, 123, 172–73; September Compromise and, 66; skilled labor and, 6, 19, 33, 47, 50, 53, 58, 60–71, 96–101, 105, 110, 119–20, 123, 127, 172–73, 176, 181, 186, 251; social democratic parties and, 6, 19, 61–63, 67–68, 72, 74, 76, 114, 181, 282n3; solidaristic, 62, 105, 172; strikes and, 73, 75, 108, 116; trade, 62–64, 170 United Kingdom: Blair and, 33, 171, 209; Brexit and, 130, 245, 248, 250, 276; British disease and, 172; British North American Act and, 87–88; Callaghan and, 169, 171; capitalism and, 10, 13, 19, 32, 38, 148, 152, 172, 206, 209; centralization and, 49; Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and, 169–70; Conservative Party and, 32, 81, 85, 88, 169, 218–19; democracy and, 38, 54–65, 73, 80–90, 277, 283n9; Disraeli and, 81, 85, 96; education and, 38, 130, 166, 177, 231–32, 277; enfranchisement and, 84–90; Fordism and, 105–8, 120, 123, 130; Forster Elementary Education Act and, 86; Gini coefficents for, 25, 36; Healey and, 169; health and, 204–5; Hyde Park Riots and, 85; inequality and, 36; knowledge economies and, 142, 147–48, 150, 152, 154, 161–63, 166, 169–77, 180–81, 194, 200–1, 204, 206, 209, 218, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245, 250; labor co-operation and, 152; laborist unionism and, 62; Labour Party and, 68, 169, 171; Liberals and, 32; Local Government Act and, 86; median income and, 25; modernization and, 19; Municipal Corporations Act and, 86; patents and, 27; populism and, 13, 218, 232, 233, 236, 242, 245, 250; postwar, 11; Prior and, 169–70; Public Health Acts and, 86; Reform Acts and, 56, 80–81, 85–86; Reform Party and, 88; segregation and, 200–3; settler colonies and, 84–90; taxes and, 17, 141, 206; Thatcher and, 33, 149, 163, 169–71, 182, 209; Tories and, 87; Victorian reformers and, 82; Whigs and, 80 United States: capitalism and, 13, 16–17, 24–25, 38, 47, 148, 152, 186, 209, 275, 277; Civil War and, 57; Clayton Act and, 153; Cold War and, 78, 111; decentralization and, 49; democracy and, 13, 24, 38, 55–57, 59, 62–64, 70, 83, 88, 96, 107, 147–48, 186, 215, 220, 275, 277; education and, 24, 38, 55, 70, 83, 109, 127, 130, 166, 177, 195, 223, 230–32, 241, 275; Fordism and, 105–9, 117–20, 123, 127, 130; inequality and, 24, 36, 42, 107, 117, 118, 123, 220, 282n22; knowledge economies and, 141–42, 147–56, 162, 166, 169, 171, 177, 186, 194–95, 198, 202, 209, 215, 218–23, 230, 232, 236, 241, 244, 277; labor market and, 56 (see also labor market); NAFTA and, 155; populism and, 13, 130, 171, 195, 215, 218–23, 230, 232, 236, 241, 244, 275; Sherman Act and, 153; taxes and, 16–17, 24, 42, 141; Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and, 155–56 unskilled workers: democracy and, 62–63, 67–71, 96–97, 101; Fordism and, 104–5, 118; knowledge economies and, 193, 246, 255; populism and, 246, 255–56 upper class: capitalism and, 4, 6; democracy and, 35; education and, 43; as gaming the system, 222; global distribution and, 27–29; Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) and, 220, 221, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76; inequality and, 41, 158, 261; political influence of, 24, 41–43, 253; populism and, 222, 227, 237, 253; skilled labor and, 43–44, 125; taxes and, 22, 42, 261, 280n13; voters and, 2 upskilling, 102, 123, 129, 174–75, 178, 228, 232, 250–51 urbanization, 37, 92; big-city agglomerations and, 194–200; effects of, 83–84; feeder towns and, 108–9, 224; knowledge economies and, 141, 194–95, 201–3, 224–27, 239, 241; rebirth of cities and, 224–27; segregation and, 200–6 (see also segregation); smart cities and, 194–95; transport systems and, 201–3 US Patent and Trademark Office, 26–27 value-added sectors, 206–9 Van Kersbergen, Kees, 44, 92, 95, 124 Verily Life Sciences, 262 Vernon, Raymond, 18 VET system, 176, 179–80 Vliet, Olaf van, 133 Vogel, Steven, 11 Von Hagen, Jürgen, 121, 151 Von Papen, Franz, 77 voters: advanced capitalism and, 2, 6, 11–14, 19–22, 30–32, 38, 46–47, 112, 158–59, 167, 215, 247, 273; aspirational, 6, 12–13, 20–21, 32, 167, 214, 219, 272; decisive, 2–3, 6, 11–14, 19–23, 32, 38, 43, 158–59; democracy and, 75, 81, 90, 96–100, 111–13, 125, 129–30, 133, 260, 272–73; economic, 164; education and, 12–13, 21, 38, 45, 90, 158, 164, 167–68, 219, 234, 247, 273; electoral politics and, 21–22, 46, 100, 111, 158, 183, 217, 272; growth and, 2, 13, 23, 32, 111, 113, 164, 168, 247; knowledge economies and, 24, 138, 140, 158–59, 163–64, 167–68, 183, 213–19, 234–36, 245, 247; median, 3, 21, 23, 44, 96–97, 100, 125, 168, 213; Meltzer-Richard model and, 3; middle class, 2–3, 20–22, 44, 90, 96–100, 125, 140, 158, 168, 273; mobilizing, 75; neoliberalism and, 2; politics of the future and, 272–73; populism and, 217–19, 234–36, 244–47, 250, 256; prospective, 164; PR systems and, 19, 34, 100, 217; redistribution and, 3, 19–21, 32, 43, 90, 98, 100, 125, 140, 158, 273; retrospective, 164; suffrage and, 72–74, 76, 80, 87–89; technology and, 6, 13, 20, 159, 234, 260, 272; upper class and, 2; welfare and, 3, 21–22, 43, 45–46, 111, 167, 214, 234, 273 wages: bargaining and, 49–50, 61, 105–10, 119–21, 127, 151, 172, 176; coordination and, 49–50, 106–7, 120, 123, 172, 229; cospecificity and, 49–50; democracy and, 266, 268, 273; Fordism and, 104–24, 127, 284n2; Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) and, 220, 221, 227–28, 247, 259, 275–76; knowledge economies and, 151, 160, 172–76, 181, 196, 211–12, 219, 222–23, 227, 229; monopoly, 6; populism and, 219, 222–23, 227, 229; restraint and, 18, 110, 113, 120–21, 151, 176, 211–12; skilled labor and, 6, 18, 33, 41, 50, 61, 64, 67, 104–5, 110, 115, 118–24, 127, 172–76, 181, 212, 222–23, 229, 266 Wajcman, Judy, 260 Wallerstein, Michael, 105 Washington Consensus, 38 Waymo, 265 Weimar Republic, 75–77 welfare: Bismarckian, 176; capitalism and, 8, 16–19, 31, 39–40, 46, 122, 125, 128, 131, 137, 167, 234, 261, 279n5, 282n22; cash transfers and, 21; competition and, 31, 40, 52, 122, 128, 131, 223, 285n6; cospecificity and, 49–50; democracy and, 94, 96, 261, 273; education and, 31, 42, 45, 52, 94, 96, 116, 128, 131, 146, 167, 223, 234, 261, 287n1; Fordism and, 110–11, 115–28, 131; free riders and, 127; Golden Age of, 127; inequality and, 3, 42, 125, 223, 282n22; Keynesianism and, 115; knowledge economies and, 137, 146, 167, 176, 214, 223, 234, 249, 285n6, 285n8, 287n1; labor market and, 31, 46, 96, 118, 120, 122–23, 125, 128, 176, 223, 279n5; populism and, 45, 223, 234, 249, 287n1; power resources theory and, 280n6; public services and, 21; redistribution and, 3, 8, 18–21, 31, 39–40, 43, 115, 123–24, 128, 131, 137, 261, 273; skilled labor and, 45; social insurance and, 21; taxes and, 16–17, 21, 40, 42, 167; trade protectionism and, 51; undeserving poor and, 43; voters and, 3, 21–22, 43, 45–46, 111, 167, 214, 234, 273; wage coordination and, 49–50 Westminster systems, 19 Whigs, 80 Winters, J.

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990
by Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds
Published 24 Aug 2016

Gorbachev also proved surprisingly radical on verification—an issue that had bedevilled the negotiation of SALT II in 1978–9. In the spirit of glasnost, he sketched out a comprehensive regime of on-site inspections that went further than the Americans themselves were willing to go. In the light of his new ‘reasonable sufficiency’ thinking, with national security no longer seen as a zero-sum game, the precise size of the Soviet nuclear arsenal—so sensitive for his predecessors, haunted by 1941—was no longer of decisive importance.81 Traditional Cold War axioms of military superiority were, however, still very much ascendant in Washington. Shultz returned from Moscow with the outlines of an INF deal, to which the president was receptive because of his need for a foreign-policy success to redeem the Iran-Contra debacle.

…

Even though pulling back from the brink of such a revolutionary step, much to the relief of their aides, the two men had clearly developed radically new conceptions of security. On his side, Reagan repudiated the traditional American doctrine of deterring war though Mutual Assured Destruction as literally mad: his Star Wars project (SDI) was intended to abolish nuclear weapons for the benefit of the world. Gorbachev, likewise, moved beyond security as a zero-sum game, benefiting one side only at the expense of the other, to talk about ‘sufficient security’ rather than superiority. In December 1987, at their third meeting in Washington, the two men finally realized some of their hopes by signing the INF treaty, which represented an unprecedented breakthrough after four decades of the Cold War.

…

But even when the instigator of a summit feels strong, as Reagan did when making overtures to Brezhnev, the weakness of the Other can be especially dangerous in the nuclear age, provoking rash gambles such as Khrushchev placing missiles in Cuba in 1962. Summitry in the face of a potential third world war was therefore not simply a zero-sum game in which one side deliberately sought to make the other side lose. Instead it demanded compromises out of which mutually beneficial stability could grow. The summits analysed in this book show just this: in order to ensure peace and gain predictability in the conduct of international affairs, leaders met, talked, and even learned from each other.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

Hence mercantilism’s obsession with the ‘balance of trade’. Its leading features, according to Denis O’Brien, were ‘bullion and treasure as the key to wealth, regulation of foreign trade to produce a specie inflow, promotion of industry by inducing cheap raw material imports, export encouragement, [and] trade viewed as a zero-sum game’.7 Mercantilism was based on a fallacy, though quite a fruitful one: like pre-modern medicine, it had elements of truth and falsehood. The fallacy was the belief that exporting is better than importing, and that the object of economic policy should therefore be to secure a favourable balance of trade.

…

Mercantilism can thus best be seen as a policy of increasing the 78 t h e or i e s of t h e f e r t i l e a n d b a r r e n s t a t e relative power and, by means of power, the wealth of individual states through manipulation of trading relations. Adam Smith’s claim to be the founder of scientific economics rests on his demonstration that trade need not be a zero-sum game, and that mercantilist policies, by restricting the size of the market, reduced the growth of wealth, and engendered the wars which justified them. David Ricardo put the case for free trade on a theoretically robust basis by proving arithmetically that, if countries were to specialize in producing and trading goods in which they were relatively more efficient, the real income of all the trading partners would be maximized – a logical demonstration that has stood the test of time, against all its critics, and provided a powerful normative argument for free trade policy.

…

There is an exception; negative rates can be expansionary even if they do not feed into lending rates, if they lead to a devaluation of the currency. Carney: ‘From an individual country’s perspective this might be an attractive route to boost activity . . . [but] for the world as a whole, this export of excess saving and transfer of demand weakness elsewhere is ultimately a zero-sum game.’ (Schomberg (2016).) Bech and Malkhozov (2016). For an explanation of the latter, see Skidelsky (2016). See e.g. Joyce, et al. (2011a); Christensen and Rudebusch (2012). Data: ONS (2017). BoP: current account balance as per cent of GDP (quarterly); time series ID: aa6h. Monthly average, effective exchange rate index, sterling (Jan. 2005 = 100); time series ID: bk67.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

This has long been a feature of the competitive strategies of the United States, but it now characterizes virtually all the affluent economies, including Canada, Britain, and France. It reflects demographic trends, a need to overcome skill shortages, and a global competition to be a net importer rather than exporter of inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs.19 Again, this was not understood as a zero-sum game, robbing emerging economies of some of their most educated and, in some cases, essential workers, such as doctors and nurses, but as brain circulation rather than brain drain.20 It is thought that workers from emerging economies could gain invaluable knowledge and experience while working in the West, which they could then use to contribute to the economic development of their country of origin when they eventually return home.

…

See also high-skill, low-wage workforce hourly wages, 117, 118 income inequalities, 124–25 industrial policy, lack of, 158 industrial revolutions, 21 Wilensky, Harold, 80 Williamson, Peter, 43, 57–58 Wilson, Timothy, 68 The Winner-Take-All Society, 122 IT revolution, 127 knowledge wars, 45–48 winner-takes-all, 11, 123, 160, 165n7 win-win scenario, 20, 111, 152–53 National Institute on Drug Abuse, 146 opportunity trap, 137 R&D (research and development), 44, 45 World Bank, 59, 130, 149 The World Is Flat, 66 World Trade Organization (WTO), 41 STEM subjects studies, 37–38, 39, 153 trade imbalance, 108–9 World University Rankings, 95 WTO (World Trade Organization), 41, 52 war for talent, 86 working poor, 163 universities. See colleges and universities 198 wage inequalities, 59–60 Wall Street, 111, 148 war for talent, 9, 83–90, 93–97, 148, 176n8, Young, Michael, 133, 182n3 value chain, 52, 54–56, 58, 98, 108–10, 128 Zeng, Ming, 43, 57–58 zero-sum game, 22 venture capital, 114–15 vertical integration, 103 Zhou, Eve, 45 ZTE, 42 Index 

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life
by Bernard Roth
Published 6 Jul 2015

The judge then says to the defendant, “You’re right.” Hearing this, a spectator in the courtroom says, “Wait a minute, Your Honor; they can’t both be right.” The judge responds, saying, “You’re right.” The point here is that seemingly contradictory things can all be correct. Most real-world activities are not zero-sum games. Ways can be found in which everyone, and especially the team, moves forward. If it is done out of respect and caring, controversy is not a bad thing. It can even be a good thing. It is important that the controversy not get personal and damage the team’s sense of mutual support and understanding.

…

Don’t lose sight of your humanity in the pursuit of a fancier car. Many businesses and academic organizations use competition as a means of encouraging people to do their best—they literally have contests (sales contests, design contests, etc.) pitting people against each other. Although our culture is habituated to winner-take-all athletics and other zero-sum games, I’m not a fan of this. While it can have a strong upside for the winner, it has a strong downside for everyone else. It can lower morale, foster jealousy, and hurt relationships. It’s important to learn to be motivated to do your personal best, regardless of what happens around you. I have found that contests bring out the worst in students, whereas learning to cooperate and share brings out the best.

In Defense of Global Capitalism
by Johan Norberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

Because we have the option of simply refraining from signing a contract or doing a business deal if we prefer some other solution, the only way of getting rich in a free market is by giving people something they want, something they will pay for of their own free will. Both parties to a free exchange have to feel that they benefit from it; otherwise there won’t be any deal. Economics, then, is not a zero-sum game. The bigger a person’s income in a market economy, the more that person has done to offer people what they want. Bill Gates and Madonna earn millions, but they don’t steal that money; they earn it by offering software and music that a lot of people think are worth paying for. In this sense, they are essentially our servants.

…

It’s obvious that such thinking would lead to a tremendous loss of welfare: the self-sufficient family would be hard pressed just to keep food on the table. When you go to the store, you ‘‘import’’ food—being able to do so cheaply is a benefit, not a loss. You ‘‘export’’ when you go to work and create goods or services. Most of us would prefer to ‘‘import’’ so cheaply that we could afford to ‘‘export’’ a little less. Trade is not a zero-sum game, in which one party loses what the other party gains. On the contrary, there would be no exchange if both parties did not feel that they benefited. The really interesting yardstick is not the ‘‘balance of trade’’ (where a ‘‘surplus’’ means that we are exporting more than we are importing) but the quantity of trade, since both exports and imports are gains.

You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing
by John Scalzi
Published 28 Jan 2007

Just as there will be writers with more success and less talent than you, some of your writer friends will do better than you, by whatever standard you decide "better" counts as. And you know what you should do? Be happy for them, you neurotic twit. Because it's more than likely that their success has almost nothing to do with you— which is to say that if they were less successful, you would probably still be no more or less successful than you are. Life is not a zero-sum game; the fortunes of others do not mean our own fortunes are diminished. I mean, for God's sake, there are 280 million people in the United States. Do you really think the success of one of them in your field of work negates your ability to be successful? Jesus. A little self-centered, aren't we. So, suck it up.

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You have to train yourself not to begrudge it to others, and indeed to want others to succeed in your field. Writers are supremely passive-aggressive (again part and parcel of that whole spending too much time in your own head thing), and it's an effort not to wonder what someone else's success means for your own or your own lack thereof. Eventually you have to realize that success is not a zero-sum game (well, technically it is, because there's a finite number of publishers with a finite amount of resources, publishing a finite amount of books every year—but all those numbers are large enough that for the individual author, the point is moot). Despite what you may think, the success of others is not a referendum on you.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How
by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Published 10 Mar 2020

And for leaders who need space to think strategically, are at risk of burnout from decision fatigue, and are weary of dealing with the same problems over and over again, a design thinking approach offers a more efficient way to manage complexity and boost both personal and organizational sustainability. Everyone wants more time, but for most organizations, giving back time to workers is a zero-sum game: either workers have to take a pay cut or the company has to spend more. By taking a design thinking approach to the problem and redesigning the workday, it’s possible to reduce working hours without losing customers or money. Ready to get inspired? 2 Inspire In the inspiration phase of the design thinking process, you cast a wide net around a problem in an effort to refine the question while still staying in touch with a wide range of ideas and disciplines.

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Shorter days make change easier by creating a new incentive structure around innovation. In a shorter workweek, feedback on good new ideas is immediate and tangible: finish the work more quickly and you can leave. In most workplaces, they’re also more social: everyone can leave if everyone pitches in. Shorter hours turn innovation from a zero-sum game in which workers lose while the company benefits into a win-win-win: higher productivity and more efficient work gives workers more time, gives businesses more output, and gives customers faster work. Under normal circumstances, Collius SBA CEO Jonathan Elliot notes, when companies introduce new tools, workers bear the burden of having to learn and adjust to it while managers and clients reap the benefits.

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy
Published 6 Jan 2011

It’s not uncommon to see Web competitors in the Val ey having dinner together and general y discussing business chal enges, before they go back to the office for some late-night coding to bury one another in the market. The same thing is happening in Indonesia’s nascent Web scene. The competitive stakes are low, because right now funding opportunities and revenues are so smal . Because they’re creating the market opportunity as they go along, there’s no feeling that the Web is a zero-sum game. They’re al in this together. For instance, the biggest problem they face is how to facilitate online payments in a country that lacks a strong system of national identification and where only 3 percent of the population has credit cards. The second largest problem is finding developers. In Indonesia, being an engineer is considered an entry-level position, not a lucrative career.

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That reason isn’t outsourcing. It’s entrepreneurs starting global y competitive companies that do something better than anyone else in the world, or at least in their region and country. While this may be a game with huge spoils—perhaps bigger than the global economy has seen before—it’s economical y a zero-sum game nonetheless. While the market opportunities of the rising middle classes in the developing world are so massive, many wil win, but many more wil lose trying to win. It’s not a question of whether America wil win—it’s a question of which Americans wil win, along with which Russians, Africans, Indians, Chinese, and South Americans.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
by Kimberly Clausing
Published 4 Mar 2019

US companies (and the government) can borrow at lower interest rates, and US consumers receive more goods to consume. Chinese savers get safe returns on their assets, and China benefits from export-driven growth. Politicians and journalists too often treat these imbalances as a marker in some struggle for global supremacy, the score of a zero-sum game. The US trade deficit is not a moral failure that places us at a disadvantage on the global chess board. Trade balances have little to do with the competitiveness of a country’s companies or workers. At current levels, reducing the trade deficit should not be a policy priority. Chapter 7 discusses international business.

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The Ricardian theory of trade is an oversimplified theory that neglects how gains from trade are distributed throughout society; this important issue is the topic of the next chapter. Still, the notion of comparative advantage provides powerful insights for understanding how trade affects countries. One of Ricardo’s essential insights is that international trade is not a zero-sum game. This is important to reassert, since the rhetoric of today’s protectionists is not much different from the mercantilists of Ricardo’s time; both hold a common belief that, in international trade, one country’s gain is another country’s loss. Historically, mercantilists argued that national power and prestige were dependent on a high volume of exports, a low volume of imports, and large stores of precious metals, or treasure.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
by Mary L. Trump
Published 13 Jul 2020

The increasing frequency with which Freddy flew under the influence was alarming, and as the summer of 1967 proceeded, Linda became reluctant to get onto the plane with him. The unraveling continued. By September, Dad realized that his plan wasn’t going to work. He sold the boat, and when Fred found out about the plane, he got rid of that, too. At twenty-nine years old, my father was running out of things to lose. CHAPTER SIX A Zero-Sum Game I woke up to the sound of Dad’s laughter. I had no sense of the time. My room was very dark, and the hallway light glared bright and incongruous under my door. I slipped out of bed. I was two and a half, and my five-year-old brother was sleeping far away on the opposite end of the apartment.

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Unlike Donald, he had belonged to organizations and groups in college that had exposed him to other people’s points of view. In the National Guard and as a pilot at TWA, he had seen the best and brightest, career professionals who believed there was a greater good, that there were things more important than money, such as expertise, dedication, loyalty. They understood that life wasn’t a zero-sum game. But that was part of my dad’s problem. Donald was as narrow and provincial and egotistical as their father. But he also had a confidence and brazenness that Fred envied and his older brother lacked, qualities that Fred planned to turn to his advantage. * * * Donald’s bid to replace my father at Trump Management was off to a strong start, but he was still at loose ends at home.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
by Talia Lavin
Published 14 Jul 2020

In the context of this world—the “manosphere”—the red pill meant learning the “truth” about society: that feminism was a devious scheme to render men’s lives difficult and women’s lives a manicured garden path of hapless mates easily parted from their money. The distance from the antifeminist “red pill” to the racist “red pill” was not so far: Each, in its own way, represented conspiratorial worldviews, in which the rights of women or minorities were a zero-sum game, promoted by sinister actors to deprive men and whites of their due. The overlap was illustrated most cleanly by one of Ashlynn’s suitors—one who rejected her outright. “I only talk to one person at a time, so my time is valuable. I’m not like the other men on here, I know my worth and my agency speaks for itself,” wrote “Brendan,” who said he was twenty-seven.

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It all squared with David Lane’s infamous, influential “White Genocide Manifesto.” Stein’s recorded comment could have been a paraphrase of the white-supremacist slogan the “14 Words”: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” In the uncompromising, visceral ideology of white supremacy, birth is a zero-sum game, a competition between the races. And murder can be an equalizer. Immigration took on a similarly apocalyptic cast. While some might see humanitarian policy in the resettlement of refugees, Stein, Wright, and Allen could see only invasion, loss, and a loathing borne of terror. At one point, Stein, Wright, and Allen explicitly mocked pro-immigration ideology.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

As soon as it is generally available, it loses its value. Some goods like Old Masters are naturally scarce; others like dwellings with fine views, or degrees from top universities, can be kept artificially scarce by restriction on entry. Power is an archetypal positional good. Ownership of such goods is necessarily a zero-sum game: not everyone can have power at the same time.14 We are rather a long way from economists’ laudable desire to ensure enough provisioning for people to lead good lives. Relative wants build insatiability into human striving and ensure that the poor are always with us: someone will always be poor relative to someone else.

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What has economics contributed to the growth of wealth? It is the spectacular growth of prosperity, reduction of poverty, and decline of violence since Adam Smith’s day that is economics’ main claim to have added value to economic life. By demonstrating that the striving for wealth, unlike the quest for power, need not be a zero-sum game, economists set public policy an altogether more benevolent prospectus. However, their contribution cannot be considered in isolation. It came on top of the prior emergence of scientific and market institutions, legal rules, the ‘spirit of capitalism’, and technological applications favourable to economic growth.1 This was the platform on which Adam Smith built his ‘science’.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

At some scope of defection, stocks will be so depleted that everyone's catch in future years will be jeopardized. There's more at stake than whether Alice gets her fair share. In game theory, this is called a non-zero-sum game because wins and losses don't add up to zero: there are outcomes where everyone loses, and loses big.7 A fishery is non-zero-sum. Other societal dilemmas might seem like zero-sum games with a finite resource: if one person takes more, others get less. But even in these instances, there is a potential for catastrophe in widespread defection. If a community can't share a common water resource, everyone's crops will die because farmers can't plan on water use.

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They can choose to cooperate and vaccinate their child, or they can choose to defect and refuse. As long as most children are vaccinated, a child is better off not being immunized: he avoids the chance of adverse effects, but reaps the benefit of herd immunity. But if there are too many defectors, everyone suffers the increased risk of epidemics. And it's a non-zero-sum game; there's a point where epidemics suddenly become much more likely. Societal Dilemma: Vaccination. Society: Society as a whole. Group interest: No epidemics. Competing interest: Avoid the small risk of adverse side effects (encephalopathy, allergic or autoimmune reactions, or—in extreme cases—contracting the disease from the vaccination).

Commodity Trading Advisors: Risk, Performance Analysis, and Selection
by Greg N. Gregoriou , Vassilios Karavas , François-Serge Lhabitant and Fabrice Douglas Rouah
Published 23 Sep 2004

This process 8Dale and Zyren (1996) report a similar level of explanatory power for positive feedback regressions applied to noncommercial positions in crude oil, gasoline, heating oil, and treasury bond futures. 9As Weiner (2002) points out, no conclusions should be drawn about price effects of noncommercial versus commercial trading based on the results in Tables 8.11 and 8.12. Since all futures markets are zero-sum games, correlations between noncommercial positions and past price movements necessarily imply just the opposite correlations between commercial positions and past price movements (assuming minimal trading volume on the part of nonreporting “small” traders). The results reported in Tables 8.11 and 8.12 are not sufficient to determine whether noncommercials (“speculators”) move prices and commercials (“hedgers”) follow, or vice versa.

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In this part of the graph, the excess return provided by the Commodity Trading Index is almost zero. That is, after taking into account the opportunity cost of capital (investing cash in treasury bills), the return to this style of managed futures is effectively zero, when there is no volatility event. This result highlights a point about the managed futures industry: It is a zero-sum game, similar to Newton’s law of physics: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. However, to the left side of the kink, there is a distinct linear relationship between the returns to managed futures and the S&P 100. Declines in the stock market driven by volatility events result in large, positive returns for the Barclay Commodity Trading Index.

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This synthetic put option exposure can be used to offset the short volatility exposure of other hedge fund strategies such as merger arbitrage and event driven. When we formed our mimicking portfolios, we observed that the mean return to these portfolios was zero. This underlines the fact that the futures market is a zero-sum game. However, managed futures should not be considered in isolation; their risk-reducing properties vis-à-vis short-volatility strategies provides measurable portfolio benefits. In sum, while the glory days of global macro funds may be over, there is a new reason to seek the benefits of CTAs. CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 10 The Interdependence of Managed Futures Risk Measures Bhaswar Gupta and Manolis Chatiras ractitioners today are faced with a wide choice of methods to measure return and risk in portfolios, either in absolute or relative terms.

Water: A Biography
by Giulio Boccaletti
Published 13 Sep 2021

It is worth remembering that an emphasis on democracy in the 1920s was in sharp contrast to the difficulties Western democracies were facing at the time. His own Chinese republic was failing, while the Soviet regime was seemingly heralding a new communist era. At a time of nationalism, chauvinism, and extractive, zero-sum-game relationships between countries, Sun believed that development in China would happen in collaboration with the West. The American minister to Beijing, Charles R. Crane, thought Sun’s ideas were “impractical and grandiose,” but in truth Dr. Sun was prescient: Many of his plans were not that far from those put forward much later by Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s opening up to the West.

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Despite the efforts by the United States to broker a deal, the inherent conflict simmered to a boil, finally exploding in full force in the 1960s. In 1964, the Israeli National Water Carrier began operations, drawing water from the Jordan River system. The surrounding Arab states saw this as a zero-sum game over the scarce resources. Nasser convened a summit—at which Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was formed—where the Arab states agreed to divert the headwaters of the Jordan, upstream of Israel, and channel them towards Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan through a series of impoundments.

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The line of control of 1949, which marked the cease-fire line at the end of the first war between Pakistan and India, happened to cut the two rivers: the Neelum ran inside India’s Jammu and Kashmir, over the line of control, and down to meet the Jhelum in Pakistan’s Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Either country could take advantage of this peculiar hydrological situation—but not both at the same time. Nature had set up a perfect zero-sum game competition to challenge the Indus Waters Treaty. Pakistan was first. It began contemplating a Neelum-Jhelum scheme in the late eighties. The project—a massive billion-watt installation—was supposed to begin construction in 2002 and be finished by 2008. However, it was beset by problems and delays, not least the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, which forced a redesign.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

Classification: LCC HD69.C6 B5749 2022 | DDC 001.068—dc23/eng/20220303 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022008480 Ebook ISBN 9780385546249 ep_prh_6.0_141443206_c0_r0 For Stephanie, Nicholas, and Peter For Leta, Aidan, and Liam Contents Introduction: When McKinsey Comes to Town 1 Wealth Without Guilt: McKinsey's Values 2 Winners and Losers: The Inequality Machine 3 Playing Both Sides: Helping Government Help McKinsey 4 McKinsey at ICE: "We Do Execution, Not Policy" 5 Befriending China’s Government 6 Guarding the Gates of Hades: Tobacco and Vaping 7 Turbocharging Opioid Sales 8 “Turning a Coal Mine into a Diamond” 9 Toxic Debt: McKinsey on Wall Street 10 Allstate’s Secret Slides: "Winning Will Be a Zero-Sum Game" 11 “The Enron Astros” 12 “Clubbing Seals”: The South Africa Debacle 13 Serving the Saudi State 14 Chumocracy: Half a Century at Britain's NHS Epilogue A Note on Sources Acknowledgments Notes Index Introduction When McKinsey Comes to Town In Gary, Indiana, just past the rusting bridges, peeling paint, and railroad switching station sits a green well-tended plot of land that seems oddly out of place.

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That led him to Ocampo’s book and to the Enron special-investment vehicles set up under Skilling. “It’s a powerful technology that has been driven beyond the speed limit,” Ocampo told Pittman in late 2008. “For the last five years, instead of going 65 mph, they’ve been gunning it up to 140 mph, 150 mph.” Chapter 10 Allstate’s Secret Slides “Winning Will Be a Zero-Sum Game” On a late summer day in 2000, Dale Deer was driving west on Interstate 70 in central Missouri when traffic stopped because of construction work. Behind him, Jason Aldridge, a twenty-year-old college student, was on a cross-country road trip from Kentucky to Las Vegas with a friend. Aldridge was trying to adjust his cruise control and did not notice that traffic had stopped.

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The new approach to boosting profit was to curtail what insurance companies saw as unjustifiably high amounts paid out to some claimants. To control what it called “leakage.” McKinsey was telling Allstate to essentially declare war on a sizable proportion of its policyholders. One slide proclaimed, “Winning will be a zero sum game.” In other words, Allstate’s gains come at the expense of its policyholders. Another featured an image of an alligator. Why? Because, like an alligator, Allstate would just “sit and wait” for its victim—the claimant—to give up. “The money came from the only place it could come from—the pockets of Allstate policyholders and claimants,” Berardinelli wrote.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
by Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 23 Jan 2012

It may also understate the division of income between capital and labor, insofar as CEOs and other top executives may have bargaining power to capture some of the “capital’s share” that would otherwise accrue to owners of common stock. Inequality Can Affect the Overall Size of the Economy Technology changes the shares of income for the skilled vs. unskilled, for superstars vs. the rest, and for capital vs. labor. Is this simply a zero-sum game where the losses of some are exactly offset by gains to others? Not necessarily. On the positive side of the ledger, inequality can provide beneficial incentives for skill acquisition, efforts toward superstardom, or capital accumulation. However, there are also several ways it can hurt economic well-being.

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series)
by James Bloodworth
Published 18 May 2016

Class politics must certainly evolve with the times – at the very least it should take account of the legitimate grievances of people who feel marginalised for reasons other than their class. It must also recognise that today’s class distinctions are not always the categorical divisions of the past. However, liberal identity politics is increasingly a zero-sum game – a game in which ‘white men’ must invariably lose out so that women, ethnic minorities and LGBT individuals can prosper. With no account for the impact of class, this will simply give rise to another injustice; or, more accurately, it will compound an existing one. As in Michael Young’s meritocratic dystopia, Britain’s individual winners and losers will continue to occupy vastly different worlds and will remain firmly pitted against each other in the sharp-elbowed race to the top. 102 ‘Men Explain Hillary to Me’, Michelle Goldberg, Slate, 6 November 2015. 103 ‘Ranks of Socialist Workers Party are split over handling of rape allegation’, Jerome Taylor, The Independent, 11 January 2013. 104 Equal Pay Portal, http://www.equalpayportal.co.uk/statistics. 105 ‘Inequality, housing and employment statistics’, Institute of Race Relations, http://www.irr.org.uk/research/statistics/poverty. 106 ‘Prison: the fact’, Prison Reform Trust, summer 2013 briefing, http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/ Portals/0/Documents/Prisonthefacts.pdf. 107 ‘“To unite the many”: an interview with Adolph L.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
by Jeff Rubin
Published 19 May 2009

But at the same time it gives each of those new car owners a straw to start sucking at what are already rapidly depleting world oil reserves. And the more they suck through those newly found straws, the less there will be for everyone else—and the higher the price we pay for what we are able to slurp up. Thinking of driving as a zero-sum game is not something that comes naturally to us. If we think about car ownership in other countries at all, we are probably not fretting that drivers on the other side of the world are pumping what would have been our gasoline into their tanks. But there is a strong sense in which that is exactly what is happening.

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Just as climate change is already affecting the poorer nations near the equator more cruelly than it does the richer, more temperate countries, rising fuel prices hit those places a lot harder as well. According to the International Energy Agency, every $10 increase in the price of oil causes the countries of sub-Saharan Africa to lose 3 percent of their GDP. What happens to their economies when the global oil market becomes a zero-sum game and the poor countries are unable to keep up with the bidding? When the developed world starts to tighten its belt, the economies of the developing world get strangled. Everyone, rich and poor, bought into globalization because everyone benefited. Incomes rose globally, and at historically impressive rates.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan
Published 18 Jun 2017

Of the nearly 400 billion person trips undertaken by U.S. drivers in 2008, almost forty-three percent were for “personal and family-related purposes (such as shopping trips and trips for medical care).[220]” In a scenario where we can dispatch the car to do our bidding while we complete another task, what does that do to our total logistical footprint? Media Business The media business is fundamentally about grabbing your attention. Until the introduction of the modern smartphone in 2007, the amount of people’s time available to media had been static for decades, and competition was a zero-sum game. Mobile opened up new territories for settlement — territories that have now been largely claimed by Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify and a handful of other major players, notably including casual gaming. Statistics show that up to 56% of people[221] play mobile games and US citizens spent 1.15 billion[222] hours playing mobile games monthly in 2016.

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Undoubtedly more people will participate in vehicle racing (cars, off road, motorcycles) to replace their emotional connection to driving. Though some more entrenched car proponents will feel it is, the driverless car does not represent a war on human driven cars or a war on freedom of choice. It is not a zero-sum game where humans must lose for the robots to win. It is about creating a technology that is better than humans at driving safely. This may require that we forgo individual freedoms for the greater good whilst still achieving as much individual freedom as possible. We will still be able to get from point to point anytime.

What's the Matter with White People
by Joan Walsh
Published 19 Jul 2012

The percentage of workers represented by unions dropped from a high of 35 percent in 1955 to less than 25 percent in the mid-1970s and continued to decline, to only about 12 percent today (and only 7 percent of private sector workers). Sadly, even as unions were opening up to blacks and women, the industries they represented were shrinking. Those who feared that integration was a zero-sum game, in which white men would lose jobs to blacks and women, turned out to be partly right in some sectors. While the percentage of black steelworkers, for instance, climbed during the seventies, the overall number of black steelworkers actually declined. There was no cause and effect here; it just so happened that just as American industry began to integrate, the economic structure beneath it was starting to disintegrate.

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And indeed, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough got me in trouble by noting on the air one morning that even the well-known liberal Joan Walsh was uncomfortable with Wright’s remarks. The only person who seemed able to feel empathy for both Ferraro and Wright, two older people bitter about sexism and racism, was Obama himself. In his remarkable March 2008 speech on race, he described the “zero-sum game” of racial politics that has divided Democrats for two generations. The country tried to improve the lot of black Americans, the candidate noted, with social and educational programs and affirmative action, just as the living standards of the white working class began to erode. Most working- and middle-class whites “worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor.”

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds
by Maneet Ahuja , Myron Scholes and Mohamed El-Erian
Published 29 May 2012

But, in my view, the classic definition of generating alphas are returns that are earned by those who can forecast future cash flows or the beta factor returns (macro factors) more accurately than other market participants, which, as alluded to in the book, is a zero-sum game. Not all can outperform—those that do are paid by those who don’t—and it is extremely difficult for those that do to replicate their successes over many periods. This is not at all the story I read in this book. There is a systematic bias that favors them. They don’t believe that they are investing in a zero-sum game; they are paid for their expertise. I have defined the true earning power of these hedge fund managers as not alpha but “omega” after Ohm’s law, where omega is the varying amounts of resistance in the market.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

The main sociological explanation of insatiability hinges, therefore, on the relative character of wants. At no level of material wealth will I feel satisfied with what I have, because someone will always have more than I do. Once competition for wealth—or the consumption by which it is normally signified—turns into competition for status, it becomes a zero-sum game, because everyone, by definition, cannot have high status. As I spend more on prestige goods, I gain status but cause others to lose it. As they spend more to regain status they reduce my own. There is no reason why the escalation of income to maintain and acquire status should ever end. Oddly enough, Keynes was well aware of status spending.

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K Galbraith, One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse and The Joyless Economy by Tibor Scitovsky—questioned the equation of “utility” and happiness. Rousseauesque anxieties were rekindled. What if technological progress creates new wants as fast as it satisfies old ones? What if humans crave relative rather than absolute advantage, making market competition a zero-sum game? Such questions took economists outside the remit of their discipline into the previously forbidden territory of psychology. Meanwhile, psychology itself was undergoing a revolution. The behaviorist veto on introspection was lifted, allowing self-reports to be admitted as evidence. Happiness surveys were first conducted in America in the 1940s and have been repeated, in increasing bulk and sophistication, every decade since.

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
by Steven Johnson
Published 2 Jan 1999

But you’re less likely to get a nod of agreement when you propose that people who are good at factoring pi in their heads are usually bad at tracking eye movements. Yet that is the brain’s reality. The more you understand the mind in the light of modern brain science, the more you recognize that isolated traits you possess aren’t necessarily isolated-the brain is full of zero-sum games, where one talent prospers at the expense of another. Sometimes those balancing acts involve related skills; sometimes the connection is more obscure. Thus our final principle: Your brain contains some strange bedfellows. Is mindreading one of our long-decay ideas, an idea that transforms your own sense of self?

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The End of Growth
by Jeff Rubin
Published 2 Sep 2013

If the greenback were to plunge against the yuan, the decline would effectively transfer millions of barrels of oil consumption from the United States to China. So what is the likelihood that the US dollar falls against other major currencies? With the eurozone debt crisis still in the middle innings, it’s understandably hard to envision how the greenback might suffer a significant drop as well. After all, currency markets are also a zero-sum game. If one major currency is going down, another major currency must be going up. If Europe’s currency union eventually breaks apart, though, a realigned euro would rally against the US dollar. A currency backed by the strong northern European economies of Germany and France would quickly attract global capital flows.

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In a zero-sum world, if Chinese oil consumption doubles over time, the number of barrels going to the United States could be chopped in half (or something close) since the energy pie is only so big. It’s a simple notion that will soon become a stifling reality for the United States and other OECD countries. If oil is the fuel that drives economic growth, and oil consumption is a zero-sum game, then so too is economic growth. Ultimately, that might be all the reason China needs to abandon its cheap yuan policy and turn its back on US treasuries. Instead of a cheap yuan facilitating export-led growth, China will let a rising yuan power domestic growth. Only a decade ago, America was the engine of the global economy, a role that China has now assumed.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
by Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Published 9 Aug 2004

Unfortunately, this simple fact of economic life is misunderstood or ignored by many commentators who cling to the discredited Marxist notion that one person gains in business at the expense of someone else. This nonsense is spread throughout the popular culture. It was on display in the movie Wall Street, for instance, in the now-famous “greed” speech, when Michael Douglas’s character explained that business “is all a zero-sum game: somebody wins, and somebody loses.” Nothing could be further from the truth, but Hollywood is full of movie scripts that spread silly, neo-Marxist propaganda such as this. And it is not just movies that perpetuate these myths. Many American universities are quite hostile toward capitalism, and during the twentieth century an entire class of intellectuals, journalists, television executives, private foundations, and others coalesced to form what might be called the anti-industry industry.

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It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.3 These are the facts that the neo-Marxist propagandists ignore when bashing capitalism as a zero-sum game in which “somebody wins, somebody loses.” CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY We all observe corporate executives, bankers, and businesspeople in general managing the day-to-day affairs of business, from the smallest dry cleaner to the largest multinational corporation. This has led many to believe that they—the public—have no say in their economy, which is largely in the hands of these “plutocrats.”

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

Firms will undermine regulations, lobby governments for special treatment, or leave one jurisdiction for another, setting off a global race to the bottom on wages, tax, and regulation, and destroying the planet in the process. Today, in the absence of the pre-2008 debt bubble, economic and political transactions have become a zero-sum game. Inequality may have risen during the 1980s, but the majority of people were also getting better off too — mainly through the expansion of access to credit. This debt bubble was never sustainable, but it served to obscure the tendency of capitalism towards stagnation — for a while. Today, we live in a world of low growth, low wages, and low productivity — all of which are impeding profitability amongst the majority of firms.

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With ever more resources controlled by the owners of capital, the only thing sustaining Anglo-American capitalism before the crash was the creation of ever greater amounts of debt. But as this debt has dried up, the stagnation created by a system premised upon rising inequality has been revealed. Economics increasingly resembles a zero-sum game, in which more for one group means less for another. And those with the political power are using it to monopolise the shrinking gains from growth for themselves. As long as the foundations of our finance-led growth model remain the same, then these contradictions will continue to escalate. In this febrile political climate, the so-called centre — committed to propping up the status quo — cannot hold.

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History
by Liam Vaughan
Published 11 May 2020

In this case, traders have placed orders to buy a total of 477 contracts at 2167.75. To some, staring at numbers and charts on a screen all day might sound dull, but for those who put in the time to understand its mysteries, the ladder can become highly addictive—a vast, confounding, ever-changing, zero-sum game played against some of the sharpest minds in the world for potentially limitless rewards. Every win releases a dopamine rush. Every loss is a blow. Adrenaline and cortisol course through the veins. In the words of Paolo Rossi, “When you’re trading, you’re alive.” Scalpers analyze the ladder for clues as to whether prices will rise or fall.

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Executives at the likes of Jump, Citadel, and Hudson River Trading pointed to the higher number of trades in general, and the shrinking gap between asking and buying prices, as evidence that their activities were improving the marketplace by making transacting cheaper and less volatile for everyone. But trading is a zero-sum game, and if HFT firms were winning, somebody had to be losing. In a research note suggesting institutional investors and pension funds were the ones getting stiffed, New York consultancy Pragma Trading wrote: “Given that HFTs are very short-term intermediaries between the directional traders who are actually trying to accumulate or unwind a position, it is hard to see how they can simultaneously be saving investors money and pulling billions out of the markets in trading profits.”

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline
by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Only 39 percent said yes in Spain, which is now considered one of the least religious countries in the world.94 (Interesting correlation: societies where the power of the Catholic Church rapidly collapsed, such as Spain, Quebec, and Ireland, tend to go from having relatively high to relatively low fertility rates especially quickly.) We must also point out that the rising power of women to control their own reproductive fate is, in many ways, a zero-sum game: fertility has declined despite, until quite recently, the stern but futile opposition of men. Men didn’t grant women property rights, voting rights—even, eventually, something approaching full equality—willingly. They did it kicking and screaming, against their will. Through most of history, men controlled women, including their bodies, in fact and in law, and they only gave up that control when forced to by women—urbanized, educated, and autonomous women.

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“Immigration enlarges the economy while leaving the native population slightly better off on average,” the report concluded, “but the greatest beneficiaries of immigration are the immigrants themselves as they avail themselves of opportunities not available to them in their home countries.”273 And as we’ve already demonstrated, immigrants provide the bodies needed to drive consumption and to pay taxes for services consumed by those no longer working. Immigration is a win-win for both immigrants and the native-born. It is the very opposite of a zero-sum game. The cold hard fact is that, without migration, population growth in most of the developed world would already be screeching to a halt. This is especially the case for Europe. In that continent, the population would have fallen between 2000 and 2015 had it not been for migrants.274 In the rest of the developed world, principally the United States and Canada, immigration will become the sole driver of population growth starting sometime in the 2020s.275 Politicians should be educating voters on the vital importance of immigration to their economic security.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 9 Sep 2019

We are in the early stages of creating a global interconnected electricity power grid—a digital Pangaea—that is likely to come online in bits and pieces between now and the late 2030s, connecting the human race for the first time in history. Individuals, families, communities, and entire countries will be freed from the geopolitics of the oil era, characterized by conflict and war in a zero-sum game, and become increasingly engaged in a biosphere politics of deep collaboration in sharing the free sun and wind that bathe the Earth. Connecting the human family on a glocal scale across a smart digital infrastructure is a singular event in the way humanity conducts its economic affairs, social life, and governance.

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Living with that new reality brings the human race together in a common bond that we’ve never before experienced. The younger generation gets it. They are staring down into a potential environmental chasm. They don’t want to hear their practical-minded, hardened, and even cynical elders say that a Green New Deal is unrealistic or a fantasy and that life is a zero-sum game. At this moment in history, we need to trust each other, all of us, beyond political boundaries, and begin to think as a species. What does all this mean for the excitement building around a Green New Deal for America and other countries not yet fully engaged in either the narrative or the process?

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes
by Ian Leslie
Published 23 Feb 2021

This was Athens, after all, a city that prided itself on its vigorous democracy, a city in which every man (although you did have to be a man, with property) was free to express his opinions in public. Athens was a culture of persuasion, however, and so most Athenians conceived of disagreement as a zero-sum game: you either won or lost. Arguments were means to achieve instrumental ends, subordinated to political goals. It was also a culture of one-upmanship. Men competed to be the finest orators, the most skilled debaters. They were not pursuing truth, but prestige. And so Socrates had to model a new and different kind of conversation.

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People will go to great, even self-destructive lengths to avoid the perception that they are being walked over. One-down parties often play dirty, attacking their adversary from unexpected, hard-to-defend angles. Instead of looking for solutions that might work for everyone, they treat every negotiation as a zero-sum game in which someone must win and the other must lose. Instead of engaging with the content, they attack the person as a way of asserting their status. By contrast, there are those who enter a negotiation expecting to succeed because they are, or perceive themselves to be, in the stronger position.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

A new generation of conservative politicians now sound very much like Attac did in 2001: the world is dangerous, there is no longer anyone in charge and free trade is destroying local traditions and good jobs. A ‘globalist’, US president Donald Trump explained, is a person ‘frankly not caring about our country so much’. The rapid progress in poor countries may have shown the West that those countries could benefit from globalization, but since the myth persists that the economy is a zero-sum game that assumes that someone’s gain is always another one’s loss, many have concluded that we in the rich world must be the losers. The worldview is the same, the roles are just reversed – twenty years ago free trade was considered bad because we exploited them, now it is considered bad because they exploit us.

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Where we once discussed where we were going, everyone suddenly started asking themselves who we are – and who does not fit in. Both the statist left and the nationalist right started engaging in some sort of purge of everything that does not fit into their pure, safe world. Borders would be closed, statues toppled, dissenters cancelled, ‘woke’ businesses threatened into silence. The culture war is a zero-sum game about what kind of homogeneous identity should be imposed on everybody else. Capitalism, on the contrary, is a positive-sum game that creates growing, dynamic societies and so gives greater opportunities for all groups to live according to their identity and realize their visions and projects.

Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs
by Jamie Fiore Higgins
Published 29 Aug 2022

I felt disgusting. Yes, I enjoyed the financial rewards of the job, but not what it was doing to my character. And if Nick was owned by Mike, then I was too, because I didn’t feel I could leave. So of course I wanted success for Pete and me, but I wanted it because we earned it. I didn’t want it to be a zero-sum game, for us to win because Nick lost. But to Mike, this was all one big game, where we were all pieces on his chess board, and he loved to pit us against one another, and play with our lives and livelihood. * * * The following spring, Mike called me into his office. “Human resources needs me to nominate an up-and-coming vice president to run the summer intern program,” he said.

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The company culture seemed to foster a scarcity mindset, as if women knew there were few spots for them, that they were a token to fill some quota in the boys’ club. So once in the club, if they brought another woman in, everyone might like her better, and then someone would get kicked out. It was a zero-sum game mentality, where in order for one woman to win, another had to lose, which was ironic because the men were winning together. I wished I had someone to talk to there, share what was really going on with my career and utilize this network. But there was nobody. The women partners focused on getting larger leadership roles, the managing directors gunned for partner, and the high-performing VPs wanted to make MD.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

Like rent, interest presupposes that those who produce goods and services for their income produce a surplus that the lenders can buy with their unearned income. Like rent, therefore, interest is parasitic on producers. As Michael Hudson puts it, it is a ‘deadweight cost’ on the economy.42 It is not merely a transfer, a zero-sum game (where gains equal losses), but a negative-sum game – that is, one that, other things being equal, leaves the economy worse off. Blocking a possible misuse of the argument In societies in which National Socialism or fascism took hold, the argument that asset-based unearned income was parasitic was hijacked and used explicitly or implicitly in a specifically anti-Semitic way, to attack Jewish people involved in finance.

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To the extent that such areas have any jobs at all, they tend to be low paid and unskilled. Right-wing politicians love to point to individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds who, through heroic struggle, find a job and then get ahead, and they castigate others for not doing the same. But where there are not enough jobs to go round, it’s a zero-sum game: if one person gets a job, it means that another does not. The same applies even if the jobseekers upgrade their skills. Yet, with boring predictability, the neoliberal media turn stories of lack of jobs into tales of lack of skills, or ‘welfare dependency’. This fallacy of imagining that what is possible for one must therefore be possible for all – a fallacy of composition, as logicians call it – is a staple of neoliberal politics and evangelists of meritocracy; it’s central to the so-called ‘American Dream’.

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Chapter Six: Profit from production 82 David Schweikart’s (2000) After capitalism, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, develops this point well. 83 There are other kinds of capitalist too: merchant capitalists make money simply by buying and selling without producing, acting as intermediaries between producers and consumers; financial capitalists make money out of lending at interest, and are in effect rentiers. 84 Applicants to public sector jobs have to convince the employer that they can do the job effectively enough to justify being paid. While the public sector has to work within budgets, neoliberal governments have tried to make public organisations compete in zero-sum games for funds to make them more like the private sector, in the belief that this will make them more efficient and effective. Or, as in health and education, they have allowed capitalist businesses to compete for them. 85 Strangely, this point is missed by Thomas Piketty (2014) Capital in the 21st century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, p 423. 86 Some readers might be wondering at this point, isn’t this like Marx’s labour theory of value, and hasn’t it been discredited?

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

Why, then, did humankind have to wait until the modern era for economic growth to gather momentum? For thousands of years people had little faith in future growth not because they were stupid, but because it contradicts our gut feelings, our evolutionary heritage and the way the world works. Most natural systems exist in equilibrium, and most survival struggles are a zero-sum game in which one can prosper only at the expense of another. For example, each year roughly the same amount of grass grows in a given valley. The grass supports a population of about 10,000 rabbits, which contains enough slow, dim-witted or unlucky rabbits to provide prey for a hundred foxes. If one fox is very diligent, and captures more rabbits than usual, then another fox will probably starve to death.

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If all foxes somehow manage to capture more rabbits simultaneously, the rabbit population will crash, and next year many foxes will starve. Even though there are occasional fluctuations in the rabbit market, in the long run the foxes cannot expect to hunt, say, 3 per cent more rabbits per year than the preceding year. Of course, some ecological realities are more complex, and not all survival struggles are zero-sum games. Many animals cooperate effectively, and a few even give loans. The most famous lenders in nature are vampire bats. These vampires congregate in their thousands inside caves, and every night they fly out to look for prey. When they find a sleeping bird or a careless mammal, they make a small incision in its skin, and suck its blood.

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Capitalism even deserves some kudos for reducing human violence and increasing tolerance and cooperation. As the next chapter explains, there are additional factors at play here, but capitalism did make an important contribution to global harmony by encouraging people to stop viewing the economy as a zero-sum game, in which your profit is my loss, and instead see it as a win–win situation, in which your profit is also my profit. This has probably helped global harmony far more than centuries of Christian preaching about loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek. From its belief in the supreme value of growth, capitalism deduces its number one commandment: thou shalt invest thy profits in increasing growth.

Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik
Published 27 Apr 2000

Taylor’s proposal to Mott was not an entirely disinterested one. At that moment POLOS and the Alto were moving along parallel paths toward the same goal—delivering computing cycles interactively to users. Taylor figured the two programs were almost certain to end up vying for money and staff in a zero-sum game. He was not alone: Even observers with little stake in the success of either system realized that when the smoke cleared only one would be left standing. No one could be surprised that Taylor would do anything to ensure the Alto was the one that would prevail. By 1974, when his conversation with Mott took place, this rivalry was already creating tension between the Computer Science and Systems Science labs.

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“I didn’t like what Lynn Conway’s group was doing and I didn’t think it was very productive,” Lampson complained, troubled to see valuable PARCresources draining down a speculative rathole. Adding to the pain, Xerox was again tightening up the budget just as CSL was hoping to launch a few new initiatives. “There was a zero-sum game in PARC resources and we thought there were all kinds of great opportunities for things we might do,” he recalled. “We wanted to get into databases and things like spreadsheets which we had completely ignored in the past. We wanted to do a lot of work on user interfaces and programming environments, all sorts of things.

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Perhaps failing to recognize that virtually since the day of PARC’s opening the physics lab had played the role in Pake’s mind of a political counterweight to Bob Taylor, Spinrad in March 1980 took a step that forever marked him, unfairly or not, as Taylor’s cat’s-paw. This was his preparation for Pake of a five-year plan in which he proposed reallocating PARC’s budget in favor of the puter labs (including SSL) and reducing the money spent on the General Science Lab. “I figured if I had a zero-sum game”—that is, if PARC’s budget were to remain static overall—“I was going to have to cut back slowly in some areas,” he recalled. “It would not be sudden, but some people’s oxen were going to get gored more than others. I was going to change the status quo.” Spinrad’s plan violated PARC and Xerox orthodoxy in at least one important respect.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

One by one, its principles were made irrelevant by a new political culture. There could be no compromise. There could be no step-by-step decision making, or reason, or objectivity. There could be no individuals. There was only the group. This was no longer the politics of how to change the world. It was the politics of who you were. And that was a zero-sum game. 11. ANTI-TRUTH The individual and reason had been born as twins in Descartes’ Cogito. One was the unit of analysis, the other the language it used to communicate. But quite suddenly – just as liberalism was facing multiple threats from the resurgence of nationalism, the rise of identity politics and the after-effects of the financial crash – people’s ability to use reason diminished.

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And by doing so, with little regard for the WTO and no restraint in his actions, he showed how powerless the international liberal institutions were when faced with unbridled economic nationalism. The primary target was China. Trump had been spoiling for a fight with the country since the 1980s, when it and Japan began to perform strongly in the auto industry. At the heart of his animosity was a basic, almost childlike, error. He thought trade was a zero-sum game. He could not conceive of a negotiation between two individuals in which one was not the loser. The entire notion that partners could have a mutually advantageous interaction was alien to him. The existence of a trade surplus – where one country sells more to its partner than it sells to them – was redefined as triumph and a trade deficit was redefined as national humiliation.

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Many ethnic minorities experience the same grim economic realities as the white working class, for instance. Many in the white working class are discriminated against by their accent or their education. These are not really distinct groups. But in the new world of brute categories, they have been cast into a culture war with each other. That war now takes place every day: a zero-sum game which permits no solution, and would only end if one set were able to gain permanent dominance over the other. In all likelihood that set would be the one representing dominant cultural groups, because of numerical superiority. And indeed, that is typically what has happened electorally, for instance through Brexit or Trump.

Immigration and Ethnic Formation in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of the 1990s Immigrants From the Former Soviet Union in Israel
by Majid Al Haj
Published 20 Nov 2003

In other words, 62% of Arabs, but only 37.5% of Jews, think that immigrants should be allowed to have their own educational and/or cultural organizations. The veterans’ attitudes show that most of the Jewish majority in Israel is still closed toward pluralism and multiculturalism even with regard to other Jewish groups (in this case, Russian immigrants). Their attitudes might also be affected by zero-sum-game considerations, in which the emergence of a new ethnic group threatens to reduce the others’ potential influence. Based on these findings, we could argue that the Arabs in Israel are more supportive of the idea of pluralism and multiculturalism than the Jews are. This is because the Arabs, as a national minority, are more open toward and more knowledgeable about Israeli Jewish society than the other way around.

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One could argue that Arabs support educational and cultural autonomy for Russian immigrants because they realize that the main competition in this field is Jewish-Jewish, with no potential to harm the Arab population. This argument, though it sounds plausible, contradicts the fact that Arabs support the immigrants’ right to their own political parties, even though this is an area that does seem to be more of a zero-sum game. As mentioned in Chapter 6, the rise of the FSU immigrants’ political power has further decreased the Arabs’ potential political influence and reduced their bargaining power in the national political arena. Social Distance In the 1999 survey of immigrants, we measured the social distance between different groups in Israeli society by asking respondents whether they were willing to have the following as their neighbors: secular Jews, religious Jews, Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, Arabs, Ethiopian immigrants, and immigrants from the FSU.

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope
by John A. Allison
Published 20 Sep 2012

In addition, remember that, in derivatives, for every loser there is an equal winner (less transaction fees, which are trivial). In the example we just gave, the counterparty to our contract has lost $20 million because rates fell. (He was making $10 million and now is paying $10 million.) However, BB&T has made $20 million. This is a zero-sum game. Zero-sum games cannot possibly crash an economic system. In addition, the better brokers have found a second counterparty with an opposite risk from BB&T’s. In this case, BB&T will make less profit if rates fall, which is why we entered into the derivatives contract. There are many financial institutions that will make less profit if interest rates rise.

Python for Finance
by Yuxing Yan
Published 24 Apr 2014

.]) >>> [ 238 ] Chapter 9 To create a graphical representation, we have the following commands: >>>import numpy as np >>>s = np.arange(10,80,5) >>>x=30 >>>payoff=(abs(s-x)+s-x)/2 >>>ylim(-10,50) >>>plot(s,payoff) The graph is shown in the following screenshot: The payoff for a call option seller is the opposite of its buyer. It is important to remember that this is a zero-sum game: you win, I lose. For example, an investor sold three call options with an exercise price of $10. When the stock price is $15 on the maturity, the option buyer's payoff is $15, while the total loss to the option writer is $15 as well. If the call premium (option price) is c, the profit/loss function for a call option buyer is the difference between his/her payoff and his/her initial investment (c).

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Later in the chapter, we will show how to use the binomial tree method, also called the CRR method, to price an American option. [ 242 ] Chapter 9 Cash flows, types of options, a right, and an obligation We know that for each business contract, we have two sides, a buyer and a seller. This is true for an option contract as well. A call buyer will pay upfront (cash output) to acquire a right. Since this is a zero-sum game, a call option seller would enjoy an upfront cash inflow and assumes an obligation. The following table presents those positions (buyer or seller), directions of the initial cash flows (inflow or outflow), the option buyer's rights (buy or sell), and the option seller's obligations (that is, to satisfy the option seller's demand): Call Put Cash Flow Buyer Seller European American (long position) (short position) options options A right to buy a security (commodity) at a prefixed price An obligation to sell a security (commodity) at a prefixed price A right to sell a security with a prefixed price An obligation to buy Are exercised on the maturity date only Could be exercised any time before or on the maturity date Upfront cash outflow Upfront cash inflow The preceding table displays long/short, call/put, European/American options and directions of initial cash flows.

Broken Markets: How High Frequency Trading and Predatory Practices on Wall Street Are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio
by Sal Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi
Published 21 May 2012

However, one class of market participants, HFT firms, has leveraged technology as well with automated programs that generate massive volumes for the stock exchanges. As they have grown, HFT firms have used their economic clout to extract an increasing number of perks and advantages from the exchanges, tilting the zero-sum game that is the stock market in the favor of HFTs versus investors. When Did HFT Start? We initially spotted HFT at work early in our careers, when we were sales traders at Institutional Network, otherwise known as Instinet, the world’s first electronic brokerage firm. Like the NYSE, Instinet was an order-driven market, but it was anonymous, with no specialists to facilitate order flow.

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The exchanges realized that they must offer the fastest speed at the lowest price to their HFT clients because HFTs represented the majority of the exchanges’ business. The exchanges also realized that the HFT community was willing to spend billions of dollars per year to get an edge on their competitors. The problem with arms races, however, is that they are zero sum games. In a 2009 blog post commenting about HFT, Rick Bookstaber, now a senior policy adviser at the SEC, wrote: “Like any arms race, the result is a cycle of spending [that] leaves everyone in the same relative position, only poorer... What is happening with high frequency trading is a net drain on social welfare.”24 The stock exchange business is extremely competitive.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Nov 2009

This was more money than anyone had ever made so quickly on Wall Street. Moreover, he had done it by betting against the very subprime mortgage bonds now sinking Citigroup and every other big Wall Street investment bank. Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino. Yet John Paulson had been a Wall Street customer. Here was the mirror image of the same incompetence Meredith Whitney was making her name pointing out. The casino had misjudged, badly, the odds of its own game, and at least one person had noticed.

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"I believe no other hedge fund on the planet has this sort of investment, nowhere near to this degree, relative to the size of the portfolio," he wrote to one of his investors, who had caught wind that his hedge fund manager had some newfangled strategy. Now he couldn't help but wonder who exactly was on the other side of his trades--what madman would be selling him so much insurance on bonds he had handpicked to explode? The credit default swap was a zero-sum game. If Mike Burry made $100 million when the subprime mortgage bonds he had handpicked defaulted, someone else must have lost $100 million. Goldman Sachs made it clear that the ultimate seller wasn't Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs was simply standing between insurance buyer and insurance seller and taking a cut.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict
by Kenneth Payne
Published 16 Jun 2021

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pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

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A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

Eric Drexler, the inventor of nanotechnology, has recently been popularizing the concept of “Pareto-topia”: the idea that AI, if done right, can bring about a future in which everyone’s lives are hugely improved, a future where there are no losers. A key realization here is that what chiefly prevents humanity from achieving its full potential might be our instinctive sense that we’re in a zero-sum game—a game in which players are supposed to eke out small wins at the expense of others. Such an instinct is seriously misguided and destructive in a “game” where everything is at stake and the payoff is literally astronomical. There are many more star systems in our galaxy alone than there are people on Earth.

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Even the recent (July 2017) Chinese AI manifesto contained dedicated sections on “AI safety supervision” and “Develop[ing] laws, regulations, and ethical norms” and establishing “an AI security and evaluation system” to, among other things, “[e]nhance the awareness of risk.” I very much hope that a new generation of leaders who understand the AI Control Problem and AI as the ultimate environmental risk can rise above the usual tribal, zero-sum games and steer humanity past these dangerous waters we are in—thereby opening our way to the stars that have been waiting for us for billions of years. Here’s to our next hundred thousand years! And don’t hesitate to speak the truth, even if your voice trembles. Chapter 10 TECH PROPHECY AND THE UNDERAPPRECIATED CAUSAL POWER OF IDEAS STEVEN PINKER Steven Pinker, a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

If so, you are mutually dependent. Then you must figure out if the current relationship is balanced, meaning your power over each other is similarly low or high; or, if it is imbalanced, meaning you are more dependent on the other party than they are on you (or vice versa). Power does not have to be a zero-sum game. The balance of power can shift over time, and as you will see, one party’s gain does not have to be the other party’s loss. But no matter who you are, where you live, or what kind of work you do, the fundamental elements of power, shown in the figure below, are the same. To be powerful, you need to offer valued resources over which you have unique control (or that are, at the least, hard to get from someone else).

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They posit that the power of Actor A over Actor B depends on the extent to which A controls access over resources that B values and that, in turn, the power of Actor B over Actor A depends on the extent to which B controls access over resources that A values. It follows from the fundamentals of power that power is always relational and that it is not a zero-sum game. The power relationship between A and B may be balanced if A and B are mutually dependent and they each equally value the resources that the other party has access to. It is imbalanced if one of the parties needs the resources that the other party can provide more. Importantly, the resources that each of the parties value may be psychological as well as material.

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice
by Pierre Vernimmen , Pascal Quiry , Maurizio Dallocchio , Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi
Published 16 Oct 2017

There is still a long way to go, as demonstrated by the graph below: OTC markets are much larger than organised markets due to interest swaps but this may change as a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis. Source: Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Companies are not required to go through a clearing house for their hedging operations. They are, however, required to file declarations (European Market Infrastructure Regulation – EMIR). 5. A zero-sum game Futures are a zero-sum game, as what one operator earns, another loses. The aggregate of market operators gets neither richer nor poorer (when excluding intermediation fees). Let’s take the above example of a tonne of cocoa quoted at £2600 at the end of July. We saw that the investor who bought contracts on 21 March has earned £113 per tonne.

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We saw that the investor who bought contracts on 21 March has earned £113 per tonne. On the other side, the operator who sold those contracts on 21 March must deliver cocoa at the end of July for £2487, even though it is priced at £2600. He will thus lose £113, the exact amount that his counterparty has earned. A zero-sum game, not a senseless game. This is not only a zero-sum game but also a worthwhile game. Derivatives markets are there not to create wealth, but to spread risk and to improve the liquidity of the financial markets. On the whole, there is no wealth creation. Summary The summary of this chapter can be downloaded from www.vernimmen.com.

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It affords the opportunity to trade a financial instrument at a “listed” price and in large quantities without disrupting the market. An investment is liquid when an investor can buy or sell it in large quantities without causing a change in its market price. The secondary market is therefore a zero-sum game between investors, because what one investor buys, another investor sells. In principle, the secondary market operates completely independently from the issuer of the securities. A company that issues a bond today knows that a certain amount of funds will remain available in each future year.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

The normal approach for a mathematician having solved a comparatively simple problem was to move on to a more complex case, such as coalition formation. But this process turned out to be difficult in the case of game theory, especially if mathematical proofs were going to be required at each new stage. The key breakthrough came in the exploration of non-zero-sum games, in which the players could all gain or all lose, depending on how the game was played. The actual invention of the game of prisoners’ dilemma should be attributed to two RAND analysts, Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. The most famous formulation, however, was provided in 1950 by Albert Tucker when lecturing to psychologists at Stanford University.

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Government most influenced by Schelling during the 1960s was John McNaughton, an academic lawyer from Harvard who died in an air crash in July 1967. He had worked with Schelling on the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, and the two remained good friends. When McNaughton spoke of arms control, for example, he showed interest in the notion of the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” and “non-zero-sum games.”34 He is said to have remarked that the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated the realism of Schelling’s games.35 McNaughton was a key figure in the development of the U.S. policy on Vietnam, working closely with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. One of his memos was famously described by a colleague as the reductio ad absurdum of the planner’s art, combining realpolitik with the hyper-rationalist belief in control of the most refined American think tank.36 In a report of a working group McNaughton chaired in February 1964,37 one suggestion was pure Schelling: it would be possible to influence Hanoi’s decisions by action designed “to hurt but not to destroy.”38 Also drawn from Schelling was the proposition that “a decision to use force if necessary, backed by resolute and extensive deployment, and conveyed by every possible means to our adversaries, gives the best present chance of avoiding the actual use of such force.”

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Dukakis was forced to devote resources to an area in which he had felt safe (“move swiftly where he does not expect you”).32 As the traditional ideological element, and party discipline, waned in American campaigns, more depended on the qualities of individual candidates. Strategy for elections was like that of battles in being geared to one-off, climactic duels. Elections were zero-sum games, so that what one gained the other must lose. This gave the contest its intensity. Given the size of the electorates, personal contact with the voters was impossible and so campaigns had to be conducted through the mass media. They were competitions of character as much as policy. Atwater was considered the master of spin, providing each situation with its own logic, so that everything that happened could be explained in a way that served a larger narrative.

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
by Nick Bostrom
Published 26 Mar 2024

There are, however, a couple of related concerns one might have about the value of gifted purposes, even if the mere fact that such purposes derive from the preferences and choices of other people is not in itself disqualifying. First, one might worry about significance claims that are based on success in zero-sum games. Second, one might worry about purposes whose roots lie specifically in somebody else’s desire to help us achieve purpose. Let us consider these in turn. First, zero-sumness: can a purpose qualify (as providing whatever value that having a purpose can provide) if it consists in trying to achieve success in a zero-sum game? The case against would be that efforts in zero-sum competitions have a kind of global futility that might seem inimical to real significance.

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It seems pretty saintly never to look down on anybody, and never to hope that somebody else will look up to one. Maybe it’s good for somebody to be saintly in this way. Hard to know what the world would look like if people were universally like that. Since status-seeking is, on its own terms, a zero-sum game, it would be prima facie desirable if status-striving were reduced—that is kind of a point I’ve been trying to make. On the other hand, this sort of competitive motivation has so many consequences, positive as well as negative, and it is so integral to our current form of humanity, that I’d be concerned that something important would be lost if it were eliminated—certainly if it were not replaced by some other motivation to inspire people to try to outdo themselves and each other.

The Signal: Watch Out for the Darkness
by Nick Cook
Published 11 Jul 2018

I stared at Steve. His face had become ashen. Had Anton been compromised? Was that it? But every instinct told me otherwise. ‘No, I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense,’ I said. ‘Why not?’ Graham said. ‘As much as I admit it, Kiera does have a point.’ ‘Because her version supports what amounts to a zero-sum game,’ I replied. Kiera tilted her head to one side. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Regardless of who pulls the trigger first, nobody wins the prize in an all-out nuclear exchange. Everyone knows that.’ Graham nodded. ‘And the Russians have just as much to lose as we have.’ ‘Which means the only logical explanation is that this phenomenon has nothing to do with Russia or the West,’ I said.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

Its readers, and Web readers in general, have approved of its content by linking to its articles despite the fact that they have always sat behind a paywall, largely inaccessible to those without a subscription to the paper. Second, the fact that Google makes ad revenue off search results for a subject does not necessarily undermine the value of the site itself on the advertising market. There is no zero-sum game going on here. Although it’s true 34 R END E R UNTO CAESA R that Google presents a potentially cheaper and more effective way for firms to purchase advertising space, that is true regardless of whether Google includes news results in its general searches (Google does not place ads on the Google News front page but does so on the first page of search results).

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Songwriters still write. Producers still produce. Distributors still distribute. Lawyers still sue. Downloaders still download. We learned three essential truths from the downloading debate: a shared file is not a lost sale; there is a significant difference between a crisis and a moral panic; and culture is not a zero-sum game. See Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is 250 NOTES TO PAGES 166– 68 Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 43–50. 26. MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 380 F.3d 1154, 1158 (9th Cir. 2004). 27.

Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio
by Victor A. Canto
Published 2 Jan 2005

The world is a good benchmark all investors, as a group, cannot evade. The investment process must begin by conceding this point: Absent any information, one wants to hold the world portfolio. Such an allocation ensures the investor will in fact receive average returns. In a static world, the implication is a zero-sum game in which one person’s gains are someone else’s losses. This is not to say investing is a zero-sum game—quite the contrary. I believe investing is a positive-sum activity. Through investment, one expands society’s opportunity set. In turn, those investments result in net wealth increases. It is the investors’ collective actions determining the net increments to wealth, and it is our investment decisions determining what share of the increments we receive.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

Since 2012, accusations that crony capitalism and the success of the 1 percent slow middle- and working-class income growth have only grown louder. While the incomes of the 0.1 percent have soared, the growth of middle-class and working-class incomes has continued to remain slow. Many insist that this gap has grown because the wealthy are rigging a zero-sum game to take what rightly belongs to others. The Upside of Inequality addresses these accusations head-on and explains why income redistribution hurts the middle and working class. Advocates of income redistribution cavalierly insist that we can redistribute the income of successful entrepreneurs, financers, and leaders without slowing growth.

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While a recent study shows college may have some value for marginal students,45 it is generally accepted that it may be of little value for these students, and that if anything, subsidized student loans and financial aid induce far more students to attend college than should (see Figure 6-7, “Value of Education to Marginal Students”).46 Credentialing is largely a zero-sum game. One person gains the value of a credential at another person’s expense. By overemphasizing the importance of college, we now demand average students earn a credential that proves they are merely average. That is, they now need a credential that proves they are not below average. That may be good for colleges and professors in the business of conferring credentials, but it is hardly obvious that this is in the best interests of average students.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

If Easterlin was right, economic growth would be a glum proposition. If everybody’s income rose equally, people’s relative position wouldn’t change. If growth benefited some more than others, the increase in happiness among the winners would balance out the loss of happiness among the losers in a zero-sum game. Adaptation proposes a world with even less hope, running pointlessly on our treadmill of happiness, rooted to the same place. The founding fathers of the United States included the pursuit of happiness as one of the inalienable rights they thought its citizens should have. But if we truly adapt to everything, what point is there in striving to be happy?

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As people and societies were forced to compete fiercely for economic output, religion’s set of ethical norms would come in handy to help societies cohere. God would be called upon to provide a supernatural narrative, a balm that reconciled humanity to its un-improvable lot; or maybe to help in war and conquest as access to resources became a zero-sum game. To many in this dystopian future, faith would be worth the price, whatever sacrifices religion demanded in return. CHAPTER NINE The Price of the Future FOR MORE THAN a century, economics has been known as the dismal science, peddling doom and despair, with little hope to offer. It owes this reputation to the work of the Scottish reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who two hundred years ago delivered a crippling blow to his era’s burgeoning optimism about the prospects for human progress.

Forty Signs of Rain
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 29 May 2004

In science, one built up over the course of a career a fund of “scientific credit,” by giving work to the system in a way that could seem altruistic. People remembered what you gave, and later on there were various forms of return on the gift—jobs, labs. In that sense a good investment for the individual, but in the form of a gift to the group. It was the non zero-sum game that prisoners’ dilemma could become if everyone played by the strategies of always generous, or, better, firm but fair. That was one of the things science was—a place that one entered by agreeing to hold to the strategies of cooperation, to maximize the total return of the game. In theory that was true.

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I mean, when have you ever seen Phil feel bad about anything?” “Never.” “Right. But, you know. He would feel bad about this if he were to go in for that kind of thing. And you have to remember, he’s pretty canny at getting the most he can get from these bills. He sees the limits and then does what he can. It’s not a zero-sum game to him. He really doesn’t think of it as us-and-them.” “But sometimes it is us-and-them.” “True. But he takes the long view. Later some of them will be part of us. And meanwhile, he finds some pretty good tricks. Breaking the superbill into parts might have been the right way to go. We’ll get back to a lot of this stuff later.”

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross
Published 7 May 2012

In the wake of the crash, rather than accept the inevitability of a Japan-style lost decade, America’s businesses and institutions tapped into the very strengths that built the nation’s economy into a global powerhouse in the first place: speed, ingenuity, adaptability, pragmatism, entrepreneurship, and, most significant, an ability to engage with the world. As the United States wallowed in self-pity, the world continued to see promise in what America has to offer—buying exports, investing in the United States, and adopting American companies and business models as their own. Global growth, it turns out, is not a zero-sum game. Better, Stronger, Faster is an account of the remarkable reconstruction and reorientation that started in March 2009, a period that Gross compares to March 1933—as both marked the start of unexpected recoveries. As the U.S. public sector undertook aggressive fiscal and monetary actions, the private sector sprang into action.

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While growth has been fitful since the recovery began in July 2009, and the economy seems to be in constant danger of slipping back into recession, there’s no reason to think that America’s ability to grow is permanently impaired. Modern-day declinism rests on a simplistic view that all the structural forces transforming the global economy are arrayed against us. But that’s not true. In fact, many of them work in America’s favor. In viewing global growth as a zero-sum game, declinists underestimate the ability of the United States to benefit from the developments sweeping the world. Far from being a victim of global growth, the country has been a beneficiary of it. Since the recession, the United States has continued to lead the world in foreign direct investment, to lead the world in exports, and to develop new types of exports.

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted
by Daniel Sokatch
Published 18 Oct 2021

All this seemed to come at the expense of the Arabs, who felt they were increasingly becoming displaced, disenfranchised, and marginalized in their own homeland—pushed off a plank into the sea. While some Palestinian Arabs and Jews did try to imagine what peaceful coexistence and a shared Arab-Jewish future in Palestine might look like, most people on both sides saw things more as a zero-sum game in which one side stood to win and one to lose. In 1921, following an eruption of riots and attacks by Arabs on Jews in Jaffa, a main port town in Palestine and the point of arrival for many Jewish immigrants, the British issued a white paper (a government policy paper; the document’s color indicated that it was intended for public release) authored by future prime minister Winston Churchill reiterating support for the idea of a Jewish national home, praising the industriousness and orderliness of the Yishuv, and supporting the notion of continued (although not unlimited) Jewish immigration to Palestine.

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Extremist rabbis even issued fatwah-like religious rulings declaring that Rabin was a rodef (a “pursuer”)—in Jewish law, one who is pursuing another in order to kill him, and thus, a legitimate target for death. Israeli security forces, divided over the magnitude of the threat, didn’t initially pay too much attention to these fringe rabbis. But others did. The extremists on both sides saw the conflict as a zero-sum game that not only couldn’t be resolved, but also shouldn’t be resolved. It was a fight to the finish, and each side was certain that they would win it. Each knew for sure that God was on their side. The rejectionists relied on the old terrorist’s playbook of shock, violence, and fear. They knew that it is far easier to destroy trust than to build it and that the best way to do that is through murder and mayhem.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

The people setting themselves the task of understanding the anger around them were precommitted to the idea that the anger had no possible basis in reason or conscious choice. They could not process people who saw the world fundamentally differently than MarketWorlders did and, misguided or not, wanted to be heard. “I’m really proud that London was the one region of England to vote to remain in the EU, decisively so,” Khan said. “In my view, it’s not a zero-sum game. And London doing well is not at the expense of the rest of the UK. If London does well, the rest of the country prospers.” The idea that what was good for a prosperous, globally networked megalopolis full of bankers and other well-educated professionals who could afford to live there, and overrun by Saudi, Russian, and Nigerian absentee princelings who pushed up rents without contributing much to the economy or tax base or the communities they lived in—the idea that whatever was good for such a metropolis was automatically good for all of Britain was part of the conceit that some voters understandably rejected when the Brexit choice came before them.

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Clinton now voiced the sense of besiegement that the globalists had been feeling. “This is a time when this sort of talk is not in fashion all over the world,” he said of their ethos. “Everywhere today,” he said, “there’s a temptation to say to everything I just told you, ‘No. You’re wrong; life is a zero-sum game, and I’m losing. You’re wrong; our differences matter more than our common humanity. To hell with the findings of the Human Genome Project, that we’re all 99.5 percent the same. No. Choose resentment over reconciliation; choose anger over answers; choose denial over empowerment; and choose walls over bridges.’

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
by Alan B. Krueger
Published 3 Jun 2019

It is possible that the size of the pie will grow large enough that new artists are eventually better off with streaming as well, if one considers the present value of royalty payments under streaming compared with the previous state of the record industry. Three Misconceptions Because streaming is a new product with a different business model, there are three mistakes that people commonly make concerning the economics of streaming. First, it is common for industry insiders to view streaming as a zero-sum game. The logic is that if one artist’s streams rise, that artist’s share of total streams will rise, and the share earned by other artists’ will necessarily fall. In other words, instead of vying individually to sell more records, artists are now viewed as competing against one another to earn a larger share of the pie.

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And removing artists with fewer streams than Drake would have even less effect on other artists’ shares. Thus as a practical matter, even in a static view of the world, there is little zero-sum aspect to competition among artists with streaming. Furthermore, the fact that streaming is not yet close to reaching its maximum number of paying customers is another reason streaming is not a zero-sum game; the sum will grow larger if more hit songs cause more customers to sign up. And even when the number of paid subscribers levels off, the size of the pie could still continue to grow if monthly subscription fees increase, or if subscription fees are further tiered to take advantage of price discrimination.

The City
by Tony Norfield

But that was hardly a sign that the world’s economic problems had come to an end. Changes in the prices of financial securities, nevertheless, clearly have a big impact on capitalists’ wealth and the monetary value it represents for them. There are some other oddities. It is common to think of transactions in these securities as being a ‘zero sum game’: a gain for one party in the deal must be a loss for the other. But consider what happens when a company sells its shares on the stock market at a price of 100. If the market price then rises to 120, one might assume that the company has ‘lost’, because it could have waited and issued shares at 120, while the investors have gained.

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See also financial power; economic power price fixing 118, 120–1 privatisation 120 production 77, 78, 86 productive capital 90 productivity 69, 148–9, 150 profit and profitability 21–2, 77, 129–39 American rate of 153–9, 154, 157 amount 149, 150 comparing 136–9 and costs 149–50 drivers 135–6 equalising 137 and financial crisis 135 and financial returns 135 and fixed assets 137 global 156 and interest rates 156–7 investment location 152 and labour costs 155–6 leverage 130–6, 133, 134 measurement 153 moribund 159–60 and productivity 148–9, 150 rate of 130, 147–50 restoration of 152, 154–5 return on equity (RoE) 129–30 role of financial assets 137 sources 129, 139–47, 143 volatility 131 property bubbles 151 proprietary positions 79 quantitative easing 65, 152, 157–9 Radcliffe Report 35 Reagan, Ronald 65 real economy, the 5 reform agenda 214 regulation 9, 215–16 American 39–40 state 115–16 Regulation Q (US) 39, 48 regulatory arbitrage 42 rentiers 98 repo borrowing 46 return on assets 132 return on equity (RoE) 129–30, 132 returns, distribution of 102–3 revenue-earning assets, bank creation of 137, 137–8 Rich, Marc 122 risk 130 rivalry 28 Robin Hood tax 215–16 Rolling Stone 161 Rome, Treaty of 33, 57, 58, 69 Royal Bank of Scotland 4 Royal Dutch/Shell Group plc 3, 112–13, 220 Rubin, Robert 16 Russia 18, 93, 106, 107, 109, 113–14, 154, 171, 216, 222, 223, 224 SABMiller 121 Samsung 118, 120, 121–2 sanctions 113–14, 172, 216 San Francisco 37 Saudi Arabia 55–6, 109, 208, 220 Scotland, independence referendum 217–18 Second World War 26–8, 151 seigniorage 43, 163–6 Shanghai 18, 182, 222–3 shareholders, power 88 share issues 179 shares 139 value 86–7 share swaps 179, 199 Sharpe ratio 131 Shell 114 Shenzhen 18 Sherman Antitrust Act (US) 119 short-term money-market instruments 79, 144 Simon, William 55–6 Singapore 177–8, 179, 206, 209 Snowden, Edward 59 South Africa 18, 222, 224 South Korea 101, 120 Soviet Union 29, 30 Spain 65 speculation, madcap 135–6 stamp duty 48 Standard Chartered 225 Standard Oil 119 state, the and capitalism 111–15 and finance 115–17 and imperialism 119 imperialist 126 power 115, 126 sterling collapse, 1992 62 convertibility 31 devaluation, 1949 31 Sterling Area, the 31–3, 35, 58 stock exchange prices 182 stock market crash, 1987 xi, 68 stock swaps 179 Suez crisis 27–8, 60 supply-chain links 77 surplus labour 149 surplus value 90, 140 appropriation of 173–4 creation of 149 global system 161 and securities 144–6 transfer of 97 Sveriges Riksbank 116 Sweden 4, 9, 116 Swiss Bankers’ Association 176 Switzerland 4, 9, 165, 175–6, 178, 184 Taibbi, Matt 161 Taiwan 18 Tanzanian groundnut scheme 33 tariffs 114 tax and taxation 114, 215–16 tax avoidance 48 tax havens 2, 22, 71, 184, 193, 209, 211 Temasek 177 Thailand 101 Thatcher, Margaret xi, 63, 65, 69 Tokyo 49, 50 Toyota 121 trade gap 188 trade patterns 6, 60–1, 61 trading revenues 146–7 Treasury, the 48 UK Independence Party 219 unemployment 53 Unilever 112–13 United Kingdom anti-monopoly policies 119–21 appropriation of value 187 balance of payments 187, 188, 200, 203 bank assets and liabilities 4, 141–4, 143 bank borrowing 206–8 bank deficits 206–10 bank lending 208–10 bank leverage data 134 banking centre status 50 banks 4, 116, 134, 191–7, 192, 194, 196, 206–10, 214 borrowing 201–2, 204–5 China policy 225–6, 227 colonial exploitation 30–3 colonialism 30–1 credit rating 204–5 current account balance 188–90, 189, 190 current account deficit 200, 202, 211, 217 current account surplus 33, 34, 69 debt costs 204–5 decolonisation 30 direct investment returns 202–3, 203 domination 162 earnings from financial services 43–4 economic power 2 economic weakness 35 Empire protectionism 30, 33 equity holdings 102–3 equity market capitalisation and turnover 181, 182 and the EU 16–17, 21 European policy 53–4 FDI 107, 200, 205 financial account 197–200, 199 financial machine 22 financial market share 70–1, 71 financial operations 185–212 financial policy 14, 44–7, 65–70 financial position, 1950s 34–5 financial power 2, 3, 64–5 financial sector benefits 185 financial sector employment 186 financial sector tax revenues 186 financial services assets location 205–6, 207 financial services exports 174 financial services revenues 190–7, 192, 194, 196 financial wealth 103 foreign direct investments 3, 66 foreign exchange trading 109 foreign exchange turnover 193–5, 194 foreign investment income 189–90 freedom of action 63, 64 GDP 4, 106, 107, 155–6 Gowan’s analysis 11–12 Helleiner’s analysis 13–14, 70 Hilferding’s analysis 93, 94 imperialism 7–8, 186, 228 imperial strategy 59–65 inflows of foreign money-capital 69 international banking index 108 international banking position 191–2, 192 international banking share 70–1, 71 international financial revenues 10 international investment position 200–1, 201 investment income 200–4, 203 investment income, 1899–1913 98 invisible empire 7–8 joins EEC 34, 57–8 Lend-Lease debts 29, 36 liabilities 204–5, 206–7 military interventions 1–2 military spending 110 monetary policy 66 OPEC’s investment in 57 pension fund assets 103 quantitative easing 158–9 relationship with America 21, 27–8, 29–30, 36, 59, 73 relationship with Europe 62 return to gold standard 23–6 seigniorage 165–6 status 1–2, 3–4, 27–8, 30, 30–5, 52, 73–4, 110, 111, 196, 204, 210, 213, 214, 216–17, 227–8 tax havens 193 trade currency pricing 163 trade deficit 44, 188–9, 189, 211 trade gap 22 trade pattern 60–1, 61 wealth distribution 102–3 United Nations 3–4, 123 United Nations Security Council 109 United States of America 2, 205 aftermath of First World War 24 anti-monopoly policies 119–21 attitude to Bretton Woods 31 bank Eurodollar deposits 41–2 bank leverage data 132–3 bank regulation 36 banking system fragmented 40 banks 132–3, 193 capital flows from 38 capital markets 55 China policy 226, 227 Chinese challenge to 17–18 corporate rate of profit 153–5, 154 cost of living 155 credit bubble 156 credit restrictions 42 current account deficit 167–8 domestic market 28 domination 3, 7, 10, 11, 26–7, 35, 162, 183–4, 223 equity holdings 102 equity market capitalisation and turnover 181–2, 181 exorbitant privilege 166–9 FDI 107 Federal Reserve System 40 financial business split 37 and financial crises 12 financial market regulations 39–40 financial policy 11, 65–6, 67–8 financial power 6, 11–12, 14–15, 55, 170–3, 183 financial services exports 173–4 financial services revenues 190 financial system 36–40 foreign direct investments 3, 42 foreign exchange trading 108–9, 109 foreign exchange turnover 194, 194 foreign investment revenues 9–10 foreign investment stock position 169 foreign securities market 48 GDP 106, 107 gold reserves 39 gold standard abandoned 54 Gowan’s analysis 11–12 hegemony 21, 105 Helleiner’s analysis 12–14 Hilferding’s analysis 93 imperial advantage 164 imperialism 12, 14–15, 166–9 interbank money market 46 interest rates 168 international banking index 108 international banking position 192, 192 international banking share 50, 71, 71 international capital outflows 66 investment income 169 leverage ratios 131 military spending 109 millionaires 99 mortgage-backed securities 140 mortgage debt 56 Panitch and Gindin’s analysis 14–17 privileged position 22 quantitative easing 157–8 rate of profit 153–9, 154, 157 relationship with Britain 21, 27–8, 29–30, 36, 59, 73 relationship with Saudi Arabia 55–6 role in the world economy 12–14, 14–17 role of 111 seigniorage 163–5 status 105, 110, 111 UK-based lending 209–10 UK debt 29 working-class living standards 154–5 United Technologies 121 unsecured loans, interbank 46 US–China Economic and Security Review Commission 18 US Commerce Department 56 US dollar, the 6, 15, 30 Chinese foreign exchange reserves 167 domination 55, 164–5 exchange rate 68, 163 exorbitant privilege 166–9 financial power 170–3 global role 170–3 glut 38–9 gold standard abandoned 54 imperial advantage 164 privileged position 22 as reserve currency of choice 166 status 35, 108–9 UK colonies surplus 33 US Federal Reserve 14, 41, 42, 44, 116, 157–8, 157, 172–3, 185 US Treasury 14 value xi–xiii appropriation of 187 creation 76, 104, 150–1 extraction 77, 104 relations 90 surplus 90, 97, 144–5, 149 transfer of 164–5 Vietnam War 54, 105 Vodafone Group plc 3, 180 Volcker, Paul 156 Volkswagen 121 wages 77, 144, 148, 152, 155–6 Wal-Mart 77, 155 waste, elimination of 152 wealth concentration of 91–2 distribution 102–3 fictitious capital 88, 147 UK household 103 West, Admiral Lord 1–2, 3, 4 West African Marketing Boards 32 WhatsApp 91 Wilson, Harold 32 Wolf, Martin 214 working-class, living standards 154–5 working hours 38 World Bank 14, 27, 29, 73, 223 world economy 2, 9–10 American role 14–17 world hierarchy 105–11, 111 world monetary system 10 ‘zero hour’ contracts 152 zero sum games 145 Zuckerberg, Mark 91

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

Because they don’t actually create any value in and of themselves, investing in cryptocurrency is more akin to gambling—shuffling assets among participants in a game of chance. It’s the digital equivalent of playing poker at a casino; you might win, you might not, but there is no increase in overall utility. Nothing of value has been created by playing. Zero-sum games are strictly competitive: For you to win, another player must lose. Much like in a regular casino, the players themselves are required to pay a small amount each hand to keep the game going. In crypto, this comes from the fees charged by the exchanges, as well as the costs associated with validating the transactions.

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Harris, who was from out of state, claimed that Whinstone was providing exactly what the people of Rockdale and the surrounding area needed: good paying jobs in a growing industry. While I agreed that, everything else being equal, employment was a good thing, I couldn’t help but notice the flimsy underpinnings of this otherwise sturdy mining operation. This company was using enormous amounts of electricity to mine speculative digital assets to keep a zero-sum game of chance going. Texas’ notoriously over-worked electric grid, also known as ERCOT, had gone down after a winter storm in February 2021, contributing to the deaths of 246 people. Mining Bitcoin hardly seemed worth the potential harm to the population. What benefit did any of this produce for the rest of us?

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis
by Kevin Rodgers
Published 13 Jul 2016

The seller, on the other hand, is a little like an insurer – he gets a steady cash stream but loses on default. Naturally, as the market developed, CDSs were entered into for purely speculative reasons, too. What is important to realise is that the CDS doesn’t create any extra risk – it is a zero-sum game between two counterparties. Despite this, it has a solid economic function. It allows firms to offset risk and diversify it away to other counterparties happier to take it on. On the other hand, it also reduces transparency. Because the deals are transacted bilaterally (something which is now starting to change due to new regulation), it is difficult for anyone outside the deal to gauge exactly where the risk lies.

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Extravagantly convoluted, their creation utterly reliant on massive computational power, dogged by accusations that they embodied inherent conflicts of interest (for whose benefit were banks constructing these deals – buyer or seller?), completely removed from any real-world purpose other than speculation, these exemplars of the zero-sum game stand as a kind of ornate spire on top of a cathedral of complexity dedicated to the mischievous god of ‘because we can’. In retrospect, their advent was a sign that the end was in sight. Citi’s FIFA Ranking For my part, aside from feeling the general pressure within the bank to do deals that were clever and having to attend the occasional box and arrow show, most of these developments passed me by.

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions
by Lee Freeman-Shor
Published 8 Sep 2015

There is nothing quite like seeing a couple of investment titans debating the merits of an investment, one of them telling the other that he is insane to even consider the merits of a stock. You might reasonably assume that one would be a winner and the other a loser; after all, the market is a zero-sum game. Not so. All were successful despite having different and conflicting views about what to invest in, because they all shared the same habits. They had all mastered the art of executing their ideas. While many factors cause stock prices to rise and fall, the ultimate determinant of whether you will make or lose money is your actions.

The Gated City (Kindle Single)
by Ryan Avent
Published 30 Aug 2011

Over the past six decades, America watched as one economy after another entered product markets, discomfiting American firms and workers. At present, the chief challenge comes from China and India. Increasingly, Americans worry that the torch of technological leadership is destined to pass from their hands, taking with it the promise of steady growth in incomes and living standards. Economic growth is not a zero-sum game. That is not to say that Americans never face costs related to growth abroad; they certainly do. It is to say that growth abroad is clearly good for the welfare of the world as a whole and is generally good for the welfare of Americans, particularly when American government policy is set appropriately.

Money: Vintage Minis
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 5 Apr 2018

To put that in economic terms, they believed that the total amount of wealth was limited, if not dwindling. People therefore considered it a bad bet to assume that they personally, or their kingdom, or the entire world, would be producing more wealth ten years down the line. Business looked like a zero-sum game. Of course, the profits of one particular bakery might rise, but only at the expense of the bakery next door. Venice might flourish, but only by impoverishing Genoa. The king of England might enrich himself, but only by robbing the king of France. You could cut the pie in many different ways, but it never got any bigger.

Stigum's Money Market, 4E
by Marcia Stigum and Anthony Crescenzi
Published 9 Feb 2007

The triple-A credit borrows medium term at a fixed rate; the single-B credit borrows medium term at a variable rate; and then in effect, they swap liabilities—more precisely they swap on negotiated terms the future interest-rate payments each contract is to pay. Surprisingly, such a swap is not a zero-sum game. Far from it, the situation is a perfect example of the gains that can be realized from specialization along lines of comparative advantage (recall that British economist Ricardo based his famous argument for free trade on differences in national comparative advantage, and the argument for free trade still stands today on that same ground).

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A forward rate agreement (FRA) resembles a forward forward except that on settlement date, no deposit changes hands; instead there’s a cash payment between the contracting parties based on the relationship between the rate at which the trade was done and the market rate at the time of settlement. In a FRA, both parties are betting on a future interest rate. If rates move such that one party loses X on his bet, the other party wins X (FRAs are a zero-sum game). Forward forwards and FRAs are, in effect, over-the-counter (OTC) versions of formal futures contracts; forward forwards are forward contracts settled with delivery, whereas FRAs are forward contracts settled with a cash payment. Interest-rate swaps are also sometimes done for forward settlement, particularly in what’s called the IMM (International Monetary Market) swap (Chapter 19).

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Thus the profit for an option can be negative, as shown by the dashed line in Figure 17.2. A buyer of a call is therefore optimistic about the underlying asset: he hopes that it will rise sufficiently high above the strike price to recoup the initial premium. Since options are a contract between two parties, they are a zero-sum game: the holder’s gain is the writer’s loss. The best that the call writer can hope for is ST < K so that the option is not exercised and so that his payoff is zero. His profit, therefore, equals the compounded premium. If, instead, ST > K, the holder will exercise and the writer will lose the difference.

Free Speech And Why It Matters
by Andrew Doyle
Published 24 Feb 2021

This cannot be sustained without free speech and, although I do not believe we are as yet experiencing a full-blown crisis, the first fissures in the barricade are certainly widening. Media outlets and other institutions traditionally committed to liberty are wavering in the face of ideological pressure, and vocal supporters of unrestricted speech are finding themselves in the minority. Decent people with noble goals are increasingly playing a zero-sum game in which social justice is seen as only achievable if freedom of expression is deprioritised. Even the ACLU is experiencing internal conflicts between the old guard of free speech absolutists and a new activist contingent whose ambitions seem inimical to the organisation’s raison d’être. When even the most ardent defenders of free speech are sheering off course, it is imperative that we muster the courage to uphold this most elemental of principles.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
by Richard Heinberg
Published 1 Jun 2011

Nor will it be impossible for any region, nation, or business to continue growing for a while. Some will. In the final analysis, however, this growth will have been achieved at the expense of other regions, nations, or businesses. From now on, only relative growth is possible: the global economy is playing a zero-sum game, with an ever-shrinking pot to be divided among the winners. Why Is Growth Ending? Many financial pundits have cited serious troubles in the US economy — including overwhelming, un-repayable levels of public and private debt, and the bursting of the real estate bubble — as immediate threats to economic growth.

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Jon Talton, “With Oil Prices Around $90, Recovery is Over a Barrel,” The Seattle Times, December 9, 2010; David Murphy, “Further Evidence of the Influence of Energy on the US Economy,” The Oil Drum, posted April 16, 2009, netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/5304; Jeff Rubin, “We Have Run Out of Oil We Can Afford to Burn,” The Globe and Mail, October 6, 2010; “Oil Price is Risk to Economic Recovery, Says IEA,” BBC News, posted January 5, 2011; Derek Thompson, “How Oil Could Kill the Recovery,” The Atlantic, posted January 6, 2011. 37. Cameron Leckie, “Economic Growth: A Zero Sum Game,” On Line Opinion, posted November 25, 2010. 38. Carey W. King, “Energy Intensity Ratios as Net Energy Measures of United States Energy Production and Expenditures,” Environmental Research Letters 5 (October to December 2010). 39. Recent reports warn that groundwater is depleting at increasing rates “Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide,” Science Daily, posted September 23, 2010; and that the world’s rivers are in a “crisis state.”

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
by John Mackey , Rajendra Sisodia and Bill George
Published 7 Jan 2014

Investors, labor, management, suppliers—they all need to cooperate to create value for customers. If they do, the joint value created is divided fairly among the creators of the value through competitive market processes based approximately on the overall contribution each stakeholder makes. In other words, business is not a zero-sum game with a winner and loser. It is a win, win, win, win game—and I really like that. I also discovered that despite my best intentions and desire to create a good business, there were many challenges. Our customers thought our prices were too high; our team members thought they were paid too little; our suppliers would not give us good prices, because we were too small; the local Austin nonprofit sector was continually asking us for donations; and various governments were slapping us with many fees, licenses, fines, and various business taxes.

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Fourth, the selected companies did not squeeze their suppliers to secure the lowest possible price, and their suppliers were innovative and profitable. Fifth, the “firms of endearment” invested a lot in their communities, and in reducing the company’s impact on the environment. Finally, they provided great customer value and outstanding customer service. Most of us have become conditioned to believe that business is a zero-sum game that requires numerous trade-offs. Therefore, if these “firms of endearment” were spending all this extra money on team members, suppliers, customers, and communities, it has to come from somewhere else—probably from investors. Sisodia and coauthors expected that since these are well-managed businesses with loyal team members and customers, investors would do as well with these companies as they would with other companies.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 28 Jan 2020

Economists refer to these long-run effects as hysteresis, the idea that history matters, or in this case, that the loss of skills from the lack of productive employment or the loss of productivity from the lack of investment will not be recouped for a long time, if ever.5 The Challenge of Finance for Europe Europe will have to create a stable financial system that serves ordinary Europeans, most of whom do not work in high finance. The revenue that the financial sector has garnered for itself comes at the expense of the rest of society, but it is worse than a zero-sum game. The losses to the rest of society are far greater than the gains to the financial sector. For instance, the exercise of market power distorts the economy. But this is even truer when the financial sector exploits its information advantage over others through insider trading, market manipulation, and predatory lending.

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Further, Trump’s administration has caused pain in other ways that fall short of canceling agreements. For example, he has blocked the appointment of WTO appellate judges, which may bring its dispute settlement system to a standstill. Trump’s penchant for trade wars (and trade skirmishes) is another example. These foolish gambits seem to be based on a premodern-era perception of commerce as a zero-sum game, which holds that one country’s gains in trade must be another’s losses. The entire edifice of markets, including trade, is based on the premise that voluntary exchanges are mutually beneficial. The most basic economics tell us that by taking advantage of comparative advantage and of specialization, both countries gain from trade.† The critical mistake of globalization advocates was to ignore its effects on different groups within the country.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

National competition, just like corporate competition, would tend to focus more on advances in raw capabilities and less on the problem of control. Perhaps, however, Putin has read Bostrom; he went on to say, “It would be strongly undesirable if someone wins a monopolist position.” It would also be rather pointless, because human-level AI is not a zero-sum game and nothing is lost by sharing it. On the other hand, competing to be the first to achieve human-level AI, without first solving the control problem, is a negative-sum game. The payoff for everyone is minus infinity. There’s only a limited amount that AI researchers can do to influence the evolution of global policy on AI.

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A positional good is anything—it could be a car, a house, an Olympic medal, an education, an income, or an accent—that derives its perceived value not just from its intrinsic benefits but also from its relative properties, including the properties of scarcity and being superior to someone else’s. The pursuit of positional goods, driven by pride and envy, has the character of a zero-sum game, in the sense that Alice cannot improve her relative position without worsening the relative position of Bob, and vice versa. (This doesn’t seem to prevent vast sums being squandered in this pursuit.) Positional goods seem to be ubiquitous in modern life, so machines will need to understand their overall importance in the preferences of individuals.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by General Stanley McChrystal , Tantum Collins , David Silverman and Chris Fussell
Published 11 May 2015

Bonds of trust began to form. People from different tribes began to see increasingly familiar faces. Even strangers were now, by extension, part of a familiar and trusted unit entity, and received the benefit of the doubt. Being part of the network became an important form of capital. Most important, it was not a zero-sum game; the more you put into the system, the more it could serve you. Nowhere was the elimination of territorialism clearer than in the exchange of our coveted air assets. ISR Under a pitch-black sky, thirty operators jogged toward idling helicopters. Rotor blades whirled, kicking hot desert air across the airfield runway.

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When a ground commander was forced to hand over an ISR asset, it could cause internal convulsions in the Task Force, and potentially serious loss of morale for the affected unit. The way our operators experienced it on the ground, one moment they had a helicopter or a Predator, the next moment it was gone. From their vantage point, someone else had taken it—it was a zero-sum game. All they knew concretely was that they couldn’t do their mission. When they understood the whole picture, they began to trust their colleagues. Much like the prisoners deciding whether or not to rat, our commanders’ responsiveness to such demands grew as they came to understand the greater environment in which the decision had been made, and the people receiving what had been taken away.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

The problem is that it takes about 2 million hits, according to Move Fast and Break Things author Jonathan Taplin,26 to make around $20,000 a year or so—not exactly a substitute for a middle-class job. You are either a YouTube star, or you are at the bottom of a pyramid of free labor, which critics like Taplin would say has become a zero-sum game for everyone but the technologists themselves.27 While it’s true that the new crop of tech companies makes it easier to slough off less productive tasks—driving, shopping, and so on—they also rely on “DIY” inputs, including user-generated content and open-source software. This is essentially unpaid work being done on a mass scale.

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But they were followed by spates of innovative products and services, ranging from automobiles and domestic appliances to wind turbines. There is no reason to think this time will be different—or that China, the United States, and Europe can’t all have a piece of the pie. The battle for 5G isn’t set—and it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. In the United States, though, shared prosperity will be obtainable only if the government moves quickly to create a more supportive environment for real innovators (coordinating with other countries on 5G standards, for example), and if Big Tech doesn’t monopolize the next generation of innovation.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

More broadly, we will need to purposefully encourage innovation around alternative means of distributed communication that preserve the great strides we have made to connect individuals to each other and to vast stores of information on a planetary scale, without at the same time manipulating them towards their basest instincts. Prioritizing security of the global communications ecosystem as a whole — one that is distributed, secure, and open — would help pivot away from how it has been increasingly treated: as a “domain” to be fought over (and often seen as collateral damage) in the zero-sum game of interstate competition. An alternative “human-centric” approach to cybersecurity strives for indivisible network security on a planetary scale for the widest possible scope of human experience, and seeks to ensure that such principles are vigorously monitored and defended by multiple and overlapping forms of independent oversight and review.469 * * * If there is anything the COVID emergency makes clear, it is that we are living in a shared habitat, a true “global village,” diseases and all.

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Retrieved from https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/ “Zero days” — or “open doors that the vendor does not know it should lock”: Lindsay, Restrained by design; Greenberg, A. (2012, March 23). Shopping for zero-days: A price list for hackers’ secret software exploits. Forbes; Meakins, J. (2019). A zero-sum game: The zero-day market in 2018. Journal of Cyber Policy, 4(1), 60–71; Zetter. Countdown to Zero Day. Throughout 2017 and 2018, we partnered with Mexican human rights investigators at organizations: Scott-Railton, J., Marczak, B., Anstis, S., Abdul Razzak, B., Crete-Nishihata, B., and Deibert, R.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol
by Holly Glenn Whitaker
Published 9 Jan 2020

If you’re Elizabeth Gilbert and you write the wildly unsuccessful Committed after publishing the epochal Eat, Pray, Love, nothing bad has happened—you’re just practicing for your TED Talk, your Oprah tour, your next New York Times best seller. For them, failure never equaled going back to square one; failure was a leap forward. None of their careers are seen as a zero-sum game where the only things that count are the wins, and their failures aren’t measured as stumbling blocks; they are measured as legacy. We live in a society where failure isn’t just part of the story—sometimes it’s the entire story. Companies encourage it through initiatives such as Failure Walls and Failure Meetings, where employees showcase their biggest fuckups; there are Failure Festivals, books on failure, and almost every successful person in the spotlight loves to regale us with their biggest humiliations.

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When you mess up, and you will, here are some helpful things to consider. First, your failure is not proof of your inability to pull off sobriety; it is proof of your courage. Second, your mistake doesn’t equal losing something, and it doesn’t mean you go back to the place from which you came—sobriety isn’t a zero-sum game, it is a sum of its parts, and failure is one of its parts. Third, the failure point isn’t the moment to get out the whip and tell yourself what a piece of crap you are; if you hope to learn from it and use it, the failure point is the moment you bring in severe compassion for the person who is trying, which is you.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Would they have rejected this liberal version of progress had they been given the choice? Probably. Even liberal societies frequently choose similarly: just ask any Brexit voter who chose to “take back control” from the EU in spite of the impact this would have on their material well-being. Ultimately, progress as we have come to know it has elements of a zero-sum game. And for most people, the primacy of their social experiences, whether tribal, national, or even pan-national (usually under the banner of religion or race), has trumped the individualist and humanist ones. In recent decades, the progress narrative has gained some extra dimensions. Since the development of nuclear weapons, the possibility that technological progress could lead to the extinction of the human race or at least lead to destruction on a scale that would take centuries to recover from (if at all) has made us question whether it is necessarily beneficial in all cases.

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Its description of the first reeks of a total disconnect from reality: Successful traders display a healthy dose of optimism, even when it isn’t supported by the latest profit and loss statement, because they know that drawdowns are temporary, and that they have the skills needed to build back profits. They also understand that trading is a zero-sum game that divides up winners and losers, and visualize themselves on the winning side at all times, regardless of short-term results.32 Unfortunately, the 2008–2009 global financial crisis is the perfect example of how unbridled market optimism (or as economist Robert Shiller calls it, “irrational exuberance”33) proved to be catastrophic, plunging the world into the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, and leaving ravages in the Western world that are still felt a decade later.

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees
by Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon
Published 2 Mar 2010

Bershad and Weiss devised the scheme. Those who were part of it, the inner circle of very senior partners (and Lerach was one of them), would award themselves annual bonuses. The bonuses would more or less match the amount the firm spent on referrals and indirectly reward the serial plaintiffs in their stable. In a zero-sum game then, the money still came from the firm as a whole. And it meant that in order to pay for plaintiffs, all the attorneys at Milberg Weiss would contribute, directly or indirectly, whether they knew it or not. While prominent and precedent-setting cases bolstered their firm’s reputation, Mel Weiss and Bill Lerach both realized that their ability to compete for big prizes was made possible only by a stream of smaller, more efficient cases to be won or settled quickly.

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In some cases, when Lerach learned from Torkelsen that Schulman had refused to pay certain invoices, an audible confrontation could be heard between the two partners. The noise reached New York through back channels. Schulman was now delivering disquieting reports to Mel Weiss and Dave Bershad. Still, Lerach felt obliged to include Schulman among the partners who deserved more money, thinking a raise might placate him. But a law partnership is a zero-sum game. Taking money from New York would mean persuading the partners there to forfeit some of their own shares—even as they were raking in unprecedented profits. On the face of it, Lerach let himself think, this should be logical. Deep down he knew better. He had grown to hate the annual executive retreats where these issues would rear up.

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He alluded to both the Halliburton and Enron cases and said darkly that Lerach had made “powerful enemies” while aggressively going after corporate fraud. For their part, the government attorneys leading the criminal investigation had already left clues that when it came to Milberg Weiss and Lerach Coughlin—Milberg East and Milberg West—prosecution was not necessarily a zero-sum game. “Once you go out and indict someone, you’ve gone out and crossed the Rubicon,” warned Columbia University law professor John Coffee. “Once you indict someone, you have put events irrevocably in motion.” LERACH’S OFFICE HAD SAID he was in Europe when the Lazar indictment was announced. It didn’t announce that he’d been celebrating the scalps he had taken that very month.

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order
by Rush Doshi
Published 24 Jun 2021

For example, Professor Yan Xuetong—one of China’s more hawkish and well-connected scholars—parses many of the admonition’s phrases and argues that they are fundamentally focused on the United States threat: The phrases “undertaking no leadership” and “raising no banner” suggest that China will not challenge American global leadership to avoid a zero sum game between China’s national rejuvenation efforts and America’s unchallenged global dominance since the end of the Cold War. This will help prevent the United States from focusing on containing the rise of China as a global superpower.96 Many Western observers sometimes point to a speech by China’s top diplomat Dai Bingguo downplaying the departure from “Tao Guang Yang Hui” in 2010, but Yan disagrees and notes the concept is about the U.S.

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In an apparent shift from past language, Yang’s essay explicitly stressed Chinese leadership by arguing that “participating in and leading global governance” would be a “pioneer direction” for Chinese diplomacy and that China would “actively lead international economic cooperation” too. Yang’s was a more self-consciously global agenda than in the past, and he declared it would “surpass the traditional Western theory of international relations based on zero-sum games and power politics” and would give Chinese diplomacy “the moral high ground.”13 Xi’s high-level foreign policy addresses amplified these themes. For example, in his 2017 address to the China National Security Work Forum, Xi went beyond the more general, rhetorical language previously used to describe China’s ambitions for international order: “It is necessary [for China] to guide the international community to jointly shape a more just and reasonable new international order,” he declared.14 An authoritative commentary on his speech went further and advocated that China become a “benefactor and leader of the international system.”

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For China, and for most objective observers, the stakes of the competition have long been clear. US-China competition is primarily a competition over who will lead regional and global order and what kind of order they might create from that position of leadership. In many places, but not all, it is a zero-sum game because it is over a positional good—that is, one’s role within a hierarchy. In other places, there may be room for mutual adjustment, particularly over the kind of order that results, as well as collaboration on transnational issues. We now turn to the question of order, peacetime competition, and the stakes of the present contest.

The New Prophets of Capital
by Nicole Aschoff
Published 10 Mar 2015

But when investors, labor, management, and suppliers choose to cooperate, they can create unprecedented value. In a free market, this joint value is “divided fairly among the creators of the value through competitive market processes based approximately on the overall contribution each stakeholder makes. In other words, business is not a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser. It is a win, win, win, win game.”8 Sure, companies have been misbehaving recently, but before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, Mackey implores us to remember that most of the wonderful things we have in the world, like cars, computers, antibiotics, and the internet, are a product of free markets, not “government edict.”

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 3 Sep 2012

A robust economy can’t be built on inventory replacements. The wrongheaded idea that corporations need tax cuts to create jobs is also being used by regressive governors who are cutting business taxes willy-nilly in order to compete with other states that are doing the same. They’ve entered into a giant zero-sum game that doesn’t create a single new job overall but robs the states of money needed for critical investments in schools and infrastructure. In 2012, Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, said his corporate tax cuts “will give Florida a competitive edge in attracting jobs.” But Florida simultaneously cut education spending by $3 billion, when the state already ranked near the bottom in per-pupil spending and had one of the nation’s lowest graduation rates.

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 20 Mar 2007

“This is like saying, ‘Give me your shirt and I will give you back a button,’” one of the youths ventured. They were unsure exactly how the 13 percent was calculated, or how best to share it out. “The only thing Shell can do is negotiate with the Ijaws. . . . Let them have an Ijaw Development Commission, headed by an Ijaw.” It was the old zero-sum game: how to divide out the more than $20 billion that Nigeria earned that year.18 The discussion ranged on. At every point, oil was dividing these people from each other. How is Nigeria’s oil money shared out? First, it is split contractually between Nigeria and the oil companies and their contractors.

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They were on their feet, gesticulating and arguing, furious that the other islanders might get “their” oil. It was a tiny episode, easily forgotten. But it illustrates the larger issue: mineral resources divide citizens against one another. Regions where locals want to split away from their countries—the Niger Delta, or Angola’s Cabinda enclave—are those parts with the oil. It is the old zero-sum game: more oil money for São Tomé means less for Principe, more for northern Principe means less for southern Principe, more for Public Works means less for Commerce, and so on. Finding oil is like dumping itching powder from helicopters, aggravating existing divisions. The divisions are often, but not always, ethnic or religious.

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation
by Richard Bookstaber
Published 5 Apr 2007

Meanwhile, there is a proliferation of hedge funds that continue to capture differentially higher returns. Over the past five years, the assets under management by hedge funds have grown over sixfold from $300 billion to more than $2 trillion. And this does not include the operation of the quasi-hedge fund proprietary trading desks at firms like Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank. It’s a zero-sum game, though, so if hedge funds are able to extract differentially higher returns, someone else is paying for them with comparably subpar returns. Maybe it’s you. This is not the way it is supposed to work. Consider the progress of other products and services over the past century. From the structural design of buildings and bridges, to the operation of oil refineries or power plants, to the safety of automobiles and airplanes, we learned our lessons.

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If the timing is right (right, that is, as far as the insiders are concerned), the influx of shares hits the market while the stock price is still riding high. The result is a net loss for the investor public. If the shares in the market were constant during the ride up and back down, at least on net there would be no loss among the investors. But with more shares hitting the market near the peak, it is no longer a zero-sum game, with one public investor’s profit equaling another’s loss. When supply catches up with demand, pricing power declines. The stocks of many Internet companies behaved like a roller-coaster ride over the year or two of the bubble, with a price at the end not far from where it was at the start, but the investors discovered that sometime during the course of the triple loops their wallets had dropped out of their pockets.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
by Marc Levinson
Published 31 Jul 2016

While economies were growing rapidly during the Golden Age, governments had been able to improve conditions for almost everyone; there was enough money to raise child allowances and build new universities offering free or low-cost education without reducing the after-tax incomes of working families without children. But now that economies were growing slowly or even shrinking, governing was a zero-sum game. Any measure that channeled more resources to one group, whether preschool toddlers or old-age pensioners, was likely to take resources away from others. Even policies that would eventually benefit almost everyone, such as reducing inflation, foundered on the public’s unwillingness to accept short-term pain for long-term gain.

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Since the earliest days of income taxation, this had been accepted as the fairest way to levy taxes. The supply-siders begged to differ. Progressive taxation, they claimed, was designed to redistribute income from some people to others rather than to make the economy grow. “All this shifting of wealth is a zero sum game,” Gilder asserted. Levying the highest taxes on the most dynamic people in a society, those whose creativity and entrepreneurial drive generated wealth, would kill the golden goose. The supply-siders claimed that this was precisely what had occurred in the 1970s, as wealthy people put their money into tax shelters and gold rather than risking it in productive investments that, if successful, would allegedly have been taxed at painfully high rates.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

The sense of community, likewise, is a moral emotion of evolutionary origin, rather than a rational choice, although there may be many good objective reasons (or rationalizations) for our having it. Fairness is consistent with the “selfish” gene: very often acting in a seemingly nonselfish way delivers better outcomes for an individual, because so much of human life is characterized by the scope for mutual benefit (or by non–zero sum games, as a game theorist would express it). A woolly mammoth is more easily brought down by a group than by a lone hunter, while individuals in a modern economy are richer when working cooperatively and engaging in trade. The role of fairness, or reciprocal altruism, in economics was given a big boost by Robert Axelrod’s 1984 book, The Evolution of Cooperation.

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Treasury, 100 utiltarianism, 31–32, 78, 237 U2, 194–98 values, 18; anomie and, 48, 51; balance and, 12–17; bankers and, 211, 213, 217, 223, 226–28, 233; capitalism and, 209–13, 218, 226, 230–32, 235–36; capitalism and, 230–38 (see also capitalism); consumption and, 229, 236; culture and, 230–38; decentralization and, 275; democracy and, 230–38; efficiency and, 210, 215–16, 221–35; face-to-face contact and, 7, 147, 165–68; freedom and, 237–38; globalization and, 210–11, 235; governance and, 211, 217, 238; government and, 14, 210–11, 215–20, 225–26, 229–30, 234; gross domestic product (GDP) and, 212, 218, 232; growth and, 13, 210–13, 222, 231–36; innovation and, 210, 216, 220, 236; institutions and, 240–42, 246–47, 258–60; intangible assets and, 149–52, 157, 161, 199–201; market failure and, 226–30; measurement and, 209, 212–13; merits of markets and, 211–17; morals and, 185, 210, 213, 220–25, 230–33; philosophy and, 237–39; policy recommendations for, 275–84; politics and, 209–13, 217–18, 223–24, 231–34, 237–38; price chasm and, 207–8; productivity and, 212–13, 224; Protestant work ethic and, 13–14, 236; public choice theory and, 220; public deliberation and, 258–60; public service and, 295; rational calculation and, 214–15; reform and, 218, 233, 275–78, 295; revalorization and, 275; role of government and, 14–15; self-interest and, 214, 221; statistics and, 13; stewardship and, 78, 80, 275; technology and, 212–13, 216, 218, 233–34, 237–38; World Values Survey and, 139 Veblen, Thorsten, 22–23 Velvet Revolution, 239 volunteering, 46–49, 205–7, 214, 249, 269, 287 von Bismarck, Otto, 112 voters, 12, 16; declining turnout of, 175; happiness and, 23, 33, 43; increased turnout and, 260, 285; institutions and, 242, 251, 258, 260, 297; Internet and, 260; knowledge levels of, 288; legitimacy and, 297; measurement and, 190, 206; nature and, 57, 61, 68–69, 76; posterity and, 86, 96, 100, 106, 111; technological effects on, 288–89; trust and, 175, 286; values and, 224, 233–34, 258 Waal, Frans de, 119 Wall Street, 147, 221 Wall Street (film), 221 Warwick Commission on International Financial Reform, 164 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 119–20 Weber, Axel, 99 Weber, Max, 236 weightless activities, 150 welfare, 310n25; aging population and, 4, 94–95, 105–6, 109, 112–13, 206, 267, 280, 287, 296; fairness and, 116, 127, 131, 136–37; growth and, 9–12; happiness and, 9–12, 24–26, 29–32, 35–36, 39–42, 50–53; inequality and, 4–5, 11, 17 (see also inequality); institutions and, 239–43, 259; markets and, 211–25; measurement and, 181–86, 193, 207; nature and, 57–58, 61–62, 71–75, 78–84; policy recommendations for, 270–71, 275–77, 286, 290, 296; posterity and, 85, 89–100, 103, 106, 111–12; trust and, 171, 175; values and, 209, 211, 217, 228, 231–38 well-being, 137–43 Western culture, 2, 16, 18, 181–82, 235; aging populations in, 94–95; anomie and, 48, 51; anxiety and, 1, 25, 47–48, 136–38, 149, 174; corrosion of trust in, 150, 156, 171–75, 255–56; downshifting and, 11, 55; Easterlin Paradox and, 39–44; government debt and, 104 (see also government debt); happiness and, 22–23, 26, 40, 48, 50–51; hedonic treadmill and, 40; increased management complexities of, 244; Industrial Revolution and, 27, 149, 290, 297; institutions and, 243–44, 255–58; nature and, 57–66, 76; policy recommendations for, 268–69, 273, 275, 278, 284–85, 287; prosperity and, 86, 94–97, 104–9; Slow Movement and, 27–28, 205; voter turnout and, 175; weightless activities and, 150 Whitehall Studies, 139 Wikipedia, 205, 291 Wilkinson, Richard, 137–40 Willetts, David, 98–99 Williamson, Oliver, 17, 220, 242, 250, 254, 261 Wolf, Naomi, 34 Wolfers, Justin, 41 World Bank, 38, 81, 163–64, 176, 211 WorldCom, 145 World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge, and Policy, 38 World Trade Organization (WTO), 162–63, 215, 297 World Values Survey, 139 World War II era, 4, 91, 97, 106, 141, 164, 257, 270, 281, 283 zero–sum games, 118 Zimbabwe, 89, 110, 122

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

If we connect with people about what we have in common – sports teams, TV shows, interests – it is easier to have dialogue about what we disagree on.’10 Yet it is extremely difficult to know each other as ‘whole’ people. It takes a lot of time, and it demands direct physical interaction. As noted earlier, the average Homo sapiens is probably incapable of intimately knowing more than 150 individuals. Ideally, building communities should not be a zero-sum game. Humans can feel loyal to different groups at the same time. Unfortunately, intimate relations probably are a zero-sum game. Beyond a certain point, the time and energy you spend on getting to know your online friends from Iran or Nigeria will come at the expense of your ability to know your next-door neighbours. Facebook’s crucial test will come when an engineer invents a new tool that causes people to spend less time buying stuff online and more time in meaningful offline activities with friends.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis
by Beth Macy
Published 15 Aug 2022

But only 36 percent of Americans have bachelor’s degrees, so the vast majority fail to thrive while a minority of us prosper, amping up what Case and Deaton call “the politics of despair.” Less educated Whites tend to oppose universal health care, erroneously believing that it favors Black people at their expense, as if health care were a zero-sum game. They vote for candidates who are suspicious of a federal government that allowed hundreds of thousands of their jobs to move offshore and whose wealthy supporters perversely oppose tax hikes that would pay for programs like universal health. For 150 years, there has never been a time when massive numbers of Americans haven’t regularly used illegal drugs.

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Josh Sharfstein, the Johns Hopkins public health associate dean. “Think about HIV: When HIV became an illness managed with medications, much of the taboo fell away. The same concept could work for addiction. The critical first step is for the medical community to fully embrace effective treatment with buprenorphine and methadone. “There isn’t a zero-sum game between treatment and prevention,” Sharfstein added. “Saving lives through treatment can create momentum that gets people to say, ‘Let’s take on a bigger chunk of the problem.’” A month into her stay at Tabitha’s House, Billie brought home a pajama set from the thrift store. Growing up, she’d never owned matching pajamas.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

The principal use of these models, according to HBP pronouncements, will be to understand how brain diseases work and to greatly improve the way therapies are developed and tested. The Human Brain Project is controversial in neuroscientific circles, with critics subjecting it to the kind of vitriol which academics excel at. Some worry that its massive funding will drain resources away from alternative projects, which suggests they believe that scientific funding is a zero-sum game. Others argue that our limited understanding of how the brain works means that the attempt to model it is premature. In July 2014, 200 neuroscientists signed a letter calling for a review of the way the project distributes its funding. One of the Human Brain Project’s harshest critics is Facebook’s Yann LeCun, who said in February 2015 that “a big chunk of the Human Brain Project in Europe is based on the idea that we should build chips that reproduce the functioning of neurons as closely as possible, and then use them to build a gigantic computer, and somehow when we turn it on with some learning rule, AI will emerge.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Published 28 May 2018

Look at how rich BUMMER companies are and remember that their wealth is made entirely of the data you gave them. I think companies should get rich if they make things people want, but I don’t think you should be made less and less secure as part of the bargain. Capitalism isn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game. BUMMER is economically unsustainable, which is even worse, perhaps, than its being unfair. Bringing down a society to get rich is a fool’s game, and Silicon Valley is acting foolishly. Once we acknowledge that a translation program needs data from real people, then those people might even be encouraged to provide better, more useful data.

Paint Your Town Red
by Matthew Brown
Published 14 Jun 2021

The Conservative government’s 2020 proposal to grant blanket planning permission over wide swathes of England to private landowners and developers is likely to further exacerbate these problems. The housing crisis has been building for years as rentier capital replaces industrial capital, and cannot be quickly or easily remedied. Indeed, it has become something of a zero-sum game: if prices come down to increase affordability, then existing homeowners — many of whom have drawn down equity on their houses in the expectation of repaying it later when the house is sold, or have used it as an investment vehicle in place of a pension — will lose out. Meanwhile, the often absurd disparity between wage levels and house prices means that many, especially younger people, are caught in the “rent trap” — unable to accumulate enough in savings or get stable enough work to access a mortgage and get on the housing ladder.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

Markets are happier when they are expanding. This point becomes critical in considering how markets can be better aligned with reality. If a market is stagnant or contracting, it is in the interests of players to protect their positions and contest the positions of others. Antagonism becomes more prevalent in a zero-sum game. The whole of the game becomes the besting of others. If a market is expanding, the game is non-zero-sum. Then win-win thinking becomes rational more frequently. The opportunity of the new can often outweigh the opportunity of fighting over the old. This is not to say that an expanding market is automatically aligned to reality.

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G., 126–27, 137, 261, 331 Wells’s humor, 126–27 What the Dormouse Said (Markoff), 213 Wheeler, John Archibald, 195 Wiener, Norbert, 230 WikiLeaks, 14, 199, 205 Wikipedia, 59n, 93, 94, 176n, 188–89, 206, 226, 235, 254, 259, 291, 338, 359 Windows, 349 winner-take-all system, 38–43, 50, 54–55, 204, 243, 256–57, 263, 329–30 Wired, 82 wireless connections, 171–72, 184–85, 273, 296n, 309, 316, 331 Wozniak, Steve, 93 writers, 352–60 Xanadu, 222, 223, 225, 228–29 Xerox PARC, 229–30 You Are Not a Gadget (Lanier), 353 YouTube, 39, 60, 101, 185, 186–87, 242, 259, 278 zero-sum games, 240, 297–98 Zuckerberg, Mark, 93, 190 SIMON & SCHUSTER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonSchuster.com Copyright © 2013 by Jaron Lanier All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

World Cities and Nation States
by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen
Published 19 Dec 2016

Federal loans and funding will play a role in improving services, but federal officials have to balance this against a need to show fiscal restraint. Reduce the city’s fiscal constraints and recognise long-term investment needs São Paulo is disadvantaged by a series of fiscal and debt arrangements, but national‐level dialogue on fiscal issues adopts a zero‐sum game approach to the way transfers are distributed and rarely examines opportunities for giving cities greater revenue autonomy. The city’s problematic fiscal arrangements have at least four dimensions: • High net fiscal outflows. Each year the city raises R200 billion in total tax revenues, but a much smaller proportion is reinvested in the city.

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And there are new mechanisms of value capture finance being looked at and tested, such as tax increment financing and air rights (Toronto, São Paulo, Moscow). Many, if not most, world cities require a higher investment rate and greater investment capacity. Not all of the fiscal or tax challenges can be solved by a simple national government reform, but many solutions require a national‐level dialogue that rejects a hostile, ‘zero‐sum game’ approach to cities’ fiscal contributions, and examines opportunities for greater revenue autonomy. World c­ ities’ ability to make progress on achieving a fairer or more advantageous fiscal arrangement depends on a better grasp among leaders and the public about the best level of fiscal autonomy.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 5 Mar 2020

It is said with some justice that to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. The hammer in my hand is the one that every Irish person holds – a sense of how nationalism works; a fear of the ways in which, if it is poorly articulated, it can turn toxic; an awareness of the danger of imagining identity as a zero sum game; a fundamental disbelief in the possibility of extracting oneself from history. These are not examples of innate Irish wisdom – to the contrary, they are the fruits of very bitter experience. To look across the water from Ireland is to see people playing with the same fire with which we ourselves have been burned.

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Johnson, in his essay, declared himself ‘troubled with the thought that people [in Britain] are beginning to have genuinely split allegiances’ – with Brexit as the cure that will restore the binary choice between Britishness and Europeanness. Underlying the whole mad project is the idea of belonging and sovereignty as zero sum games – it is either/or, not both/and. The British problem is that all the rationality is on the side of both/and, but all the emotional clarity is with either/or. If it is to avoid disaster, Britain needs to accept messy ambiguities. But it is still led by a party that allowed itself to be captured by the stirring simplicities of a stark choice between national failure and impending glory.

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements
by Haym Benaroya
Published 12 Jan 2018

An ability to embed self-healing components within the structural layers implies an ability to embed electronics as well. Integrated electronics offer opportunities to generate power and develop active control forces . The complexity of embedding self-healing components and electronics challenges system reliability . Complexity and reliability can be a zero-sum game, but this does not mean that we avoid complexity. Rather, designers need to balance that complexity carefully in a suboptimal way, recognizing that there is likely a point of diminishing returns. Mathematical and computational modeling is required of the stowed, deploying, and deployed structure.

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Implied is a knowledge of the structural environment, and what load types and magnitudes the structure will experience over its design life. For a lunar structure and its site, where our knowledge is both deep as well as lacking, reliability and probabilistic mathematical tools give us the ability to integrate our lack of knowledge into the analysis. The challenge is to balance risk and cost, and these do not exactly lead to a zero-sum game. It is possible to minimize risk without increasing cost by using a clever design. Similarly, it is possible to increase the risk, and the cost, by way of a poorly thought through design. Part of the challenge is to be able to envision the complete life of the structure. After all, the risks and costs begin at the conceptual level, long before the structure is erected on the lunar surface.

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
by Suzanne Simard
Published 3 May 2021

Or that the rhododendrons protected the smaller prickly-needled spruce seedlings from hard frosts that were much more severe out in the open than under a jigsaw canopy. No, the thinking was clear and simple. Get rid of the competition. Once the light, water, and nutrients were freed up by obliterating the native plants, the lucrative conifers would suck them up and grow as fast as a redwood. A zero-sum game. Winners take all. Here I was, a soldier in a war I didn’t believe in. That familiar guilt at being part of the problem nagged at me as we began these new experiments. But I was in it for the ultimate prize: to learn how to be a scientist so I could unravel what was ailing the planted seedlings

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Grown intimately together, this forest had almost twice the productivity of the stands where we’d trenched between the species two decades earlier. This was the opposite of the usual foresters’ expectations. They figured that fir roots free of birch interference would obtain more of the resource pie, as though the ecosystem worked as a zero-sum game—the adamant belief that greater total productivity cannot possibly emerge from species interactions. Even more surprising to me was that birch benefited from fir too. Not only did birches likewise grow at twice the rate when intimately connected with firs than when alone, but they also had fewer root infections.

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence
by Robert I. Rotberg
Published 15 Nov 2008

The narrow focus on state behavior or foreign policy is inadequate. Unless fundamental changes occur in China’s own reform process, many of the issues we encounter in China’s external behavior will not easily be modified. 03-7561-4 ch3.qxd 9/16/08 4:08 PM Page 62 62 wenran jiang Great Powers in Africa: A Zero-Sum Game? The prospects of further Chinese-African cooperation and the issues raised during Hu’s trip to Africa will almost certainly resurface again. Economic interests in the continent, as well as global aspirations, guarantee that China will not be disengaging from Africa in the near future. In fact, China’s policymakers and academics will pay even closer attention to these contentious issues, and Beijing is likely to continue to adjust its policies toward Africa, both to advance its relations with the continent and to fend off international criticism.

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Second, the two sides agreed that the various subdialogues, including that on Africa, should continue in order to deepen mutual understanding and enhance collaboration in areas of common concern.29 Greater consensus has been achieved in the last few rounds of bilateral dialogue on Africa, in part because the United States is beginning to understand that China has real interests in Africa and will be engaged on the continent for the foreseeable future. Continuing to see China’s economic, political, or diplomatic activities in Africa as a zero-sum game is therefore counterproductive. This emerging viewpoint is an encouraging sign; the challenge is for Washington to make a strong commitment, at a high diplomatic level, toward understanding the Chinese perspective and then to continue to test China’s intentions systematically. There will continue to be critical voices and distractions in Washington that may impede the near-term official formulation of an integrated, coherent U.S. strategy that might leverage areas of common U.S.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

Platform companies have generally outsourced the parts of the production process that involve the greatest volatility: heavy capital spending, physical inventories of materials and finished goods, and unionized industrial employment. The outsourcing of capital and labor resulted in the outsourcing of a large amount of economic volatility from the United States and Europe to the Third World. This was not, however, a zero-sum game because the globalization process enabled developing countries, most obviously China, to transform themselves with amazing and unprecedented speed into industrial, rather than agricultural, economies. While they imported industrial volatility from America and Europe, developing countries reduced the overall instability of their economies by becoming less dependent on primitive farming—the most unreliable business.

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And for anyone worried about the U.S. government’s profligate borrowing and spending, the levels of government debt in Japan and most eurozone countries, including Germany and France, are higher than they are in the United States. To dwell on the economic problems in Europe and Japan may seem like a pointless exercise in schadenfreude, but in one important respect the troubles of other countries benefit the United States and Britain. Currency trading is a zero-sum game, in which the fall of one currency must automatically mean the rise of another, so the fact that the only real alternatives to the dollar are structurally weaker than the dollar is a boon to both the United States and the world. If Europe and Japan had been structurally stronger or less affected by the 2007-09 crisis, worries about a precipitous fall in the dollar and the pound might have deterred U.S. and British policymakers from cutting interest rates as aggressively as they did.

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 1 Jan 2002

This was indeed the assumption: in the words of the contemporary political economist William Petty, there was ‘but a certain proportion of trade in the world’. The hope of the East India Company director Josiah Child was ‘that other Nations who are in competition with us for the same [business], may not wrest it from us, but that ours may continue and increase, to the diminution of theirs.’ It was economics as a zero sum game – the essence of what came to be called mercantilism. If, on the other hand, the volume of spice exports proved to be elastic, then the increased supply going to England would depress the European spice price. The English company’s initial voyages from Surat were exceedingly profitable, with profits as high as 200 per cent.

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It might of course be objected that British investors had no business investing in Buenos Aires and Rio when they should have been modernizing the industries of the British Isles themselves. But the anticipated returns on overseas investment were generally higher than those from domestic manufacturing. In any case, this was not a zero-sum game. New foreign investment soon became self-financing, since earnings from existing overseas assets consistently exceeded the value of new capital out-flows: between 1870 and 1913 total overseas earnings amounted to 5.3 per cent of GDP a year. Nor is there any compelling evidence that British industry was hampered by a shortage of capital before 1914.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Published 10 Oct 2011

.† With careful observation and recording we have been able to give children to those who were “barren” and the fertile the freedom to decide when—and whether—to reproduce. Our science now influences every aspect of life, and it has freed us from a life that was, according to Thomas Hobbes, “a war … of every man against every man … solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”4 In such remnants of thinking from the Middle Ages, economics was a zero-sum game: “Without a common power to keep them all in awe,” men in Hobbes’s time fell into war. There was finite wealth and opportunity, and to get ahead one had to take some away from another. In its capacity to create knowledge, science had the tools to break that zero-sum economic model and generate wealth, health, freedom, nobility, and power beyond Hobbes’s wildest dreams.

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Lubchenco is one of America’s leading voices on tackling climate change, but she challenges the idea of a limited world, pointing out that science has consistently expanded the economy beyond the zero-sum days of Thomas Hobbes. “By creating new knowledge, science changed economics away from a zero-sum game,” she says.8 Evolutionary biologist Simon Levin thinks that the way to tackle the problem is to develop an economic model that values the commons as capital. “I see a real split even among my students,” he says, “many of whom think economic growth and environmental protection are antagonistic elements and therefore a primary goal must be to reduce consumption and economic growth.

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
by Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber
Published 9 Feb 2014

Pluralistic-Green Organizations seek to deal with the problem of power inequality through empowerment, pushing decisions down the pyramid, and they often achieve much higher employee engagement. But empowerment means that someone at the top must be wise or noble enough to give away some of his power. What if power weren’t a zero-sum game? What if we could create organizational structures and practices that didn’t need empowerment because, by design, everybody was powerful and no one powerless? This is the first major breakthrough of Teal Organizations: transcending the age-old problem of power inequality through structures and practices where no one holds power over anyone else, and yet, paradoxically, the organization as a whole ends up being considerably more powerful.

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Interestingly, none of the organizations I have researched are employee-owned; the question of employee ownership doesn’t seem to matter very much when power is truly distributed. From an Evolutionary-Teal perspective, the right question is not: how can everyone have equal power? It is rather: how can everyone be powerful? Power is not viewed as a zero-sum game, where the power I have is necessarily power taken away from you. Instead, if we acknowledge that we are all interconnected, the more powerful you are, the more powerful I can become. The more powerfully you advance the organization’s purpose, the more opportunities will open up for me to make contributions of my own.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

Despite the promise of eternal life, faith in the West declined and has continued to do so, never faster than in the twenty-first century.8 Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline. Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game. But let us not get too far ahead of the story. If you’d attended the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, you might have spotted him. Far from the Ferris wheel and main concourses, Clark Stanley stood before his booth in an elaborate cowboy outfit, a beaded leather jacket with a colorful bandana, his hair worn long with a prominent goatee and mustache.

…

Of course, some are so famous that gaining more attention is unnecessary. But among those less secure in their prospects, revealing embarrassments or personal failings, appearing less than fully clothed on red carpets, and sometimes engaging in even more extreme exhibitionism would be the secret to besting their rivals in a zero-sum game. What People ultimately created was a platform for attracting attention through self-revelation that remained something short of tawdry, a kind of self-flaunting for the polite mainstream. Both People and the celebrity attention merchants have continued to gain from the new confessional culture, since the fans can never get enough.

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

As if this were a zero-sum game, as if only one of us can be left standing. It’s just funny.” Allison laughed. The mood lightened. “I don’t know why. Maybe deep down in my heart I’ve always had something to prove to you?” “You want to hear some truth?” “Please.” “You don’t need to prove anything to me, because in my heart, you’ve always been perfect.” Michael could no longer meet her gaze. “Maybe you don’t believe me. Well, my plan was to go public, to force OmegaAlliance to abandon this business, but I’ve changed my mind.” “Why?” “This may not be a zero-sum game after all.” “You mean…cooperate?”

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

“Playing in Los Angeles is not a home game for the United States,” a Los Angeles Times reporter agreed.15 Yet civic education in matters of race and class is a delicate enterprise. It usually fails, as we have seen in contemporary Iraq and Lebanon or in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Groups claim that their tribe’s achievements have not only been ignored by the majority but are marks of superiority deserving privileged status in the society. It is a zero-sum game of winners and losers—with the prize ultimately being favoritism under the law among supposedly equal citizens. In Federalist Papers No. 10, James Madison (“Publius”) wrote that factionalism—in his view arising over material inequality and unequal property holding—was inevitable in a free society.

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And even those Western nations that might hold themselves up as models for others less wealthy, safe, and free can no longer claim a common core of values among their growing diverse populations at home. Indeed, in the globalist West, regressive tribal identities are most in ascendence. American voters elect national leaders, not utopian philosophers. An allegiance to the world, in the zero-sum game of fidelity and time, implies some diminishment of commitment to one’s particular homeland. During the COVID-19 outbreak, both former First Ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush spoke at an international symposium titled “One World: Together at Home,” a well-meaning global-citizen effort designed to support and help fund the World Health Organization.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
Published 14 Sep 2020

The rise of a favored person can seem less a commentary on you or your own deficiencies than a reflection of the way the world is. “Conspicuously outperforming one’s fellows is sometimes resented, as it makes people who are already feeling inferior feel even more inferior,” Matory wrote. “Honor is a zero-sum game, with particularly intense implications for the discredited, because…there is so little honor to go around.” The caste system thrives on dissension and inequality, envy and false rivalries, that build up in a world of perceived scarcity. As people elbow for position, the greatest tensions arise between those adjacent to one another, up and down the ladder.

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The writer distilled this conclusion in his analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s seminal “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic (2014). “the trillions of dollars of wealth”: Lipsitz, Possessive Investment, pp. 5–7, 107. more racism than African-Americans: Michael I. Norton and Samuel Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (2011), pp. 215–18. as much as 80 percent: David R. Williams, interview by author, Providence, R.I., May 29, 2013. white felons applying for a job: Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108, no. 5 (March 2003): 937–75.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

“To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else,” Tuchman explains, “commercial law prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and under-age children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others.”36 This is a recipe for a zero-sum game, and leaves predation as the only way people could add to their wealth. A positive-sum game is a scenario in which agents have choices that can improve the lots of both of them at the same time. A classic positive-sum game in everyday life is the exchange of favors, where each person can confer a large benefit to another at a small cost to himself or herself.

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Studies of American street violence have found that the young men who endorse a code of honor are the ones most likely to commit an act of serious violence in the following year.102 They also have found that the presence of an audience doubles the likelihood that an argument between two men will escalate to violence.103 When dominance is reckoned within a closed group, it is a zero-sum game: if someone’s rank goes up, another’s has to go down. Dominance tends to erupt in violence within small groups like gangs and isolated workplaces, where a person’s rank within the clique determines the entirety of his social worth. If people belong to many groups and can switch in and out of them, they are more likely to find one in which they are esteemed, and an insult or slight is less consequential.104 Since the only commodity at stake in contests of dominance is information, once the point has been made about who’s the boss, the violence can come to an end without setting off rounds of vendetta.

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Apollonian cultures discounting, temporal; see also self-control discrimination disgust Disney, Walt distress and sympathy-altruism hypothesis District of Columbia, homicides in Divinity, ethic of; see also disgust; Purity, ethic of Djilas, Milovan DNA testing Dodds, Graham dodgeball domestic violence outside U.S. dominance and anarchy and the brain as cause of war circuit in brain gender differences in group (tribalism) hierarchies of and information introduction of concept and nationalism dominance (cont.) and sadism and self-esteem and social identity as zero-sum game dominance hierarchy Dominica Donohue, John Doomsday Clock dopamine Dostoevsky, Fyodor Douglas, William O. Douglass, Frederick Dover Doctrine Dowd, Maureen Doyle, Arthur Conan Draco Draize procedure drones drugs: decriminalization of 1960s trafficking War on Drugs Druids Dubner, Stephen Duck Soup (film) Duckworth, Angela dueling Dukakis, Michael Dulles, John Foster Dumas, Alexandre père Durham, Margaret Dworkin, Andrea Dylan, Bob dynasties, see Age of Dynasties; monarchy Eastern Europe abortions in and democracy and genocide violence against women in wars in East Timor Easy Rider (film) Eckhardt, William Eden, William education and civil war and democracy IQ tests method and content of ego depletion egotism Egypt, ancient Egypt, modern Eichmann, Adolf 80:20 rule Eighty Years’ War Einstein, Albert Eisenhower, Dwight D.

The Little Book of Hedge Funds
by Anthony Scaramucci
Published 30 Apr 2012

These returns are entirely reliant on the investment skill of the hedge fund manager and are uncorrelated to the market index. Just as many skeptics would have you believe that El Dorado is a fictitious place that can never be found, so do many academics prophesize that the investment world is a zero-sum game where alpha—excessive returns regardless of market conditions—does not exist. Naysayers argue that there are few money management geniuses who possess the intrinsic skills to achieve uncorrelated returns. Like our gallant knight, many hedge fund managers have similarly met colossal disappointment, glorious failure, and financial ruin—both for themselves and their clients—in their quest to achieve alpha.

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science
by Paul Krugman
Published 18 Feb 2010

My European friends always marvel at how hard Americans work, even those who already have plenty of money. Why don’t we take more time to enjoy what we have? The answer, of course, is that we work so hard because we are determined to get ahead—an effort that (for Americans as a society) is doomed to failure, because competition for status is a zero-sum game. We can’t all “get ahead.” No matter how fast we all run, someone must be behind. If one follows this line of thought one might well be led to some extremely radical ideas about economic policy, ideas that are completely at odds with all current orthodoxies. But I won’t try to come to grips with such ideas in this column.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry
by John Warrillow
Published 5 Feb 2015

According to a 2013 study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, over half of surveyed companies are changing the way they deliver products and service. Four in five companies surveyed believe their customers are switching to new consumption models like sharing or subscribing. Of the companies changing the way they price and deliver goods, 40% are adopting the subscription business model. But the market for any given commodity is a zero-sum game. For every customer who decides to subscribe to a vitamin regimen from Køge, one less person buys vitamins from the local health food store. For every customer who subscribes to receive their Puppy Chow from Amazon’s Subscribe & Save, one less dog lover visits her local pet supplies store. So what’s it going to be?

The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns
by Mohnish Pabrai
Published 17 May 2009

Chapter 8 Dhandho 201: Invest in Distressed Businesses in Distressed Industries Efficient market theorists (EMTs) tell us that all known information about a given publicly traded business is reflected in its stock price. Thus, they proclaim that there isn’t much to be gained by being a securities analyst and trying to figure out the intrinsic value of a given business. And with frictional costs thrown in, the EMTs believe stock picking is not just a zero-sum game, but rather a negative-sum game. Here are Mr. Buffett’s replies to them:I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.1 Investing in a market where people believe in efficiency is like playing bridge with someone who has been told it doesn’t do any good to look at the cards.2 It has been helpful to me to have tens of thousands [of students] turned out of business schools taught that it didn’t do any good to think.3 Current finance classes can help you do average.4 —Warren Buffett Mr.

How to Hygge: The Secrets of Nordic Living
by Signe Johansen
Published 19 Oct 2016

A University of Cambridge study found that inactivity was far more dangerous to our health than being overweight, with a higher rate of morbidity among those who are sedentary compared to those who are obese, confirming the suspicion long held by many of us who are active that it doesn’t matter what body shape you are, or how high or low your BMI is—the key to longevity is to be active. In the Nordic region, sport isn’t viewed as a zero-sum game that’s all about winning. Everything from the usual winter suspects—skiing, skating, hockey and ski-jumping—to football during the more clement months, handball, athletics, rowing, sailing ... all sports are big news, and people get excited about their athletes doing well in international championships, but it’s hardly a national tragedy if your side loses.

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on Our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide
by Luke Hart and Ryan Hart
Published 15 Jul 2018

Power over others is not strength; it is weakness projected into the world. True strength comes from command over ourselves and our choices. We need to teach men the true language and behaviours of strong men, not the contradictory rationalisations of weak and resentful murderers. Masculinity as it currently stands is a zero-sum game on a single power spectrum. Some men, like our father, interpret the rules of this game to mean that competitive destruction is required to ‘succeed’ against others. When these men feel that they can no longer compete within the rules that masculinity has defined for them, they believe they have nowhere to go.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

Well, those crazy cats are centered on meaning. Or is it placemaking or planning or cognition? To be sure, we can (and should) argue about the centers, but that’s not the most pivotal point. If we connect the dots from facets and tags to fuzzy, centered sets, we begin to see the silliness of playing zero-sum games. As Schrödinger tried to tell us, a cat can exist in multiple categories at once. There’s a wonderful scene in Life of Pi in which young Pi and his mother and atheist father are walking down the street and bump into Pi’s pandit, priest, and imam all together. After an angry debate, Pi is told “he can’t be a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim.

The European Union
by John Pinder and Simon Usherwood
Published 1 Jan 2001

But alongside the majority who gain, there will be some who lose, or at least fear they will lose, from the opening of markets to new competition; and these may demand compensation for agreeing to participate in the new arrangements. Such compensation usually has implications for the Union budget and looks like a zero-sum game, which can lead to conflict between those who pay and those who receive, even if the package of compensation and competition, taken together, benefits both parties. The first major example was the inclusion of agriculture in the EEC’s common market. Agriculture The opening of the Community’s market to trade in manufactures was, when the EEC was founded, a relatively simple matter of eliminating tariffs and quotas by stages.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom
by Tony Robbins
Published 18 Nov 2014

I have fifteen hundred employees and forty years of experience, and it’s a tough game for me. This is poker with the best poker players on earth.” Ray is 65 years old, speaks with a soft New York accent, and uses his hands like a conductor when he talks. He reminded me that poker, like playing the markets, is a zero-sum game. For every winner, there has to be a loser. “As soon as you’re in that game, you’re not just playing poker against the guys across the table. It’s a world game, and only a small percentage of people make real money in it. They make a lot. They may take money away from those who are not as good at the game,” he said.

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Right now, I’m betting, the primary “money machine” in your life is you. You might have some investments, but let’s say you haven’t set them up with income in mind. If you stop working, the machine stops, the cash flow stops, your income stops—basically, your financial world comes to a grinding halt. It’s a zero-sum game, meaning that you get back just what you put into it. Look at it this way: you’re an ATM of another kind—only in your case, the acronym might remind you of that lousy “time-for-money” trade. You’ve become an Anti–Time Machine. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but for many of you, it’s reality.

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But you certainly aren’t going to do it listening to your broker buddy. And you certainly aren’t going to do it by trying to time the market. Timing the market is basically playing poker with the best players in the world who play round the clock with nearly unlimited resources. There are only so many poker chips on the table. “It’s a zero-sum game.” So to think you are going to take chips from guys like Ray is more than wishful thinking. It’s delusional. “There is a world game going on, and only a handful actually make money, and they make a lot by taking chips from the players who aren’t as good!” As the old saying goes, if you have been at a poker table for a while, and you still don’t know who the sucker is: it’s you!

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Jan 2008

In other words, an attitude that makes someone less happy as a human being actually makes her more effective as a lawyer. A second reason: Most other enterprises are positive-sum. If I sell you something you want and enjoy, we're both better off. Law, by contrast, is often (though not always) a zero-sum game: Because somebody wins, somebody else must lose. But the third reason might offer the best explanation of all and help us understand why so few attorneys exemplify Type I behavior. Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little decision latitude. Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has.

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
by Jason L. Riley
Published 14 May 2008

Even the most adept populists need some empirical evidence to back up their claims, and the Bush economy of the mid-2000s presented remarkably little data on which to hang anti-immigrant half-truths. The reality is that America’s foreign labor force helps to propel economic growth, not impede it, because the U.S. job market, properly understood, is not a zero-sum game. The number of jobs in the United States is not static. It’s fluid, which is how we want it to be. In 2006, 55 million U.S. workers (or just less than 4.6 million per month) either quit their jobs or were fired. Yet 57 million people were hired over the same period. In a typical year, a third of our workforce is turning over.

Designing for the Social Web
by Joshua Porter
Published 18 May 2008

Shouldn’t we focus on creating great content, instead? This is a fair concern, and the answer is YES! There is nothing more powerful than great content and a compelling experience. If you had to choose between focusing on content and focusing on sharing features, you should definitely focus on great content. However, this isn’t a zero-sum game. Most teams have both content producers and designers. So it’s OK for designers to focus on creating sharing features. Even better, the designers and content producers should work together to come up with the best possible display for information. Furthermore, it does help to prompt people to share.

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

This then necessitates the use of more chemicals and genetic modifications, and the cycle continues. By current estimates, the earth will run out of topsoil (the layer of earth in which plants can grow) within sixty years. That’s great for markets based on scarcity, but terrible for a planet of humans who need to eat. Agriculture is not just a zero-sum game of extracting value from the earth and monopolizing it. It means participating as both members and beneficiaries of a complex cycle of bounty. 75. The planet’s complex biosphere will survive us, one way or the other. Our own continuing participation, however, is in some doubt. Our aggressive industrial processes don’t just threaten the diversity of other species; they threaten us, too.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn
by Chris Hughes
Published 20 Feb 2018

I chose Guy Vidra, a 40-something executive at Yahoo who had turned around businesses of our size. Guy’s vision was clear: a new, firmer emphasis on traffic metrics, a slimmer editorial staff, more talk of content partnerships, and more experimentation with video. The editorial team had little enthusiasm for his approach. They felt like it was a zero-sum game: an emphasis on digital traffic would come at the expense of quality long-form. I hoped that we’d be able to reconcile differences through a collective commitment to making a popular and sustainable New Republic, but unfortunately that was not to be the case. Guy and Frank clashed continually over the fall, and Guy recommended that we bring in new editorial leadership.

Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy
by John Lewis
Published 22 Jul 2014

Our present concerns about exhausting resources should be viewed in the context of our exponentially growing knowledge of the Solar System in which we live. We also must acknowledge the dawning of a new era of low-cost access to space through competitive private launch services, which makes space travel much more accessible to commercial and private travelers. Our present zero-sum game of competition for ever-dwindling terrestrial resources need not be the model for our future. Instead, we may choose a limitless future by turning to the vast ocean of energy and resources that lies around us. Our journey into that ocean begins with the Near-Earth Asteroids. Appendix A Detailed Taxonomy of Meteorites This Appendix contains a much more detailed description of the known classes of meteorites.

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing
by Niels Jensen
Published 25 Mar 2018

As we have entered a hiking cycle with Fed’s decision to raise rates in December 2015, irrespective of the structural trends discussed in this book, there are very good reasons to believe that beta returns will be quite modest in the years to come. Alpha risk Alpha risk is non-market risk or, as it is often called, idiosyncratic risk, and alpha is a zero-sum game before costs. For every underperforming investor, there is always somebody who outperforms. When people say that nobody outperforms anymore, it is sheer nonsense. If somebody underperforms, somebody else must outperform (before costs). Alpha returns are driven by extracting risk premia from mis-pricings in the listed markets, and there is no correlation to beta.

Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler
Published 1 Jun 1984

Only a tiny fraction of them will survive this filtering process. These few, however, could be of the utmost importance in calling attention to new possibilities that might otherwise escape notice. As we move from poverty toward affluence, politics changes from what mathematicians call a zero sum game into a non-zero sum game. In the first, if one player wins another must lose. In the second, all players can win. Finding non-zero sum solutions to our social problems requires all the imagination we can muster. A system for generating imaginative policy ideas could help us take maximum advantage of the non-zero opportunities ahead.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge
by Faisal Islam
Published 28 Aug 2013

Even before the bottom rungs of the ladder broke, it appeared that the housing ladder had turned into a one-step house trap. Rise of the domocracy At the heart of all of this is the unwillingness of anybody in finance or politics to say that ever-rising house prices have been a disaster. In reality, ever-rising house prices constitute what is more or less a zero-sum game, a mechanism that redistributes from the poor and the young to the rich and the old. The test case for this is, of course, Germany. Since 1980 real house prices in the UK nearly trebled, and are still well over double their level in 1995. In Germany, real house prices have fallen 17 per cent since 1995.

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Germany had, through intermediaries, lent people like Kelly and Nelson the boom-time cash. But they had left the credit risk with the Spanish banks. This method of lending turned out to be a very important factor during the bust. Cédulas were not a form of credit alchemy that had disappeared default risk, despite the German engineering. This was a zero-sum game. All the covered bonds did was to shift risks around. The additional security offered to the cédula-holders was at the expense of other unsecured lenders to the cajas. As Spanish credit quality declined, more high quality assets were sucked in to secure the interests of the holders of covered bonds.

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

Malthusian arguments were present in the debates that culminated with passage of the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts, which essentially closed the nation to 60 chapter 2 non-Northern Europeans, but racial concerns were paramount.97 Many elites who opposed immigration on eugenic grounds actually insisted that immigration stunted the birthrate of the native-born population. Francis Walker had long hypothesized that immigration was a zero-sum game for the aggregate total of people because it retarded enlargement of the native-born population.98 He also believed that immigrants from Southern Europe were “vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions.”99 Put another way, for eugenicists, immigration raised the specter not of Malthusian aggregate overpopulation and resource scarcity but of the “annihilation of Native American stock,” as the charity reformer Robert Hunter argued in Poverty (1905).100 Several reformist, progressive-era economists echoed these eugenic views.

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Chronic unemployment would be aggravated by a return to the immigration policies of a less complicated age.178 Rep. Peter Rodino Jr. (D-N.J.), who represented an Italian-American district in Newark, had introduced bills to repeal the national origins system since 1949 and almost got his name on the 1965 act. He also positioned population growth as a zero-sum game for the nation. “We will not be ad- 164 chapter 5 mitting substantially more immigrants,” he stated. “Times and possibilities have changed. We can no longer admit everyone who wishes to come here and it is with sadness that we modify Miss Liberty’s invitation. We must be able to provide for those who come here—with jobs, with homes, with futures—a modern society is limited as to the rate at which it can expand and accommodate new settlers.”179 Many individual restrictionists who testified before Congress also accentuated economic arguments against population growth rather than cultural ones.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

It is not clear that a community can exist in the absence of other communities: no Robinson Crusoe communities, no unique one-only neighborhoods, no singular social cells not folded into larger social organisms. Isolation is simply not an urban state of being. Because cities are sticky, they do not slide or bounce off one another the way states do. States collide because their common frontiers define where one ends and another begins. This necessarily turns territorial quarrels into zero-sum games. One state cannot grow without another being diminished. Not so cities, which are separated physically and hence touch only metaphorically and virtually, in ways that do not take up space or put one another at risk. A world of Singapores, in which cities were co-extensive with states, might put cities in the same position as states and compromise their connectivity.

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Test cases such as the proposed “Grand Park” in Los Angeles (squeezed between City Hall and Disney Hall and meant both to serve nearby poorer neighborhoods and to revitalize the downtown dead district of the city) will turn on how well they actually serve poorer communities and neighborhoods where only a handful of small but precious refurbished parks like MacArthur and Lafayette are currently to be found.78 Poverty, injustice, and segregation in every relevant urban sector in both slum “planets,” first-world and third-world, remain major obstacles to urban equality and hence the role of cities in nurturing democratic global governance. Too many of the urban advantages we celebrate, from creativity and culture to trade and diversity, have consequences that accrue to the middle and upper classes at the expense of the poor. What should be common city assets become zero-sum games in which one (rich) man’s redevelopment plan spells another (poor) man’s loss of center-city housing; in which a wealthy woman’s riverside playground is housed in former manufacturing warehouses from which poor women’s sewing jobs have fled. Too often, city corruption is defined in ways that exempt white-collar criminality (bank redlining to enforce segregation, for example, or bundling and reselling mortgage debt to distant investors insulated from responsibility to borrowers), even as it highlights activities of the poor that, while illegal, might ease their plight, if only temporarily (like the numbers game).

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
by Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton
Published 15 Mar 1991

The dispute between India and Pakistan over the waters of the Indus River became more amenable to settlement when the World Bank entered the discussions; the parties were challenged to invent new irrigation projects, new storage dams, and other engineering works for the benefit of both nations, all to be funded with the assistance of the Bank. Look for mutual gain The third major block to creative problem-solving lies in the assumption of a fixed pie: the less for you, the more for me. Rarely if ever is this assumption true. First of all, both sides can always be worse off than they are now. Chess looks like a zero-sum game; if one loses, the other wins — until a dog trots by and knocks over the table, spills the beer, and leaves you both worse off than before. Even apart from a shared interest in averting joint loss, there almost always exists the possibility of joint gain. This may take the form of developing a mutually advantageous re-lationship, or of satisfying the interests of each side with a creative solution.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
Published 8 Aug 2011

For centuries it offered shelter for early modern science, a safe way to conduct their work without attracting the scorn or suspicion of the religious zealots. Human evolutionary biology over the past 150 years continued this tradition: debating core moral questions about ourselves in terms of natural sciences (in particular, evolutionary biology). Questions like: Are humans inherently selfish or altruistic? Is life fundamentally a competitive, zero-sum game, or an arena of cooperation? Are humans basically equal, or do we live in a naturally ordered hierarchy of superiors and inferiors? The modern version of the debate goes back to the time of the Social Darwinists. Its political implications were never subtle. Herbert Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” to describe the idea that only the best-adapted species would survive and reproduce, and then used it to justify the harsh nineteenth-century version of laissez-faire industrial capitalism.

The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets
by Alan Boss
Published 3 Feb 2009

December 9, 2005—NASA headquarters further delayed the launch of the Webb Telescope from 2014 to 2016. The extra costs involved in adding two more years of work on Webb used up all the cost savings gained as a result of the Webb descope exercise a few months earlier. The total cost of Webb was thus still $4.5 billion. Given the zero-sum game in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, it was clear that the funds needed for Webb would have to come from other NASA science missions. Although Webb could not see exoEarths, it would be able to see newly formed Jupiters orbiting nearby young stars, if any existed. February 6, 2006—Fritz Benedict submitted a paper to the Astrophysical Journal that combined Doppler data and astrometric measurements, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and by George Gatewood’s Allegheny Observatory telescope, of the nearby star Epsilon Eridani.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America
by Steven Johnson
Published 26 Dec 2008

The necessity of open information networks—like ones he cultivated with the Honest Whigs and the Lunar Society, and with the popular tone of his scientific publications—has become a defining creed of the Internet age. That is in part because the flow of information differs from the flow of energy in one crucial respect: there is a finite supply of energy, which means that tapping it is invariably a zero-sum game. (Burning Carboniferous fuel in steam engines during the eighteenth century leaves less in the ground for the twenty-first.) But the spread of information does not come with the same cost, particularly in the age of global networks. An idea that flows through a society does not grow less useful as it circulates; most of the time, the opposite occurs: the idea improves, as its circulation attracts the “attention of the Ingenious,” as Franklin put it.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Dec 2012

Fisher’s signal contribution was the concept of “principled negotiation,” which proposed that the aim of negotiating shouldn’t be to make the other side lose but, where possible, to help it win. This idea, which quickly became shorthanded as “win-win,” transformed business and legal education. Until then, many viewed negotiation as a zero-sum game, where parties vied for the largest share of a fixed pie. But Fisher’s work urged young business students and law students, and less-young people inside organizations, to reframe these encounters as positive-sum games, where one person’s victory didn’t depend on another’s defeat. If each party looks past the other party’s position to its actual interests and invents options for mutual gain, negotiations could end with both sides better off than when they began.

Demystifying Smart Cities
by Anders Lisdorf

For a summary of outcomes of the autonomous vehicle disaster see Table 5-2.Table 5-2Autonomous vehicle disaster scenarios Scenario Child Pedestrians Opposite Car AV 1 Dies Survive Survive Survive 2 Survives Die Survive Survive 3 Survives Survive Die Die How do we prepare the AI to make that decision? Now, the goals are not so clear as in a game of Jeopardy. This is not a zero-sum game where you either win or lose. Humans make moral judgments in situations like this and are aided by ethical values. But what are they? Is it more important not to hurt children at any price? Let's just say for the sake of argument this was the key value. The AI would then have to calculate how many children were on the sidewalk and in a given car on the opposite side of the road.

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb
by Dorie Clark
Published 14 Oct 2021

Leveraging for Your Relationships For most of us, relationships are extraordinarily important. Yet we’ve all heard stories about the high-powered executive who can’t seem to make time for his family, but professes that they’re the reason behind everything he does. What would it look like if work and family weren’t a zero-sum game, but instead represented a series of deliberate strategic choices? Phil Van Nostrand is a photographer in New York City, earning thousands to shoot weddings or events. But for years, he accepted a $500-a-day assignment to cover a “random JavaScript tech conference in San Francisco.” Why? He’s originally from Santa Barbara, and the annual conference paid for his cross-country flight.

Why Liberalism Failed
by Patrick J. Deneen
Published 9 Jan 2018

Because social status is largely a function of position, income, and geographic location, it is always comparative and insecure. While advancing liberalism assures that individuals are more free than ever from accidents of birth, race, gender, and location, today’s students are almost universally in the thrall of an economic zero-sum game. Accusations of careerism and a focus on résumé building are not the result of a failure of contemporary education but reflect the deepest lessons students have imbibed from the earliest age: that today’s society produces economic winners and losers, and that one’s educational credentials are almost the sole determinant of one’s eventual status.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Published 9 Oct 2017

After all, “if you are driving for Uber, your employer’s plan is to automate your job.” 40 But generic antitech backlash isn’t going to save us from impending disruption—unless we’re willing to put down our phones and stop web-enabling all our appliances. The only real way to hold tech accountable, and to rid it of its worst excesses, is to demand that it become accessible to everyday people—both in the way it designs its products, and in who can thrive in its offices. Because as long as tech is allowed to operate as a zero-sum game—a place where anything goes, as long as it leads to a big IPO and an eventual multibillion-dollar sale—companies like Uber will exist. Conversely, the more we remind tech companies that real people use their products—the more we demand to be taken seriously, and push to be represented fairly within their systems—the more chance we have that they’ll see their role for what it really is: one that profoundly affects lives, livelihoods, and communities.

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change
by Ronald Cohen
Published 1 Jul 2020

Tala had raised more than $105 million over three rounds of funding by April 2018,40 with PayPal joining the list of investors that October.41 On the day Tala announced its $65 million third round, Siroya was asked where she saw the company in five years’ time. She responded, ‘We’ll have proved that it’s possible to succeed by doing things differently – that mission and profit are not a zero-sum game, that you can be for both of these things and still win.’42 Fintech is undoubtedly a powerful way for impact entrepreneurs to improve lives. So is biotechnology, which is remastering very traditional fields, such as agriculture, to improve the livelihood of farmers and feed the world. Seeding Innovation to Feed the World With 7.5 billion mouths to feed and the Earth’s climate changing before our eyes, agriculture is arguably the sector on the planet that is capable of delivering the most impact.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
by Rachel Clarke
Published 26 Jan 2021

It is no coincidence that coronavirus irritates our airways. Every cough, every splutter, every sigh, every whispered word is an opportunity for the virus to propagate more widely. The more intimate our interactions with others, the greater the proximity of human flesh to flesh, the more effectively we generate a viral success story. In the zero-sum game of survival of the fittest, the number of human deaths is immaterial so long as the virus can always find new hosts in which to multiply before its predecessors expire. Right now, it has 7.8 billion of us to choose from, minus the 90,000 or so currently infected. Like many doctors in the UK I know, I’m now glued to coverage of northern Italy’s unfolding death toll as it rises day by day.

Things That Matter: Overcoming Distraction to Pursue a More Meaningful Life
by Joshua Becker
Published 19 Apr 2022

When the desire for money is present in our lives, we become almost different people, often engaging in behaviors we would otherwise avoid. The desire fuels competition against others. The love of money requires me to desire what you already possess. For me to gain more, you must part with yours. The world quickly becomes a zero-sum game dominated by jealousy and envy. The desire for money begins to dominate our time, our energy, our values, and our relationships. Too often, it limits our potential to bring good into the world, because we can never become greater than that which we most desire. When the acquisition of money becomes our greatest goal in life, we can never become greater than the balance in our bank account.

All the Devils Are Here
by Bethany McLean
Published 19 Oct 2010

But that also meant that as subprime mortgages continued to default—and those losses eventually began to erode the value of the CDOs—those losses were going to be greatly amplified because so many side bets had been made so quickly through the purchase of synthetic CDOs. The gains were amplified, too, because synthetic CDOs are a zero-sum game: someone has to lose and someone has to win. Even after all the damage had been done, some would make the argument that there was nothing wrong with this. In a free market, shouldn’t all participants be able to “express their views”—a euphemism for placing a bet—on the direction of mortgage-backed securities?

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In all the subsequent frenzy over who did what to whom in the synthetic CDO market, a series of deeper, more troubling questions tended to get overlooked. One was this: What, exactly, was the point of a synthetic CDO? It didn’t fund a home. It didn’t make the mortgage market any better. It was a zero-sum game in which the dice were mortgages. “Wall Street is friction,” said Mark Adelson, the former Moody’s analyst. “Every cent an investment bank earns is capital that doesn’t go to a business. With an initial public offering, you get it. But with derivatives, you can’t tie it back. You could argue that at least it’s not hurting things, and that was a compelling rationale for a long time.”

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William J. Bernstein
Published 5 May 2009

The debate between them and the free-traders supporting the EIC engaged the nation's most talented economic minds and found expression in that era's equivalent of the political blog, the pamphlet, which generally sold for a few pence per piece. Mercantilist theory was simplicity itself: a nation's wealth was measured by the amount of gold and silver it possessed. In other words, international commerce constituted a zero-sum game in which one nation's gain came only at the expense of another, and the only way for a country to grow rich was to gamer gold and silver from abroad by exporting more than it imported. In modern parlance, the route to wealth lay in a positive trade balance. This, too, was a grim tug-of-war, since every gold sovereign or piece of eight accrued by one nation had to come from a competitor.

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Three hundred years ago, as England debated the India trade, few detected the flaws in mercantilism.42 One observer, Roger Coke, noted that Holland, the world's wealthiest nation on a per capita basis, "imported everything," whereas impoverished Ireland exported far more than it imported .4 Another, Charles Davenant, cogently explained that the benefits of keeping a nation "more Cheaply supply'd" with foreign imports far outweighed the damage done to domestic employment. He perceptively argued that trade was not in fact a zero-sum game, "For all Trades have a Mutual Dependance upon one another, and one begets another, and the loss of one frequently loses half the rest." In his view, protectionist measures were "needless, unnatural, and can have no Effect conducive to the Publick Good"; further, they encouraged inefficient domestic industries with artificially high prices and threw good money after bad.'

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
by Annie Jacobsen
Published 14 Sep 2015

In 1926, when von Neumann was twenty-three years old, he wrote a paper called “Theory of Parlor Games.” The paper, which examined game playing from a mathematical point of view, contained a soon-to-be famous proof, called the minimax theorem. Von Neumann wrote that when two players are involved in a zero-sum game—a game in which one player’s losses equal the other player’s gains—each player will work to minimize his own maximum losses while at the same time working to maximize his minimum gains. During the war, von Neumann collaborated with fellow Princeton mathematician Oskar Morgenstern to explore this idea further.

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Acheson, a conservative, saw the situation very differently. “How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to ‘disarm by example?’” he asked. Von Neumann became interested in the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a means for examining strategic possibilities in the nuclear arms race. The Prisoner’s Dilemma was a non–zero sum game, meaning one person’s wins were not equal to another person’s gains. From von Neumann’s perspective, even though two rational people were involved—or, in the case of national security, two superpower nations—they were far less likely to cooperate to gain the best deal, and far more likely to take their chances on a better deal for themselves.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian
Published 5 Oct 2020

Returning to the well-worn starting position is simply boring compared to the atypical and unusual positions that arise in a long rally. The team was intrigued to see what might happen if such an agent was given the chance to play against a copy of itself. How would curiosity versus curiosity unfold in a zero-sum game? The answer: a non-zero-sum collaboration emerges, as both sides pursue the shared goal of moving away from the game’s well-trodden starting state. In other words: they rally and rally and never stop. “In fact,” the researchers write, “the game rallies eventually get so long that they break our Atari emulator.”

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A tiny sliver of research admits this possibility but assumes that the agent will “rationally” attempt to defend itself against such changes.23 And yet we undertake certain transformative experiences, on purpose, suspecting that we will be changed from them, sometimes without even being able to anticipate in what ways.24 (Parenthood comes to mind as one such example.) Traditional reinforcement learning also tends to presume that the agent is the only agent in the environment; even in a zero-sum game like chess or Go, the system is playing “the board” more than it is playing “the opponent,” and there is little allowance for the idea that the opponent may be changing and adapting to its own strategies. In a recent conversation I had with two reinforcement-learning researchers, we mused about putting most RL algorithms into the prisoner’s dilemma, where two co-conspirators must decide whether to “defect” by turning the other in or “cooperate” by staying silent.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

Plato wrote in The Republic that “any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.” The fight against the downsides of density requires a truce in that war. Such a truce should be possible, because city building is not a zero-sum game. In most cities, both poor and rich would benefit from more home building, from better schools, from more humane policing, and from widely available health care that provides a stronger defense against future pandemics. The impact of catastrophe is always mediated by preexisting social strength or weakness.

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The real fight is the city’s need to expand against the enemies of urban growth. At its heart, urbanism is about opportunity. Cities have made space and enabled economic miracles for white, Black, Mexican American, and Chinese immigrants. The ground-level view of the gentrification battle sees only the fixed set of current resources, but cities are anything but a zero-sum game. We can make our metropolitan areas more equitable and humane, but only if we allow them to transform themselves. We can make space for all, but only if we understand that our real enemies are the artificial limits on growth, not our neighbors who happen to have a different skin color. Background to Battle: The Making of Boyle Heights Racial and ethnic divisions loom so large in our cities both because urban density means that people with different heritages live cheek-by-jowl, and because urban history is replete with racial exclusion and discrimination.

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it
by Dom Nozzi
Published 15 Dec 2003

Can we return to putting the needs of our community before the demands of our cars? Forty years from now, will we be proud of where we live? Our love affair with cars is unsustainable for the environment, the economy, and quality of life in the twenty-first century. Car transportation is truly a zero-sum game. Nearly always, when we make it easier to drive a car, we make it harder to travel another way, and worsen our quality of life. Fortunately, the emerging paradigm as we enter the twenty-first century includes the freedom of transportation choice for all of us—including people who can drive a car, seniors, children, individuals with disabilities, and the poor.

The Other Israel: voices of refusal and dissent
by Tom Śegev , Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin
Published 15 Nov 2002

To add insult to injury, he wants to remove Yasser Arafat, the democratically elected leader and the symbol of the Palestinian revolution, and to replace him with a collaborationist regime that would meekly serve as a subcontractor charged with upholding Israeli security. What Sharon is unable or unwilling to comprehend is that security is not a zero-sum game and that it cannot be achieved by purely military means. The only hope of security for both communities lies in a return to the political track, something that this champion of violent solutions has always avoided like the plague. Consequently, Sharon's second war against the Palestinians, like his first, is doomed to failure from the start.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture
by Marvin Harris
Published 1 Dec 1974

One might as well believe that objectivity was the commanding lifestyle of Germany in 1932, that the Aryan beast cult of blond manhood, anathematization of the Semites, gypsies, and Slavs, worship of the fatherland, and the Wagnerian chanting, goose-stepping and Sieg-Heiling in front of der Führer all resulted from the atrophy of the “non-intellective capacities” and feelings of the German people. Ditto Stalinism with its Uncle Joe cult, genuflections before the corpse of Lenin, Kremlin intrigues, Siberian slave camps, and party-line dogmatism. Of course we have our Strangelove zero-sum-game specialists, would-be super-objectifiers who objectify human life by counting corpses and computerizing death. But the moral flaw of such technologists and their political handlers is a shortage of scientific objectivity about the causes of lifestyle differences, not a surplus. The moral collapse of Vietnam was scarcely caused by an overdose of objective consciousness about what we were doing.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return
by Mihir Desai
Published 22 May 2017

In offering advice to young people, Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, said, “Don’t make friends who are comfortable to be with. Make friends who will force you to lever yourself up.” Commitments to smart and demanding people keep us from doing stupid things—we gain from those commitments. Leverage is not a zero-sum game. In addition to allowing you to be more productive and raising your own standards, embedding yourself in meaningful relationships is simply good for you. George Vaillant, a research psychiatrist, helped conduct the longest longitudinal study of emotional and physical development by continuing the so-called Grant Study of Harvard undergraduates in the late 1930s.

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
by Lena Dunham
Published 28 Sep 2014

“How could you dismiss this opportunity to be a small part of a film that will be taught in colleges for years to come in exchange for the utter ephemera of a ‘TV Pilot.’ ” In quotes! He put it IN QUOTES! And I read the email again and again, shocked, jaw set with rage so that I couldn’t make a sound. And I imagined my own pain, my anger, magnified by fifty in the man who would send that email, the person who believes that life is a zero-sum game and girls are there to be your props, that anyone else’s artistry is a mere distraction from the Lord’s grand plan to promote your agenda. How painful that must be, how suffocating. And I decided then that I will never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won’t be threatened by the old, or by the new.

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again
by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi
Published 11 May 2014

Some of the decline in the economy during the heart of the financial crisis was a result of problems in the banking sector. But the bank-lending view has become so powerful that it has killed many efforts that could have helped mitigate the crushing household-debt burdens that drove the Great Recession. Policy makers have consistently viewed assistance to indebted households as a zero-sum game: helping home owners means hurting banks, and hurting banks would be the worst thing for the economy. Housing policy during the Obama administration was severely hampered by strong adherence to the banking view. Clea Benson at Bloomberg covered President Obama’s approach to housing and came to the conclusion that “while his [housing] plan was undermined in part by the weak U.S. economic recovery, it also lacked broad and aggressive measures.

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code
by Jeff Atwood
Published 3 Jul 2012

The price of a few monitors is negligible when measured against the labor cost of a programmer or information worker salary. Even if you achieve a meager two or three percent performance increase, it will have more than paid for itself. What does get a little frustrating is when people claim that one large monitor should be “enough for anyone.” This isn’t a zero-sum game. Where there is one large monitor, there could be two large monitors, or three. Sometimes, more is more. Coding Horror commenter lomaxx The biggest advantage I find from having multiple monitors is when I’m referencing data from the second monitor for use on my main monitor. You’d be surprised how often you do this sort of interaction between two windows and having the second monitor is invaluable.

I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50
by Annabelle Gurwitch
Published 6 Mar 2014

Let me put it in your chin—you need a bigger chin, like mine,” and before I could say, I don’t want more chin. I don’t like your chin! he had done it. I hated that extra chinnage, which did fade with time, but still. I used to wonder who would let someone experiment on their face and now I know—me. “Maintenance” is truly a misnomer because what no one tells you is that it’s a zero-sum game. You look the very best immediately after one of these treatments, while your face is slightly swollen. The swelling restores your face’s lost volume in a way that looks more natural than anything you can get on the market today. Once that goes away, the results, if noticeable at all, begin to fade, day by day, until very shortly afterward, sometimes weeks, you look exactly the same as you did the day you forked over an amount that an entire family in Turkmenistan could live on for a year.

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
by Garett Jones
Published 15 Feb 2015

But I want to push beyond the formal model to suggest that people with high average test scores are more likely to convert a game of conflict into a game of cooperation. It would be a tragedy—worse, it would be a case of money left on the table—if two players couldn’t find a way to redefine, to reimagine their conflict as a possibility for a win-win outcome. Two reasonably intelligent people getting divorced certainly face a zero-sum game when it comes to how they split up the retirement savings. And certainly, the divorcing spouses have little reason to tip their hands to each other about their bargaining strategy. But part of the power of memory, part of the power of being able to recall obscure facts, is the power to remember interests the couple still have in common: “Oh, there’s a day care right between our two houses,” “Here’s an investment company that doesn’t add on fees when we split our retirement plans in half,” “I read about a job online that might be a good fit for you.”

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
by Alex Kantrowitz
Published 6 Apr 2020

Snapchat’s users loved how Stories gave them a carefree way to post (in contrast with Facebook, where your posts would go to everyone and stick around forever), and the app’s usage exploded. Spiegel, who once spurned a $3 billion acquisition offer from Zuckerberg, was now hitting him where it hurt. In the zero-sum game of social media, where time spent on one platform is time not spent on another, Spiegel had the energy, the sharing, and was driving his company toward a hot IPO. As Snapchat took off, an eighteen-year-old developer named Michael Sayman joined Facebook. Sayman had built a game that caught Zuckerberg’s eye, and the company hired him as a full-time engineer in 2015.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
by Ian Bremmer
Published 12 May 2010

As Adam Smith, the system’s most famous critic, put it, mercantilism was based on “a popular folly of confusing wealth with money,” leading to the conclusion that any increase in the money supply, namely bullion, made everyone richer. Second, mercantilists assumed that the total volume of global wealth—and therefore of international trade—was fixed. They believed that the pie could not grow larger and that success meant securing the largest possible slice. Trade was practiced as a zero-sum game, and because one country could only gain at another’s expense, commercial relations were bound to spark conflict. These two assumptions led to a single dominant national objective: to accumulate precious metals through a positive balance of trade. The importance of maximizing exports while minimizing imports became an article of faith.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
Published 24 Sep 2019

Yet, if the community grew and prospered, the edge would expand outward. The shop owner would then find themselves with an investment now strategically located closer to the center, a more valuable situation. The little shop owner thus shared a common fate with other property owners in the city. It was not a zero-sum game, where one benefits only at the expense of others. I’m not suggesting they all lived in harmony, but they had a lot of selfish incentives for altruism. This makes the common walls of the buildings more understandable. The Pompeii fast-food structure shared a wall with its neighbor on each side.

Protecting Pollinators
by Jodi Helmer
Published 15 Nov 2019

The authors offered a firm directive, noting, “Honeybees may be necessary for crop pollination, but beekeeping is an agrarian activity that should not be confused with wildlife conservation.” Penn State’s Grozinger embraces a less hard-core stance on the issue, noting that while it’s currently popular to say that honeybees are destroying landscapes, she doesn’t think that the data back up that view. “I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game where you have honeybees in the landscape, and therefore the wild bees go down,” she says. Novice beekeepers might be making life harder for honeybees. As the “save the bees” message spreads, the number of new beekeepers has increased. In 2015, the Florida Department of Agriculture reported a record number of registered beekeepers in the state, with 3,856 beekeepers maintaining 460,000 new colonies (up from 150,000 hives in 2007).

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States
by Bernadette Hanlon
Published 18 Dec 2009

Thus, the idea of entering into regional arrangements that might threaten the ability to maximize the generation of local taxes is anathema. Similarly, local governments are not inclined to support proposals for such things as regional tax base sharing (mainly to assist ailing center cities) because nearly everyone sees them as a zero sum game in which the suburbs subsidize the central city.” Or, in this case, the newer outer suburbs subsidize the inner-ring suburbs. This makes it all the more difficult to proceed with a regional solution to the problem of decline among older suburban communities. What is clear is that older or first suburbs need additional resources from federal and state governments, since, on their own, it is difficult for them to guard against decline.

Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite
by Carne Ross
Published 25 Apr 2007

Only parties, elected in some way, can claim the fullest legitimacy to speak for people, a problem NGOs will always be challenged by. Global political parties may seem hopelessly utopian, but the idea is unavoidably logical. Only parties can legitimately claim to represent those who choose them, or pay their membership dues. Only a global politics can lift us above the zero-sum games of governments short-sightedly arbitrating their “interests” in international forums. This is not to advocate the immediate establishment of a world parliament. Institutions cannot simply be invented to solve a problem. They have to evolve, and become accepted as legitimate. The European Parliament has suffered from this very problem since its inception: founded as the élite’s answer to the problem of the “democratic deficit” of the European Community (as it was then known), it has struggled for popular acceptance, not helped by the gross extravagance of its procedures and members.

Life Will Be the Death of Me: ...And You Too!
by Chelsea Handler
Published 8 Apr 2019

“For jears, I watch all jour doggies in this house give jew all the love and attention anyone could want. They love their mama. Chunk never loved me the way he love jew. No matter how much we play, he never love me like he love jew. Tammy, okay, but she was not my baby. Bert is my baby. He love me, and I love Bert.” Then, in perfect English, she said, “Doggies are not a zero-sum game.” “Sounds like someone just got served,” Brandon said, as he made an overhead tennis-serve motion with the wrong hand. The bottom line was this: If Bert was too fat to get up the stairs and get in my bed to cuddle with me, then what was the point of having dogs to begin with? If Bert was in fact five, or eight, or any of the other ages suggested to me, then we didn’t have that long before the stairs would become his nemesis.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

See also early adopters cross-type learning, 15–16, 21–22, 211–230 Crowley, John, 123–124, 125–126, 139, 143, 212 Crusaders, 6–7, 88–117 archetype of, 247 blueprint for, 116–117 as Captain cobuilders, 169 charisma of, 108 as corporate builders, 96–97, 198–199 customer dynamic and, 101–102 decision making by, 166–168 as Driver cobuilders, 163–164 elevate and delegate strategies for, 110–115 expert strategy for, 223–225 as Explorer cobuilders, 165 followers of, 80 foundational expertise of, 214 gifts and gaps of, 107–110, 210 hiring and, 180–182 how they engage, 91–107 loyalty of, 181 Page and Brin, 18 polar complement of, 91 profile of, 89 scale dynamic and, 104–107 solution dynamic and, 93–97 sponsor dynamic and, 103–104 sponsor selection for, 196–199 team dynamic and, 97–100, 180–182 Cuban, Mark, 4, 193 culture, company Captains and, 7, 120, 124–125, 135–138, 183 Crusaders and, 112 Drivers and, 178 Explorers and, 69, 72, 75 recruiting team members and, 176 Currier, James, 103 customer dynamic Captains and, 129–131, 140 Crusaders and, 101–102, 113–115 Drivers and, 31, 39–41, 53–54 Explorers and, 70–72 customer segments Drivers and, 41 Personality-Based Clustering approach to, 30 profitability of, 109–110 scaling across, 10 Cutler, Elizabeth, 153–154 Daltran Media, 36 Dealer.com, 69, 71 decision making, 3, 233 Builder Type pairings and, 160–170 by Captains, 119, 121, 143, 168–170 cobuilders and, 157, 160–170 by Crusaders, 89, 166–168 by Drivers, 29, 162–164 by Explorers, 59, 164–166 Della Femina, Jerry, 77 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 104, 197 DiSC Profile, 13 Dixon, Tom, 36 Doctor On Demand, 44–45, 219 Dorsey, Jack, 15, 92–93 DoubleClick, 60 Dries, Chris, 140–141 Drivers, 4–5, 28–57 archetype of, 245 blueprint for, 56–57 as Captain cobuilders, 168–169 as corporate builders, 42–43, 191–193 as Crusader cobuilders, 166–167 customer dynamic and, 39–41 decision making by, 162–164 definition of success by, 37–38 elevate and delegate strategies for, 50–55 expert strategy for, 217–220 as Explorer cobuilders, 164–165 foundational expertise of, 213 gifts and gaps of, 47–50, 210 how they engage, 31–47 Jobs, Steve, 17 as master builders, 218–220 profile of, 29 recruiting and, 177–179 scale dynamic and, 44–47 solution dynamic and, 32–34 sponsor dynamic and, 41–43 sponsor selection for, 190–194 team dynamic and, 36–39, 177–179 zero-sum games and, 134 Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPSG), 39, 49 Dstillery, 63–64, 68 early adopters, 41, 50, 53, 70 Crusaders and, 95 Eastside College Preparatory School, 137 elevate and delegate strategies for Captains, 140–145 for Crusaders, 110–115 for Drivers, 50–55 for Explorers, 81–85 Emmelle, 33–34 empowering others Captains and, 120–121, 128–129, 138–139 Drivers and, 34, 47 Explorers and, 83–84 Endeavor, 104 Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder (Clifton and Badal), 240 entrepreneurship Crusaders and, 106 definitions of, 3, 189 Equinox, 154 Eventbrite, 155 executive coaches, 215, 221 expert builder strategy, 16, 213 Captains and, 225–227 Crusaders and, 223–225 Drivers and, 217–220 Explorers and, 220–223 Explorers, 5–6, 58–87 archetype of, 246 blueprint for, 86–87 as Captain cobuilders, 169 as corporate builders, 64–65, 75, 195–196 as Crusader cobuilders, 167 customer dynamic and, 70–72 decision making by, 164–166 as Driver cobuilders, 163 elevate and delegate strategies for, 81–85 expert strategy for, 220–223 foundational expertise of, 213 gifts and gaps of, 79–81, 210 hiring and, 179–180 how they engage, 61–79 as master builders, 221–223 polar complement of, 91 profile of, 59 scale dynamic and, 75–79 solution dynamic and, 61–65 sponsor dynamic and, 72–75 sponsor selection for, 194–196 team dynamic and, 65–70, 179–180 Zuckerberg, Mark, 18 Facebook, 18 Fairchild Semiconductor, 193 Fidelity, 20 financial support.

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order
by Bruno Maçães
Published 1 Feb 2019

The Belt and Road takes this notion on board by defending that China’s problems and challenges cannot be addressed in isolation but only in mutually beneficial relations with other countries. As Xi put it in his speech at the Boao Forum for Asia in 2015, “only through win-win cooperation can we make big and sustainable achievements that are beneficial to all. The old mindset of zero-sum game should give way to a new approach of win-win and all-win cooperation. The interests of others must be accommodated while pursuing one’s own interests, and common development must be promoted while seeking one’s own development.” It is a remarkable, even a stunning development in Chinese foreign policy.

Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War
by Micah Goodman
Published 17 Sep 2018

But there could be no greater humiliation for the Palestinians than to have Israeli jets flying above their heads on a daily basis.8 Yet again, both sides are right. The same steps that would allay the Israelis’ sense of fear would also exacerbate the Palestinians’ sense of humiliation. This is a zero-sum game between one nation’s national honor and another’s national security. As a result, any agreement that would satisfy Israel’s security needs would be perceived as one that perpetuated Israel’s control over the Palestinians and therefore humiliated them. Conversely, any agreement that would be acceptable to the Palestinians would be perceived as one that weakened Israel and exposed it to intolerable security threats.

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

Is it the human default that once we find a limitation – in this case, our own – we believe it must be eliminated and replaced? Is there simply no room for the weak? A matter of accepting that once a stronger villain arrives in town, the old (and weaker) one is replaced? If this is the case, then this kind of thinking will transform the discussion about the human-AI relationship into a zero-sum game. If one is better (and thus wins), then the other loses (and is eliminated). Where does the belief in this logic come from? To answer this question, it is worthwhile to look at the distinction that the famous French philosopher René Descartes made between mind and body.³⁴ The body allowed us to do physical work, but, with the industrial revolution taking place, we were able to replicate our physical strength by utilizing machines.

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity
by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods
Published 13 Jul 2020

People struggled against this new order and fought wars to overturn it for thousands of years. Even if rebellions succeeded, the same hierarchical order was likely to be reestablished under the rule of a new despot from another clan, party, tribe, religion, or ethnicity. Agriculturalists became stuck in a zero-sum game. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, some Western European societies found a way out of this cycle by forming representative social systems called constitutional democracies. In 1689, the English Bill of Rights limited the power of the king and gave Parliament free elections and freedom of speech.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

Instead of relying on Fidelity or Vanguard, investors could create an automated service on Ethereum to invest and pay out funds according to the terms of a smart contract. In Vitalik’s view, Ethereum was not just a new technology but a way to reallocate global power structures. “Ultimately power is a zero-sum game,” he told Wired magazine “And if you talk about empowering the little guy, as much as you want to couch it in flowery terminology that makes it sound fluffy and good, you are necessarily disempowering the big guy. And, personally, I say ‘Screw the big guy.’ They have enough money already.” This wasn’t just the stuff of computer nerd fantasies.

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak
by Rosie Wilby
Published 26 May 2021

She wonders whether the comedian’s invitation to others to laugh at them is a strange act of self-harm. Being laughed at is often hurtful. Is the invitation to laugh at one’s past failings a way of gaining social credit in the present, a way to recoup some success? ‘Look at how amazing I am now compared to that schmuck who got dumped’. Even so…isn’t the result a zero-sum game if the teller of the joke is also the butt of it? She may have a point. In Hannah Gadsby’s award-winning show Nanette, she proposes that she will give up the career that she has built out of self-deprecating humour. She asks what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins, and concludes that it is not humility but humiliation.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

Those models were developed through countless research hours by dozens of highly trained financial analysts hired by and paid for by your firm at a cost of millions of dollars. Revealing this information would allow your competitors to duplicate your business. Proprietary trading is effectively a zero‐sum game; your gains are someone else’s losses: so is this activity unethical? There’s no “rising tide raises all boats” here. It’s all “I win, you lose.” Finally, where does your “corporate responsibility” begin and end? Does our moral intuition have anything to say here at all? These examples show that our moral intuition about fairness simply isn’t fully adapted to the world of modern finance.

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The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis tells us that we can improve a market, a method, or an entire financial system, adapting it to our needs and the challenges of our environment. The same traits that make the financial system prone to the madness of mobs also make the financial system extremely effective in gathering and deploying the wisdom of crowds. Finance doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game if we don’t let it. We can do well by doing good, and if we all work together, we can do it now. I can be Harvey Lodish, and so can you. Figure 3.1. Two views of the human brain (left figures) and color-coded renditions of Brodmann’s areas. Source: Mark Dow. Research Assistant Brain Development Lab, University of Oregon.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

If the former, maximizing absolute levels of in-group well-being is the goal, and the levels of rewards to Them is irrelevant; if the latter, the goal is maximizing the gap between Us and Them. Both occur. Doing better rather than doing well makes sense in zero-sum games where, say, only one team can win, and where winning with scores of 1–0, 10–0, and 10–9 are equivalent. Moreover, for sectarian sports fans, there is similar mesolimbic dopamine activation when the home team wins or when a hated rival loses to a third party.*17 This is schadenfreude, gloating, where their pain is your gain. It’s problematic when non–zero sum games are viewed as zero-sum (winner-take-all).18 It’s not a great mind-set to think you’ve won World War III if afterward Us have two mud huts and three fire sticks and They have only one of each.* A horrific version of this thinking occurred late during World War I, when the Allies knew they had more resources (i.e., soldiers) than Germany.

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O., 364, 383–84 Wilson, James Q., 95 Wingfield, John, 105 winning, 102, 103, 105 witchcraft, 583–84, 606–8 Woodward, James, 506–8 Worchel, Stephen, 628 word definitions, 15–16, 18, 20 World War I, 394–95, 414, 619–21, 662–68, 670 Christmas truce in, 410, 663–65, 663, 667 Live and Let Live truces in, 665–67 propaganda posters in, 667 World War II, 202, 308, 404, 410, 413, 618, 619, 645–47 Japanese in, 413, 640, 653–55, 668, 669 Wrangham, Richard, 314, 316–17 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 285 Wynn, Karen, 484 Wynne-Edwards, V. C., 332 Yanomamö, 311–14, 316, 319 Yanomamo: The Fierce People (Chagnon), 312 Young, Larry, 110, 526 zero-sum games, 394–95 Zhong, Chen-Bo, 564 Zimbardo, Philip, 461, 463–68, 475 Zulus, 310, 310 Robert M. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. He is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
by Paul Collier
Published 26 Apr 2007

But longer-term investment is likely to be beneficial all around. Workers in developing countries get jobs and increased wages, and the firms that move capital to developing countries get higher returns on it. Such capital movements, like trade, normally generate mutual gains. Since political contests are usually presented as zero-sum games—your gain is my loss—the people who are most politically engaged have the hardest time believing in mutual gains. Hence, perhaps, the exaggerated suspicions of globalization. But what about the bottom billion? Again, I think that the effect of globalization—this time through capital flows—is different.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

Were computer spending to return to early-1990s averages, much of the miracle, then, would eventually disappear. Gordon (2000) speculates that the concentrated productivity gains came at the expense of firms that didn't make the investments: [CJomputers are used extensively to provide information aimed at taking customers, profits, or capital gains away from other companies.This is a zero-sum game involving redistribution of wealth rather than the increase of wealth, yet each individual firm has a strong incentive to make computer investments that, if they do not snatch wealth away from someone else,at least act as a defensive blockade against a hostile attack.... There is a "keeping up with the Joneses" aspect of hardware and software purchase motivated by competition, employee satisfaction, and employee recruitment.

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse
by Mohamed A. El-Erian
Published 26 Jan 2016

And, until now, because it is a relatively closed economy where trade accounts for a rather small (albeit growing) share of GDP, the United States has been the only major economy willing to see its currency appreciate significantly, and able to afford a transfer of growth impetus to other countries. But even here there is a limit, especially as companies find it harder to compete. Given that this currency approach is (under most conditions) a zero-sum game—indeed, some have called it a stealth currency war—and given the limited successes that the advanced world has had (individually and collectively) in engineering an economic “liftoff,” adjustment and reform fatigue has tended to set in. This is the case for parts of the Eurozone and among certain segments of Japanese society and in the emerging world.

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy
by David A. Mindell
Published 12 Oct 2015

What’s more, the costs of robotic vehicles ranged from a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars, so a new Alvin was going to cost the equivalent of forty to a hundred new vehicles. You could cover a lot of ocean with that many robots. But that math only makes any sense if vehicle funding is a zero-sum game. If Alvin could secure funding from Congress at levels that no other vehicle could, then of course you’d build a new one—why turn down available funds? Whereas if the new Alvin funding would take away from other funding, then there was a serious debate to be had. But of course, this was a question about Washington science policy, not about technical capability.

Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading
by Joel Hasbrouck
Published 4 Jan 2007

It is also noteworthy that the implementation shortfall is defined at the level of the portfolio rather than the individual security. The total volatility will then reflect correlation across securities in the outcomes of limit order strategies. Over both sides of the trade, and of course in the aggregate, execution costs are a zero-sum game as long as everyone uses the same benchmark π0 . TRADING COSTS: RETROSPECTIVE AND COMPARATIVE Opportunity costs, on the other hand, are measured relative to desired positions. There is no mechanism to ensure that unconsummated demand equals unconsummated supply. Infeasibility of aggregate desired positions can easily lead to misleading estimates of aggregate implementation shortfalls.

Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success
by Greg Nudelman and Pabini Gabriel-Petit
Published 8 May 2011

Starting from zero forces your team to address the most difficult design questions up front and honestly assess your engineering budget and capabilities. More important, your team can define the entire search user interface design problem more precisely—in a compelling and possibly even original way. No Search Results Strategy: Not a Zero-Sum Game No simple set of rules exist that guarantees a successful implementation of a no search results page. However, the following four broad design principles provide a useful starting point: 1. Don’t be afraid to say I did not understand. Clearly indicate there are no search results, so your customer can recover. 2.

Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good
by Kevin Smith
Published 20 Mar 2012

Please pay attention very carefully, because this is the truest thing a stranger will ever say to you: In the face of such hopelessness as our eventual, unavoidable death, there is little sense in not at least trying to accomplish all of your wildest dreams in life. Lemme include a strong exception: If your wildest dreams are to hunt humans or kill children, I’m not talking to you. Please draw no hidden, sociopathic meaning from my words. Life is fragile and painful enough, so don’t hurt people, asshole. Life is also, as George Carlin taught us, a zero-sum game. We all lose in the end. We all die screaming. If that’s the case, we might as well make for ourselves a paradise in this world. Make yourself happy and comfortable as often as you can, because sooner or later, the infinite hands you a bill for all these goods and services. What follows is some tough shit.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
by Carl Sagan
Published 11 May 1998

We're used to playing games in which somebody wins and somebody loses. Every point made by our opponent puts us that much further behind. "Win-lose" games seem natural, and many people are hard-pressed to think of a game that isn't win-lose. In win-lose games, the losses just balance the wins. That's why they're called "zero-sum" games. There's no ambiguity about your opponent's intentions: Within the rules of the game, he will do anything he can to defeat you. Many children are aghast the first time they really come face to face with the "lose" side of win-lose games. On the verge of bankruptcy in Monopoly, they plead for special dispensation (forgoing rents, for example), and when this is not forthcoming may, in tears, denounce the game as heartless and unfeeling— which of course it is.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Jan 2016

As long as you don’t ignore the more important activities, it seems like it can’t hurt to also support some of the less important alternatives. This argument, however, misses the key point that all activities, regardless of their importance, consume your same limited store of time and attention. If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you’re taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It’s a zero-sum game. And because your time returns substantially more rewards when invested in high-impact activities than when invested in low-impact activities, the more of it you shift to the latter, the lower your overall benefit. The business world understands this math. This is why it’s not uncommon to see a company fire unproductive clients.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

Under Adam Smith's model of natural liberty, wealth creation was 2. This passage in the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations is remarkably similar to the theme developed by Leonard Read in his classic essay, "I, Pencil," which describes how a simple product like the pencil involved production processes from around the world (Read 1999 [1958]). no longer a zero-sum game. No longer was there a conflict of interests, but a harmony of interests. According to Jouvenel, this came as an "enormous innovation" that greatly surprised European reformers. "The great new idea is that it is possible to enrich all the members of society, collectively and individually, by gradual progress in the organization of labor" (Jouvenel 1999,102).

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich
by Ndongo Sylla
Published 21 Jan 2014

Quite to the contrary, Smith was perceived by his contemporaries as the inventor of a new system that was superior to mercantilism and whose originality was based on the principle of the division of labour in which labour is the only source of value. Mercantilism is generally described as a doctrine that considers trade as a zero sum game, the objective being to gather the maximum gold possible thanks to trade surpluses. From a normative point of view, this vision was problematic for two reasons at least: on the one hand, it represented an argument against free trade and, on the other, it implied protectionist leanings that often led to wars and threatened the international order.

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales From Neurosurgery
by Frank Vertosick
Published 1 Jan 1996

A tragic death, yes, but aren’t they all? When would the city declare a Sarah Clarke day? Heart and liver transplants are indeed heroic affairs, requiring consummate skill to perform and extraordinary fortitude to undergo. But when viewed from a national health-care perspective, such transplants equal zero-sum games: a life saved is a life lost. Our city coaxed people into signing donor cards, although no one really wants to think about ending up young, healthy, and brain dead. Transplant programs survive on a constant diet of good-looking cadavers—people in the prime of their lives with brains extinguished by senseless catastrophe.

Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone
by Mark Goulston M. D. and Keith Ferrazzi
Published 31 Aug 2009

Then work with the person to make that solution a reality. 14 THE EMPATHY JOLT Benefit: Transition a person from resisting to “willing to do” in a single step, by changing the dynamics of a relationship. Great anger is more destructive than the sword. —INDIAN PROVERB Early in my career, I grew tired of listening to coworkers, couples, and family members who refused to listen to each other. I hated the “he said/she said” wars. I hated the zero-sum games. In these infantile debates, the best I could achieve was a temporary truce. More often, I felt like I was putting a temporary bandage on a gaping, hemorrhaging wound. I had a name for the culprits in these situations: “ignorant blamers.” These were the people who treated communication as a blood sport, ranting relentlessly about another person’s failings without giving a second’s thought to how the attacked party felt.

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
by Paul Collier
Published 9 Feb 2010

That does not make them right, but it does make it possible to know approximately how much confidence can be placed in them. In part, that comes with the statistics, but it also comes because my work is produced within the modern academic community. The modern academic community is to an idealized community what The Simpsons is to an idealized family. Essentially, academics fight a zero-sum game over reputation in which the fast route to success is to demolish some prominent piece of work. You can rest assured that droves of academics on the make are hacking away at the propositions in this book. And, of course, being scared to death of them, I have done my best to protect myself by eliminating the errors.

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy
by Dr. Jim Taylor
Published 9 Sep 2008

But as Kevin Phillips points out in Wealth and Democracy, massive inequality has been a harbinger of significant but more gradual declines among each of the world’s most dominant powers since the Renaissance: Spain in the early 1500s, Holland in the early 1600s, and the British Empire of the 1800s. The future of any plutonomy, along with its social and political implications, depends on a number of factors. First, while the rich have gotten richer, has everybody else gotten richer as well? At the extremes, two scenarios suggest themselves. First, if the economy approximates a zero-sum game, in which the gains of the elite come at the expense of the vast majority, then resentment and class warfare would be more likely. On the other hand, perhaps a rising tide lifts all boats (a phrase John F. Kennedy popularized in responding to criticism that his tax cuts would mainly benefit the wealthy), and the gains of the wealthy elite are symptoms of overall economic growth that results in broad-based gains among all elements of the population.

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work
by Scott Berkun
Published 9 Sep 2013

They're not in the stressful limbo of abstraction that middle managers and consultants live in. Instead there's little posturing or showing off. People who know how to build things don't worry about turf. They know they can always make more. It's often people whose jobs are abstractions that see a company as a zero-sum game where they have to fight and defend what's theirs to stay alive or get promoted. Most discussions at Automattic were about how to build, design, or fix some specific tangible thing. That pragmatism changes the nature of how people communicate. There were few turf battles, approval seekings, or the grandstanding that dominate many miserable e-mail threads.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
by Winifred Gallagher
Published 9 Mar 2009

In a still-mysterious process, the activity level of many nerve cells that were depicting the blue jay changes in a way that both suppresses it and other probable losers, like robins and doves, and enhances possible winners, such as wood-peckers and birds with black-and-white mottling, red spots, or lemony wings. Thus stacked, the battle for your focus ensues, ending when you locate your target as if it were spotlighted amid its horde of rivals. In this “zero-sum game,” says Yantis, the sapsucker’s winnings equal the jay’s losses: “Your neuron populations can represent pretty much anything, but not everything at once. You have to choose—or they do.” The big lesson from this little experiment is that depending on how the competition for your attention is biased, whether by you or your neurons, you can have very different experiences of the same scene.

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment
by Guy Spier
Published 8 Sep 2014

This is the extraordinarily powerful effect of compounding goodwill by being a giver, not a taker. And as he has taught me, the paradox is that you end up receiving infinitely more in life by giving than by taking. There’s a real irony here: in focusing on helping others, you end up helping yourself too. For some people, this is not easy to understand. They act instead as if life were a zero sum game, in which the person who gives something away is the poorer for it. Buffett, of course, understands this perfectly, thanks in no small part to the influence and example of his late wife, Susan, who was the kindest and most giving of people. After visiting her in hospital, he told a class at Georgia Tech, “When you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually love you.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal , Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb
Published 16 Apr 2018

“In June, the government of Tianjin, an eastern city near Beijing, said it planned to set up a $5 billion fund to support the AI industry. It also set up an ‘intelligence industry zone’ that will sit on more than 20 square kilometers of land.”16 Meanwhile, the US government seems to be spending less on science under the current Trump administration.17 Research is not a zero-sum game. More innovation worldwide is good for everyone, whether the innovation occurs in China, the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, or Japan. For decades, the US Congress worried that American leadership in innovation was under threat. In 1999, Michigan 13th District Representative Lynn Rivers (a Democrat) asked economist Scott Stern what the American government should do to address the increases in R&D spending by Japan, Germany, and others.

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
by Ken Kocienda
Published 3 Sep 2018

Stallman railed against companies like Microsoft and Apple, which sold software for money, but kept the source code, the software instructions written by programmers, as a proprietary trade secret. In Stallman’s idiosyncratic belief system, mixing computer code and the profit motive formed a toxic brew whose ill effects compelled companies to hoard the intellectual effort required to write programs and turned software development into a zero-sum game that impeded the advance of technology to the detriment of the human race. If you’re not a programmer, free software might echo with sixties-style hippie idealism. Yet I am a programmer, and for me, free software is more like the best candy store ever. If I picture myself as an entrepreneur with a dream of a new photo-sharing app, or a computer scientist researching artificial intelligence algorithms, or a system administrator trying to improve the utilization of the computers in my data center, I know I could go out on the internet and find existing code I could tailor for my own purpose.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day
by Craig Lambert
Published 30 Apr 2015

Chances to talk—for example, with staff in supermarkets who give away free samples of a new product—enhance the shopping experience and help draw shoppers back to the store in preference to competitors. Sociability can build goodwill toward the merchant. Retailers in general strive to get customers into their stores, and creative ways of recapturing the social dimensions of food gathering may help do this. Second, work in the grocery store is, to some degree, a zero-sum game: Either staff do it or customers do it. The earlier counter-and-shelf system was highly labor-intensive, as staff handed each item to the customers. Transferring this job to the shoppers meant designing a market that makes it clear where things are, and what they are. Supermarkets had to cultivate an informed shopper.

Automating Inequality
by Virginia Eubanks

The movement manufactures and circulates misleading stories about the poor: that they are an undeserving, fraudulent, dependent, and immoral minority. Conservative critics of the welfare state continue to run a very effective propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the working class and the poor must battle each other in a zero-sum game over limited resources. More quietly, program administrators and data scientists push high-tech tools that promise to help more people, more humanely, while promoting efficiency, identifying fraud, and containing costs. The digital poorhouse is framed as a way to rationalize and streamline benefits, but the real goal is what it has always been: to profile, police, and punish the poor. 2 AUTOMATING ELIGIBILITY IN THE HEARTLAND A little white donkey is chewing on a fencepost where we turn toward the Stipes house on a narrow utility road paralleling the train tracks in Tipton, Indiana.

Antisemitism: Here and Now
by Deborah E. Lipstadt
Published 29 Jan 2019

David Irving tried to use the law to silence me when he sued me for libel in the British courts. Antisemitism must be fought, but that fight must be strategic. Many of the more militant off-campus advocacy groups that have taken up this fight against “offensive” speech call for the defeat of the “other side” and insist that there be no exchange of ideas with them. For them it’s a zero-sum game. There are, of course, groups with whom an exchange of ideas is impossible. (I would include in this category deniers, who, as we demonstrated in court, are liars and falsifiers of history.) But it’s in the free exchange of ideas that extremists are revealed to be what they are. And it’s in the free exchange of ideas that the truth is brought to light and prejudice and intolerance are revealed for what they are.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 14 Jun 2018

The problem, said Gabriel, was that Europe and the west had no coherent ideas, no plans, no response and, seemingly, no ideas. ‘What we can blame ourselves for,’ he said, ‘is the fact that we, as the “west”, do not have our own strategy for finding a new balance between worldwide interests, one that is based on conciliation and common added value and not on the zero-sum game that is the unilateral pursuit of interests.’50 Gabriel’s successor as foreign minister, Heiko Maas, has tried to find a way to articulate the dangers of isolationism. He called for countries like Germany that ‘are too small to be able to call the shots on their own on the global stage’, to find ways to work together In a speech in Tokyo in July 2018, he warned of the consequences of President Trump’s willingness to use ‘280-character tweets’ to undermine ‘alliances that have developed over decades’.

The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 30 Apr 2018

The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious. The elephant will pursue its evolutionary goals even when greater happiness can be found elsewhere. If everyone is chasing the same limited amount of prestige, then all are stuck in a zero-sum game, an eternal arms race, a world in which rising wealth does not bring rising happiness. I confess that, after I won my big award, I got some joy from the improvement in my prestige; and, I won’t lie to you, I still do. But my elephant kept gazing up the social ladder, not down; it quickly took on board my success, recalibrating; it demanded more achievement.

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
by Jenny Blake
Published 14 Jul 2016

At the same time, there is a danger in some self-help teachings (à la The Secret) that imply merely thinking positive thoughts is enough to manifest a parking spot or a red Ferrari. Going all in on hope, without taking practical steps in tandem, will not pay the bills. Get crystal clear on how much money you need to live, your income sources, and your emergency plan. At the same time, cultivate an abundance mindset. Life is not a zero-sum game; there is enough opportunity out there for each of us to thrive and be successful. For example, if you are a website designer, even though there are thousands of designers in the world, including inexpensive options for people looking to outsource overseas, you can still differentiate yourself by the quality of your work and find ideal clients who are looking for the premium services you offer.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency
by Roger L. Martin
Published 28 Sep 2020

Regardless of where lessees were located within the facility, their servers would be connected to the NYSE servers with cables of equal length. There would be no arms race within their facility.14 Of course, the arms race will certainly continue elsewhere, and the solution does no favors to traders who are not engaged in high-frequency trading but who simply wish to transact trades on behalf of clients. Since trading stocks is a zero-sum game, whatever extra the high-frequency traders make with their techniques comes out of the pockets of normal traders, including pension funds and traditional money managers. This example illustrates several points about gaming the market and its effects. To begin with, it shows how quick players in the financial markets are at exploiting changes in the rules, regulations, and infrastructures surrounding the markets.

Trading in the Zone: Master the Market With Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude
by Mark J. Douglas
Published 1 Apr 2000

If the market is a group of people interacting to extract money from one another, then what is the market’s responsibility to the individual trader? It has no responsibility other than to follow the rules it has established to facilitate this activity. The point is, if you have ever found yourself blaming the market or feeling betrayed, then you have not given enough consideration to the implications of what it means to play a zero-sum game. Any degree of blaming means you have not accepted the reality that the market owes you nothing, regardless of what you want or think or how much effort you put into your trading. In the market, typical social values of exchange do not come into play. If you don’t understand this and find a way to reconcile the differences between the social norms you grew up with and the way the market works, you will continue to project your hopes, dreams, and desires onto the market believing it’s going to do something for you.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster
Published 3 May 2021

In March they owned $4.5 billion in Microsoft shares, $4.4 billion in Apple, $3.2 billion in Amazon, $2.7 billion in Google, and $1.6 billion in Facebook. I’m talking huge fucking size.” “Wow.” The Rabbi wants the last word on this one. “Tough to trust anyone. And in the game of floating paper currencies, it’s all a zero-sum game. People win and people lose.” “Yeah,” Elias says as he reaches for his beer. “I know a lot of people who lost their jobs in that one.” “Yeap,” says the Rabbi, as he takes a bite out of a Scotch egg. “These are the same central bank ass-holes that you’re now trusting with your futures.” It’s starting to get late.

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story
by Rachel Clarke
Published 14 Sep 2017

In one of my recent jobs, in 2016, I would arrive every morning on my ward to greet the most senior nurse, the ward sister, as she grappled with how she would manage with all the nurses missing from that day’s rota. She would weigh up whether she would be forced to close beds to patients or whether, with superhuman effort, her depleted band of nurses could manage to keep the whole ward open. In other words, in this zero-sum game, would it be patients or nurses who would suffer more today? Once, to my shock, this tough, uncomplaining, seemingly imperturbable colossus – the absolute heart and soul of our ward – broke down and started to cry. There is only so much fudging and firefighting even the most resilient of professionals can take.

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win
by Sachin Khajuria
Published 13 Jun 2022

Or they might stop valuable assets from being taken out of the package of security that lenders have in case things go wrong, which would mean they cannot be taken over by creditors. Or they might be restrictive when it comes to paying out dividends to the private equity fund. Most likely, it will be a combination of such protections in some form that creditors would look for. It’s a zero-sum game: The weaker the creditor protections are, the stronger the position of the Firm on behalf of its investors in the private equity fund. It’s in these investors’ interest for the Firm to negotiate this way, because if something were to go wrong with the deal, it is in their interest to be in the best position possible vis-à-vis creditors.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

“It’s not like most people get up and say, ‘Hey, I wish I could go work for a company.’ I mean, they do it because they have to.” Alphabet’s goal was to be different, to take on big problems. “We have to be more ambitious, we have to do things that matter to people, we’ve got to do less things that are zero-sum games, and more things that cause a lot of benefit.” In short, companies needed a higher purpose. Whether Google has achieved that goal is open to debate, but the mindset of its founders clearly reflected a generational change. The Vatican meeting came just one year after the San Francisco event where Page spoke, and in the weeks that followed it, many of the CEOs who had attended urged Fortune to keep that important conversation going.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

Transport providers can achieve sustainable momentum if everyone in their organization understands that better diversity means better decisions, and better decisions translate to better outcomes – not just for the team and not just for the organization, but for the millions of people who use their services. This is not a zero-sum game in which one group loses and another group wins. The evidence shows that the process of making improvements to diversity and inclusion requires high-­performing teams, so how might we help people take action? Group dynamics Committees control decision making out of necessity. Transport involves tasks and projects that are far too large to be completed by one person, so people must come together, typically with a range of skills, objectives and levels of seniority in a hierarchy.

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 4 Sep 2023

Those who believe that white people take up too much “space” in the discourse should, indeed, stop taking up such space by shutting up. But the problem there is that they have conceived of this bizarre and unhelpful conception of taking up space in the first place. The idea of taking up space implies a zero-sum game between races, genders, and similar, precisely the kind of political thinking that suggests that the only way for one identity group to flourish is for another not to. But as I have argued in this book, zero-sum racial (or gender, et cetera) thinking is the enemy of progressive politics. White people make up 70 percent of the electorate; men half of it.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

While in the short run this may disadvantage the inhabitants of well-off cities who end up donating their tax contributions to struggling places, helping such places rise to their potential will benefit everyone in the long run through a more productive national economy. Supporting others to thrive is not a zero-sum game. Equally, it is important to ensure that redistributed resources are used wisely. As mentioned earlier, trade-offs are going to be required in a knowledge economy in which the scale of a city matters for competitiveness. Unfortunately, national funds are often allocated across local districts in a seemingly arbitrary fashion based on who has the most political leverage at any given point in time.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

Handing me a card with Reagan’s talking points after one White House meeting, the Senator noted that it contained the Administration’s position, but most of the meeting was spent swapping stories, he said. Reagan’s unfocused intellect has dimmed his luster a bit, as noted by President George W. Bush’s speechwriter David Frum: “The most dangerous legacy Reagan bequeathed his party was his legacy of cheerful indifference to detail.”47 Yet detail is vital in the zero-sum game of economics. Reagan’s failures are significant, but so are his successes. Ronald Reagan was an admired president, a genuine American success story who adroitly maximized his skill set to become leader of the Free World. He indexed income tax rates, which ceased drawing the middle class into higher and higher brackets.

…

Their conviction that government cannot deliver value is compounded by the reality in their daily lives of economic stagnation. Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman draws from history to argue that periods of economic malaise like today can induce deep social fragmentation that reduces the inclination of voters to compromise. Politics becomes in the eyes of many voters a zero-sum game: “The unwillingness to entertain compromise with one’s political opponents on the central issues of the day is a phenomenon all too familiar in times when participants in a democratic society lose the sense that society is delivering any material improvement in their lives.”113 Australian-style wage determination and codeterminism carry the promise of side-stepping the Friedman conundrum because evidence is persuasive that they can enable virtually all to gain.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 1 Jan 2009

Snobbery, says Epstein, is ‘sitting in your BMW 740i and feeling quietly, assuredly better than the poor vulgarian . . . who pulls up next to you at the stoplight in his garish Cadillac. It is the calm pleasure with which you greet the news that the son of the woman you have just been introduced to is majoring in photojournalism at Arizona State University while your own daughter is studying art history at Harvard . . .’ But snobbishness and taste turn out to be a zero-sum game. Epstein goes on to point out that another day, at another stoplight, a Bentley will pull up next to your pathetic BMW, and you may be introduced to a woman whose son is studying classics at Oxford. The ways in which class and taste and snobbery work to constrain people’s opportunities and wellbeing are, in reality, painful and pervasive.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)
by Tim Marshall
Published 10 Oct 2016

Such incidents are likely to occur more frequently as the Arctic opens up, but they will remain difficult to manage. Perhaps the Arctic will turn out to be just another battleground for the nation states—after all, wars are started by fear of the other as well as by greed; but the Arctic is different, and so perhaps how it is dealt with will be different. Our history has shown us the rapacious way of the zero-sum game. Arguably, a belief in partial geographic determinism, coupled with human nature, made it difficult for it to have been any other way. However, there are examples of how technology has helped us break out from the prison of geography, that technology was made by us, and, in our newly globalized world, can be used to give us an opportunity in the Arctic.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter
Published 9 Jan 2007

When it comes to creating long-term positive change in ourselves, we have one gun, one bullet. You can’t hit more than one target with that ammunition. P.S. There’s a bonus to ignoring benchmarks. People commonly fear that if they get better at X they’ll get worse at Y—as if improvement is a zero-sum game. Not true. Statistically, if you get better at X, it helps everything else get better, too. I have 20,000 feedback reports confirming this. If you’re a bad listener who learns to listen more, then you are perceived as treating people with more respect. In deferring to their views, you probably hear their ideas better.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
by Jeff Speck
Published 13 Nov 2012

There will of course be exceptions, but this situation will continue for some time, until enough people have moved back downtown that the workplace follows them there, just as it followed them to the suburbs in the sixties. For this reason, the best strategy for attracting business to your city is no longer the conventional zero-sum game of luring corporations away from other places with tax breaks, land deals, and other door prizes. Too many cities still think that economic development can occur in a vacuum of golf and giveaways, ignoring the fact that such victories are increasingly rare and don’t always last. After all, the corporation that dumps Philly for Indy thanks to a 5 percent tax cut will happily run off to Cincy for 7.5—and perhaps to Tijuana soon thereafter.

Bureaucracy
by David Graeber
Published 3 Feb 2015

Some have called this the notion of “top-down” play, a concept that seems to be most explicitly developed in Indian theology, where the cosmos itself is essentially the play of the divine forces.161 But as Brian Sutton-Smith notes in his book The Ambiguities of Play, this was the dominant view throughout the ancient world, where human beings were the playthings of destiny and fate; the exemplary human game, in such a universe, is gambling, where we willingly submit ourselves to the random whims of the gods.162 In such a universe, freedom really is a zero-sum game. The freedom of gods or kings is the measure of human slavery. It shouldn’t be hard to see where all this is going. Modern states are based on a principle of popular sovereignty. Ultimately, the divine power of kings is in the hands of an entity called “the people.” In practice, though, it’s increasingly unclear what popular sovereignty in that sense is even supposed to mean.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

It turns out that information that's freed up and accessible by all has an equal and opposite impact on the physical world. Information becomes objects. Information changes the shape of the physical world. Information changes the social and physical world and inevitably the economic structure. In many ways, it's the opposite of what business had been about up until this point. Business was a zero sum game of producers and consumers: an ‘us' and ‘them'; a server-and-receiver structure. But most of all, it was a definitive power structure where the people who already had wealth and access had much of the economic power. And I know what you're about to say: ‘But what about the 1 per cent, the ever-increasing wealth of the wealthiest few?'

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012

“What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent?” she wonders. “The Internet is more than old wine in new bottles; now we can always be elsewhere.” We feel the consequences of this every day—the disconnection that comes as a consequence of connections, as if in a zero-sum game. And yet that isn’t the only truth about the network—especially not in Silicon Valley. Undergirding our ability to be everywhere is a more permanent thicket of connections, both social and technical. We can only talk about being connected as a state of mind, because we take the physical connections that allow it as a given.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

He said the best way to think about the Google-Samsung relationship is to think about how Microsoft and Intel worked together to dominate the PC industry: they didn’t always say nice things about each other and sometimes they competed, but they mostly worked together because they both knew that was the best way to make the most money. “Samsung is a very close partner and we owe a lot of the success of Android to what they have done. But it’s also fair to say that Samsung has been hugely successful in mobile because of Android. We see a path where we can be successful and so can Samsung. We don’t see it as a zero-sum game.” The response was friendly but not conciliatory. It also happens to be truthful. Samsung is competing with Google. Yet, as Pichai announced the month before, the two companies are also finding new ways to partner. Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, can now be purchased two ways—with or without Samsung’s Android software enhancements.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Marc Andreessen has pointed out that the robots-will-take-our-jobs argument first took place in 1964, relying on the exact same terminology and engendering the same fears we’re seeing in the press today. In a recent discussion with Salim, noted economist John Mauldin said he stands with Andreessen in not believing in a zero sum game. Instead, he holds that the economy will simply expand to include new activities that could never have been imagined before. (That said, Mauldin also believes there are two opposing tensions at play in the bigger economics picture, at least in the short term: governments making unsustainable promises regarding pensions, healthcare, etc., and increasing productivity as a result of technology.)

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

If you are fifty and spent twenty-five years as an expert and have just been replaced by a stupid robot and some computer program offers to retrain you for a job at half your prior salary, it is pretty easy to become both cynical and disillusioned. Large numbers of parents are concerned about the economic futures of their children. When people see change as a zero-sum game that they cannot win, they resist it and attempt to preserve the past. If we are going to adapt well to the Autonomous Revolution, we are going to have to confront this issue head on. The second issue is that things are happening fast. Therefore, we need to create new rules to accompany the new forms as quickly as possible.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

Even if we accept that skills requirement has risen so much with the rise of the knowledge economy that the 40-plus per cent enrolment rate that Switzerland now has is the minimum (which I seriously doubt), this still means that at least half of university education in countries such as the US, Korea and Finland is ‘wasted’ in the essentially zero-sum game of sorting. The higher education system in these countries has become like a theatre in which some people decided to stand to get a better view, prompting others behind them to stand. Once enough people stand, everyone has to stand, which means that no one is getting a better view, while everyone has become more uncomfortable.

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
by Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter
Published 14 Sep 2020

Like any human being in a profession, a politician is beholden to the incentives and rules that determine success and failure in their industry. The incentives driving members of Congress are largely a function of the electoral dynamics they face, such as the outsized influence of special interest groups and ideologically extreme voters. And between elections, legislating is a zero-sum game held captive by the next party primary. Just as today’s duopoly has cemented its market power in elections, it has also cemented its grip over lawmaking by capturing Congress and devising rules in its favor—particularly in leadership’s favor—and often at the expense of effective problem solving in the public interest.

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle
by Dinny McMahon
Published 13 Mar 2018

Local-government competition for investment—and the tax revenue that goes with it—is one of the basic ingredients responsible for China’s economic miracle. By giving local governments a large degree of autonomy, the hope was that they’d come up with innovative techniques, suitable to the local environment, to generate growth. However, competition for investment has turned into a zero-sum game; investment that one city gets is tax dollars that another doesn’t. And rather than designing solutions based on local conditions, everyone competes by offering the same incentives. As a result, China’s urban footprint has a disproportionately high ratio of industrial land. Generally speaking, in most parts of the world, industrial land might take up 10% to 15% of a city’s area.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder
by Sean McFate
Published 22 Jan 2019

One prominent scholar showcases the grand strategies of individual presidential administrations, missing the entire point of what makes a grand strategy “grand”: it endures over decades and is not linked to a single leader—otherwise it’s just petit strategy.16 Such a mix-up is a rookie mistake. Mistaking bureaucracy for strategy is another source of grand confusion. Bureaucracy is a zero-sum game, except the sums don’t add up. When the Pentagon gets its paws on the National Security Strategy, it breaks it down into constituent parts. Huge staffs perform an “objectives crosswalk” to derive a National Defense Strategy that derives a National Military Strategy that derives a Joint Operations Concepts (called the “Jopsy”) for the “battle space.”

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Published 27 Aug 2018

Part II: Symposia Papers (September 2000): S653–S666. 32.Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor, “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics,” Pew Research Center and Demographic Trends, July 26, 2011, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/. 33.A 2011 study conducted in Boston concluded that some “Whites have now come to view anti-White bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-Black bias.” Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6 no. 3 (May 2011): 215–218. doi: 10.1177/1745691611406922. “Whites see racism . . .” is one of those generic statements that I mentioned in the first chapter. It is, of course, consistent with the existence of millions of whites who don’t see racism that way; indeed, recalling Sarah-Jane Leslie’s example of mosquitoes and the West Nile virus, it’s consistent with a majority of whites not doing so. 34.Alvin B.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

We gather our team to mark the occasion, and anyone who feels compelled can share their gratitude for their departing colleague. A week later, our alumnus receives a globe selected just for them—a token of our appreciation and a reminder that we hope they’ll change the way the world works wherever they go. No Handcuffs. When you view the world as a zero-sum game in which there can be only a finite number of winners, you tend to view competition as something you want to eliminate. One way to do that is by restricting your employees with a legal instrument called a noncompete. Noncompete clauses prohibit employees from creating or joining competitive firms within a certain period of time after their departure from their current employer.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

However, it will not be able to lift world growth the way China did for three reasons: First, the global environment is materially different in two ways. The decline in nominal and real interest rates during (and caused to no small extent by) China’s ascent created benign conditions at home in the AEs so that the ascent of China was not seen as a zero-sum game. That advanced the cause of globalisation in terms of social opinions. Now, India has to face a declining labour supply not just in the advanced economies, but in the manufacturing powerhouse economies of North Asia and Eastern Europe as well. If that means real wage growth, inflation and nominal interest rates are going to rise, then improving growth in ageing economies is going to be quite difficult, and so the political opposition to the transfer of production to India would be greater.

Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-And What We Can Do About It
by Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Published 21 Aug 2023

Interestingly, Kasser told me, these values operate like a seesaw: the more we value extrinsic goals, like wealth and status, the less room we have in our lives to pay attention to intrinsic ones, like community goals that focus on improving the lives of others. Kasser also offered an analogy of a pie, where your values are different slices: one might be material goods, one might be family, another might be career goals, another might be community. If the materialistic slice gets too big, the others get short shrift. Values operate like a zero-sum game: as one set increases in importance, the others must decrease. A great desire for personal success and achievement, then, can crowd out the desire to help others without expecting anything in return. Logistically, a person has only so much time, energy, and attention to spend. Choosing intrinsic values—like investing in friendships, neighbors, or volunteer groups—has been found to sustain our happiness and well-being in a way that pursuing extrinsic goals, like higher income or higher status in a career, doesn’t.

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power
by Rose Hackman
Published 27 Mar 2023

We can all do emotional labor, and connect back to where we thrive the most. As I went over in the opening chapter of this book, empathy is not a fixed trait you have or you don’t have. Empathy can be learned. You can practice it and gradually get better at it. Empathy is a skill. It also isn’t a zero-sum game where one person giving will automatically lose. Empathic people reap benefits for themselves and for those around them—having more friends, higher-quality romantic relationships, being happier across the board, and succeeding more in professional contexts, Zaki writes. This means there’s an incentive for people to engage in emotional labor across the board.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
by Michael A. Cusumano , Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
Published 6 May 2019

Most researchers are also focusing on CRISPR-Cas9, a specific protein that used RNA to edit DNA sequences. One concern we have is that the business models of biotech start-ups and pharmaceutical companies depend on patent monopolies, making the industry ultra-competitive and locking applied research into protected silos. The result is potentially a “zero-sum game” mentality. This contrasts to the more cooperative (but still highly competitive) spirit of “growing the pie” together that we generally see with basic science and which we saw in the early days of the personal computer, Internet applications, and even smartphone platforms such as Google’s Android.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 1 Jan 2006

Pandolfini stresses to his students that his goal is not to make them great chess players but great thinkers:My goal is to help them develop what I consider to be two of the most important forms of intelligence: the ability to read other people, and the ability to understand oneself. Those are the two kinds of intelligence you need to succeed at chess—and in life.4 There are limits to the business-as-chess analogy. Besides the added complexity of business, the most significant limitation is that chess is a zero-sum game: for every winner, there’s a loser. The business world is not zero-sum, and the game between players has an unspecified tenure. So how can we apply these lessons from chess to the business world? Strategy as Simple Rules One of the characteristics of a complex system is that highly variable outcomes emerge from simple rules.

The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine
by Yaroslav Trofimov
Published 9 Sep 2008

The destruction of the American embassy in Pakistan highlighted the depth of anti-American sentiment there. Bloodshed in Mecca and Saudi Arabia’s Shiite heartland were even more gratifying for Moscow. After all, the kingdom was so fervently anti-Communist at the time that it even refused diplomatic relations with the USSR. In the zero-sum game of the Cold War, any weakening of the Saudi regime was perceived as an automatic boon for the Kremlin. This was especially so because the Saudis were backing their anti-Communist creed with weapons and money in one part of the Muslim world where the Soviets had a problem of their own—Afghanistan.

The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells
Published 31 Aug 1996

Thus, the question is raised at the level of the nation: the new growth strategy would imply increased competitiveness at the cost of reducing employment in some sectors, while using the surplus thus generated to invest and create jobs in other sectors, such as business services or environmental technology industries. In the last resort, the net employment results will depend on inter-nation competition. Trade theorists would then argue that there is no zero-sum game, since an expansion of global trade will benefit most of its partners by increasing overall demand. According to this line of argument, there would be a potential reduction of employment as a consequence of the diffusion of new information technologies only if: expansion in demand does not offset the increase in labor productivity; and there is no institutional reaction to such a mismatch by reducing working time, not jobs.

…

The cost, however, is the high mortality rate of on-line friendships, as an unhappy sentence may be sanctioned by clicking away the connection – for ever. As for the impact of Internet communication on physical intimacy and sociability, Wellman and collaborators consider that the fears of the impoverishment of social life are misplaced. They point to the fact that there is no zero-sum game, and that, in fact, in some of the networks they have studied, more Internet use leads to more social ties, including physical ties. Here again, pundits seem to be opposing sociability on the Internet to a mythical notion of a tight community-based society. Yet, “current research suggests that North Americans usually have more than one thousand inter-personal ties.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

However often American public figures proclaim their country’s prominence or dominance, the work that must be done in this century is inescapably cooperative—a point made by President Barack Obama in a speech to the UN General Assembly eight months after taking office: [M]y responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests. But it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009—more than at any point in human history—the interests of nations and peoples are shared. . . . The technology we harness can light the path to peace, or forever darken it. . . . In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.7 Were this understanding—that dominance cannot be the cornerstone of security in an interconnected world—ever to take root, the resulting cooperation would not only help forestall an arms race in outer space but could also help rescue our home planet from some of the upheavals of climate change.

…

Through 2004, the US had spent $6.8 billion on reconstruction in Iraq; through 2009, it had spent $44.6 billion. 17.American Security Project, “About: Vision–Strategy–Dialogue,” www.americansecurityproject.org/about/ (accessed July 1, 2014; Apr. 10, 2017). 18.When viewed in July 2014, the ACLU National Security Project’s self-description had a soaring tone: “Our way forward lies in decisively turning our backs on the policies and practices that violate our greatest strength: our Constitution and the commitment it embodies to the rule of law. Liberty and security do not compete in a zero-sum game; our freedoms are the very foundation of our strength and security.” When viewed in Apr. 2017, the banner on the redesigned National Security page had become quite matter-of-fact: “The ACLU’s National Security Project is dedicated to ensuring that U.S. national security policies and practices are consistent with the Constitution, civil liberties, and human rights.”

How to Fix Copyright
by William Patry
Published 3 Jan 2012

The ability of distributors to charge monopoly prices for superstars was a phenomenon noted by Adam Smith way back in 1776: The exorbitant rewards of players, opera-singers, operadancers, &c are founded upon those two principles; the rarity and beauty of the talent, and the discredit of employing them in this manner.35 Whether the talent displayed by superstars is in fact rare is questionable (especially in the area of popular culture), but the purpose of proclaiming a superstar’s talent to be rare is easy enough to understand. It is a zero sum game, where the more people vie for the top, the fewer make it, but the rewards are disproportionately greater.36 Since rare talent must, by definition, be uncommon, there can only be a few who succeed. Those who succeed take it all: superstars get all the product endorsements, the clothing and perfume lines, the magazine covers, the television appearances, and most of our money.

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
by Taylor Larimore , Michael Leboeuf and Mel Lindauer
Published 1 Jan 2006

Largely because our financial markets are essentially closed systems in which an advantage garnered by a given investor comes at the disadvantage of the other investors in the same market. The authors recognize this eternal truth: As a group, we investors are inevitably average, so beating the market is a zero-sum game. (After our investment costs are deducted, of course, it becomes a loser's game.) Importantly, they note that relying on the typical common sense approaches that apply to most of life's challenges is "destined to leave you poorer." On page 76, for example, they warn against following life principles like these: 1.

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think
by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley
Published 1 Jan 2006

Each cooperative endeavour generates new resources and thus new arenas of potential conflict. So when conflict arises within a game of cooperation it arises at the margins, for that is where interests diverge. Even small margins can generate heated disagreement. This is because haggling over the margins is a zero-sum game, a game of ‘your loss is my gain’. Think of a buyer and seller arguing over the price of a rug. A stranger to rug-markets would assume that they were arenas where strife runs deep. But such bargaining takes place within a game of cooperation—in this case, mutually beneficial trade. Thus wherever we see cooperation, at whatever level, we should be prepared also to see conflict.

Monte Carlo Simulation and Finance
by Don L. McLeish
Published 1 Apr 2005

Competitor’s Strategy Bid I II III Your 12 3 2 -2 Bid 13 1 -4 4 14 0 -5 5 The payoffs to the competitor are somewhat different and given below Competitor’s Strategy I II III Your 12 -1 -2 3 Bid 13 0 4 -6 14 0 5 -5 For example, the combination of your bid=$13 per share and your competitor’s strategy II results in a loss of 4 units (for example four dollars per share) to you and a gain of 4 units to your competitor. However it is not always the case that the your loss is the same as your competitor’s gain. A game with this property is called a zero-sum game and these are much easier to analyze analytically. Define the 3 × 3 matrix of payoffs to your company by A and the 9 payoff matrix to your competitor by B, ⎛ ⎞ ⎛ 3 2 -2 -1 ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ ⎜ ⎟ ⎜ A = ⎜ 1 -4 4 ⎟ , B = ⎜ 0 ⎝ ⎠ ⎝ 0 -5 5 0 -2 4 5 3 ⎞ ⎟ ⎟ -6 ⎟ . ⎠ -5 Provided that you play strategy i = 1, 2, 3 (i.e. bid $12,$13,$14 with proba- bilities p1 , p2 , p3 respectively and the probabilities of the competitor’s strategies are q1 , q2 , q3 .

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Published 6 Feb 2015

There is “a creative dynamic inherent in the concept of free expression” that intersects in a lively way with “rapid changes in technology” to generate the public good.26 This aspect of speech, Kennedy argues, specifically “counsel[s] against upholding a law that restricts political speech in certain media or by certain speakers.”27 Again, the L aw a n d L eg a l Re a s o n 159 dynamism, innovativeness, and generativity of speech, like that of all capital, is dampened by government intervention. Fourth, and perhaps most important in establishing speech as the capital of the electoral marketplace, Kennedy sets the power of speech and the power of government in direct and zero-sum-game opposition to one another. Repeatedly across the lengthy opinion for the majority, he identifies speech with freedom and government with control, censorship, paternalism, and repression.28 When free speech and government meet, it is to contest one another: the right of speech enshrined in the First Amendment, he argues, is “premised on mistrust of governmental power” and is “an essential mechanism of democracy [because] it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people.”29 Here are other variations on this theme in the opinion: The First Amendment was certainly not understood [by the framers] to condone the suppression of political speech in society’s most salient media.

Milton Friedman: A Biography
by Lanny Ebenstein
Published 23 Jan 2007

But according to Friedman in Free to Choose: “Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit.”6 The great merit of free exchange, whether at home or abroad, is that both parties believe that they benefit. Exchange is not a “zero-sum” game, as some would have it. Rather, trade is win-win, and therefore should be encouraged to the greatest extent possible. This is why, Friedman believes, an individual who, in Smith’s words, “intends only his own gain” is led to promote the benefit of others: “Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren,” Smith wrote, “and it is vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only.

Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System
by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier
Published 29 Mar 2017

If the grand international plan is that the firms coming to haven countries during a regional conflict should promptly depart once it is over, the governments of haven countries are unlikely to cooperate with it. The core attraction to the governments of haven countries of the plan to attract firms to them is that, by providing a temporary haven for refugees, they gain a permanent benefit. Fortunately, global capitalism does not work like that: it is not a zero-sum game. A successful firm aims to expand. If it has successfully set up production in a haven country, employing both local citizens and refugees, and its refugee workforce wants to return home, it can set up production in the post-conflict country without closing it in the haven. But the fact that its refugee workforce wishes to return may well not be a sufficient incentive to compensate the firm for the evident risks of setting up in a post-conflict situation.

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

In particular, although stock markets made impressive gains in the years after the financial crisis, capital spending in the developed world remained largely moribund. Instead, the most important channel of influence became the exchange rate. In a world in which most economies are weak simultaneously, however, printing money to drive the exchange rate lower risks becoming a zero-sum game: one country’s competitive gain is another’s competitive loss; one country’s inflationary increase is another’s deflationary problem. And so it has proved. The dramatic drop in sterling in 2008 temporarily raised UK inflation, but only because the Eurozone ended up importing the UK’s deflation.

Traders at Work: How the World's Most Successful Traders Make Their Living in the Markets
by Tim Bourquin and Nicholas Mango
Published 26 Dec 2012

can be a good measure of how much risk you are taking, and if you answer “No,” then that’s something you need to address right away. Wilson: Absolutely, and the Forex education market doesn’t help itself there, because it tries to convince people that they really can get rich quick. That’s both absurd and highly disingenuous, because it masks the fact that Forex traders are going up against some very sharp minds in a zero-sum game. Why should anyone sitting at home in front of their computer be able to take on the sharpest minds on Wall Street, with all the resources those traders have available to them, and hope to consistently come out on top? It’s entirely unrealistic, but that’s what people are being told, and that’s why you see people take some obscene risks with their own capital.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability
by David Owen
Published 16 Sep 2009

There has been much talk of reviving the economy with green jobs and green industries, but that won’t be as easy as it may sound. Creating green jobs is different from creating new jobs, since green jobs, if they’re truly green, displace non-green jobs—wind-turbine mechanics instead of oil-rig roughnecks—probably a zero-sum game, as far as employment is concerned. The biggest effort we’ve made, up to now, to create a green industry—the billions we’ve wasted on ethanol—has put people to work and enriched some of the participants, but, overall, it’s been an environmental and economic disaster, and not just for us. A further consequence is that the paradoxical environmental benefits of economic recession, though real, are tremendously fragile, because they are vulnerable to intervention by governments that, understandably, would like to put people back to work and get them consuming again—for example, through programs intended to revive consumer spending (which has a big carbon footprint), and through public-investment projects aimed at doing things like building new roads and airports (ditto).

The Narcissist Next Door
by Jeffrey Kluger
Published 25 Aug 2014

It’s not interesting—even though everyone else in the room seems intrigued by it. It’s unrealistic—even though it seems eminently achievable and it’s been well thought out. Something is being served here that has nothing to do with the company’s larger mission and everything to do with the critic’s smaller one—the belief that professional recognition is a zero-sum game, and that every little success one coworker enjoys is somehow subtracted from your own. “This is a dangerous game to play,” says Hochwarter. “You really have to be careful about being so obvious, since all of the capital you acquired can be spent very quickly. It’s in the nature of the narcissistic beast that they start off being well liked until me-ism begins to ooze out of their pores.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe
by Greg Ip
Published 12 Oct 2015

For example, a farmer may agree to sell corn to a food processor at $5 a bushel in three months’ time. If, when that time comes, corn is trading at $4, the farmer wins: he sells his corn for more than he otherwise could. If it’s trading at $6, the processor wins: it buys corn for less than it otherwise would. That such a trade has a winner or loser does not make it a zero-sum game, because both farmer and food processor get something valuable: the certainty of what corn will cost in three months’ time. This makes it easier, and less stressful, to plan. Swaps are similar to forwards, and futures are forwards traded on a public exchange. There is evidence of forward-like arrangements dating back three thousand years.

Moonwalking With Einstein
by Joshua Foer
Published 3 Mar 2011

Teen teaches developmentally disabled kids at a local school and is an avid reader and tennis player. She is mostly tolerant of Ed’s eccentricities, but also cautiously hopeful that Ed might someday direct his considerable talents in a more focused, and perhaps even socially useful, direction. “What about the law, Edward?” she asked. “I consider the law to be a zero-sum game, and therefore a pointless use of a life,” said Ed. “Being good at being a lawyer means merely, on average, maximizing injustice.” Ed leaned over to me. “I used to be quite a promising young man when I was eighteen.” This prompted Phoebe to chime in: “More like thirteen.” While Ed was in the bathroom, I asked Rod if he would be disappointed if his son ended up becoming the next Tony Buzan, a fantastically wealthy self-help guru.

Running Money
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2007

And the sooner they do, the better off they will be! Still, there is another paradox (drool). With those currency flows, foreigners will eventually own the entire U.S., or hold us hostage by threatening not to loan us anymore, i.e., not send our dollars back. But the stock market is not 1:1—it is not a zero sum game. So those deaf, dumb and blind economists can’t find the capital flows. One million dollars invested in a stock can make the stock go up by $10 million or even $100 million in value on a slow afternoon. Money flowing from overseas back into the U.S. stock market may not even cause a loss of ownership.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

Recall that during the Asian financial crisis the United States and other Western countries demanded that the Asians take three steps—let bad banks fail, keep spending under control, and keep interest rates high. In its own crisis, the West did exactly the opposite on all three fronts. Economics is not a zero-sum game—the rise of other players expands the pie, which is good for all—but geopolitics is a struggle for influence and control. As other countries become more active, America’s enormous space for action will inevitably diminish. Can the United States accommodate itself to the rise of other powers, of various political stripes, on several continents?

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

And life today doesn’t just allow us to spend more time with the acquaintances who comprise our inner and outer rings; we can populate those categories with people who speak our language.20 Never before have people who shared our concerns been so easily accessible, not only across the dinner table but around the globe. Which brings us to the question of trade-offs. Besides the rings where we’ve chosen to invest more of our social capital, we also have to consider which acquaintances we’ve abandoned. Choosing among relationships is, some might say, a zero-sum game: while we’ve been empowered to invest additional capital in certain acquaintances, we’ve been compelled simultaneously to withdraw time and attention from others. How then have the changes we’ve each made on an individual level begun to ripple across society as a whole? The trade-offs we’re making individually—often without realizing it—are having major impacts on the whole landscape of American life.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age
by Manuel Castells
Published 19 Aug 2012

Table 2: Implications and cancellations of meaning in the shared terms of discourse in the Indignados movement Term Implies Cancels Common Self-management of community, shared space Restricted property, dichotomy of public/private, seizing of power by a few Consensus by Assembly Decisions result from interaction between different proposals, respect of all ideas, non-linear process of decision-making, no vote but synthesis, qualitatively superior outcome of the decision-making process Opposition consensus/dissent, averaging propositions, linear decision-making, outcome inferior to the quality of the original proposals debated Anybody Singularity, anonymous citizens Everybody, totality Future-less Right now Delayed fulfillment, separation between means and goals No bosses Self-regulation, distributed network, full involvement of everybody (as in the Internet interaction), anonymity, rotation of responsibilities Assignment of rigid social roles, pre-definition of subjects, command and submission Non-representation Participation, direct democracy, politics of expression Delegation Non-violence Legitimacy, exemplarity, actual self-defence, intangible field of force by de-legitimizing violence from others Efficacy of violence, tyranny of the testosterone Respect Reciprocity, dignity, self-limitation, true citizenship Security, enemy Money-less Wealth is not monetary, disconnection with the financial system, local currencies, decommodification Economy of scarcity, financial tyranny, inevitable austerity, zero sum games Fearless Together we can, you are not alone, the crisis can be overcome (as in Iceland), creativity Fatality, paralysis Slowness Co-evolution, processes of gradual maturation ‘Fast life’ subordination of life to the acceleration of capital Source: Eduardo Serrano, 2011. El poder de las palabras: glosario de términos del 15M.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

Life is not a race, in which some have to lose so that others can win. It’s not a contest at all. Your well-being doesn’t depend on being better than others—it depends on being good, which means being competent, hardworking, eager to learn and to grow. To be sure, there is competition in an economy, but it’s not a zero-sum game in which some have to lose so that others can win—not in the big picture. If you don’t get selected for a job, or if you start a company that goes out of business when Walmart comes into town, you don’t get shipped off to Siberia: you’re free to look for another job or start a new business. All the while you’re better off living in the kind of prosperous, dynamic economy that results from people being free to compete for jobs or customers.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

It encourages a higher volume of loans by lowering the lending standards, as exemplified by the US subprime loans, so that credit is extended against inadequate collateral or without acceptable legal protection. The focus shifts to channeling funds into speculative activities and trading for profit unrelated to client needs. These are frequently zero-sum games, entailing transfers of wealth between the parties to a transaction and adding little to overall economic activity. One problem is the global financial system's intricate linkages, which in 2008 became a conduit for transmitting contagion. This led to sharp falls in cross-border capital flows, which today remain well below the pre-crisis levels.

I Love Capitalism!: An American Story
by Ken Langone
Published 14 May 2018

If we’d had a good idea but executed it poorly, we’d also have gone broke. Look at all the automobile companies that have folded: Packard, Studebaker, Hudson; I can go right down the list. What happened? Mostly good ideas poorly executed. They couldn’t compete. Capitalism is brutal, but it’s rarely a zero-sum game. Both sides of any transaction should get something out of the deal. Valeant, the pharmaceutical company, had a whole roster of important medications, but when it got caught charging obscene prices for them, its stock went down 90 percent. The market spoke, and Valeant had to listen. I can’t think of one deal I’ve ever done where I couldn’t have gotten more out of it than I did.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

One of them is the nineteenth-century idea of a Darwinian competition among states, whereby wars are the struggle through which we get progress and self-realization of humanity.31 The equally silly, if less bloody, modern counterpart of this idea is the notion of economic competition among nations, whereby global commerce is seen as a zero-sum game. Both ideas are based on the belief that the point of competition is to lead us to the one perfect model. But competition works in diverse ways. In economic models of “monopolistic competition,” producers compete not just on price but on variety—by differentiating their products from others’.32 Similarly, national jurisdictions can compete by offering institutional “services” that are differentiated along the dimensions I discussed earlier.

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order
by Bruno Macaes
Published 25 Jan 2018

If it has always been a problem to be understood by other countries, it is not because of any belligerence in the Chinese nature. China’s thought is decided by the Chinese people, and the Chinese people are always hardworking, pragmatic, mild and used to avoiding conflicts and they like reconciliation. In our mind, a good relationship with other people is in cooperation and making money together. I have learnt the ‘zero-sum game theory.’ Of course it is very realistic, but this kind of thinking hardly appeals to the Chinese, most of the time we hate disorder and sharp struggle, even if it can bring us profit. As an example, we appreciate those who ‘subdue the enemy without fighting’ more than a general who emerges victorious in every battle.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

But it uses “capitalist” methods of competition to ensure that those public goods are delivered as successfully as possible. Both Sweden and Singapore demonstrate something beyond doubt: Government can be made slimmer and better. The dire warnings of William Baumol and other economists are misplaced: There is no reason to assume that government reform is a doomed enterprise. It is not a zero-sum game. But how should reformers go forward? There are two answers to that question. The first is practical: Everybody, whether from Left or Right, could make their governments work better. The second is ideological: It requires people to ask just what they want government to do. Our next two chapters look at how this revolution will proceed on those two fronts.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Published 20 May 2019

One of his size fourteen leather shoes rested perilously close to the screen of Tyler’s open laptop, but Tyler let it slide. It had already been a long day. Tyler knew the tedium was by design. Mediation was different from litigation. The latter was a pitched battle, two parties trying to fight their way to victory, what mathematicians and economists would call a zero-sum game. Litigation had highs and lows, but beneath the surface there lurked a primal energy; at its heart, it was war. But mediation was different. When properly conducted, there wasn’t a winner or a loser, just two parties who compromised their way to a resolution, who “split the baby.” Mediation didn’t feel like war.

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 14 Jul 2012

The player with the greater number always wins, and the player who wins the most battles overall is the victor. A simple version of the game has players A and B allocating one hundred soldiers to three battlefields. Each player's goal is to employ a strategy that creates favorable mismatches. (See figure 9-1.) Colonel Blotto is a zero-sum game in which one player's loss is the other's gain. As long as you avoid bad strategies, such as putting all your soldiers on one battlefield, the game resembles Rock-Paper-Scissors. As a consequence, we can't really tell what the best strategies are for simple versions of Colonel Blotto. FIGURE 9-1 Simple example of the Colonel Blotto game Source: Analysis by author.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

It is making sure that the spirit of the contract is held up, that the people around you are treated well, and that even if it is a stretch, doing what is expected of you in every situation. The entrepreneur from Ukraine took my investment and the money just disappeared. What he didn’t know is that incident put a damper on our ever investing in Ukraine again. It is amazing how powerful trust is. A community of distrust is constantly fighting a zero-sum game. There is only enough around for the people who have it, and they constantly steal it from each other. A community of trust, however, can accomplish anything. Incentives are aligned, people don’t need to hide things from each other, everyone helps each other succeed. Show me a poor community and I will show you a community of dishonesty where people don’t trust each other.

Sex Power Money
by Sara Pascoe
Published 26 Aug 2019

If you understand that all animals are mere meat machines churning out smaller versions of themselves as repackaged genes, you’ll realise how dire the cuckold’s situation is. Loss 1 The fool might not have biological offspring of his own (evolutionary loser) OR if he does he’s effectively weakening them by delivering food and resources to the non-biological offspring. Parenting is a zero-sum game, there is a set amount of love resources. Any food or protection going to Jeremy is taken away from Sophie, and vice versa. This is where sibling rivalry comes from. Just by existing your brothers and sisters are potentially lowering your quality of life and survival chances. The bastards. Loss 2 In evolutionary terms, unrelated humans are competitors.

Concentrated Investing
by Allen C. Benello
Published 7 Dec 2016

It was this “form of self‐deception” as Buffett described it, that nearly destroyed GEICO in the early 1970s.158 Simpson believes that, when considering active management, the base case for an investor must be a passive index fund, for example an S&P 500 index fund, a total market index fund, or a worldwide market index fund. That base case index fund allows an investor to obtain a market return very cheaply, so unless an active manager can add value over and above that index, the investor is better off in the index fund. For active managers as a whole, investing is a zero sum game, less fees and transaction costs, so most active managers won’t do as well as the market because they are the market. Academic studies tend to flatter the active managers due to survivorship bias, which means that because the worst drop out, they aren’t counted. How, then, does a manager add value over the market?

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

Louis magazine, describing the shock of Missourians that an out-of-state tycoon had bought something as essential as an airline purely to destroy it and pocket the profits.8 By the late 1980s, New York and St. Louis were no longer carrying a shared American burden of lost opportunity. Wall Street predators had devised a zero-sum game and deemed the Midwest expendable. In 2017, Icahn, a long-time friend of Donald Trump who had helped Trump recover from his financial disasters in the casino industry, constructed a cabinet of corrupt Wall Street multimillionaires including himself, Steven Mnuchin, and Wilbur Ross9—while Trump flew to Missouri and assured down-and-out Missourians he was making their lives great again.

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning
by Tom Vanderbilt
Published 5 Jan 2021

You’re amazed that you can still do something from so long ago; skills are like memories contained by the body. Even better is when parent and child are learning something new—rappelling at the climbing gym, making cookies, playing some new game—together. That’s when you realize that you and your child’s growth need not be competing entities in some zero-sum game, or that your child’s learning is something that must be managed only from afar, and that this thing that you’re so fetishizing in your child—learning—does not have to end at childhood. My own little experiment, all these little boats I’ve pushed out, continues. I haven’t learned any of these skills; I’m learning them.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

However, it would also result in losers among some sectors of society, particularly in the host nations, so strong dynamic social policy with a welfare contingency would be required to help the transition. One of the biggest fears surrounding mass immigration is the idea that immigrants take jobs from the native-born and drive down wages. This sounds plausible but is actually a fallacy, because the economy isn’t a zero-sum game. For a start, migrants bring a greater diversity of skills to the workforce, which improves the efficiency of the overall economy, which leads to more jobs. Migrants also increase the size of the economy: they need to eat, shop, get their hair cut and so on – by spending their wages and paying taxes, migrants support new jobs and businesses.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

“I think what the average investor doesn’t understand is that Wall Street likes volatility—they make money on volatility, on volume, up or down,” says Jordan Belfort, the “Wolf of Wall Street.” “It’s nice to have a bull market, but when volume dries up and there’s no activity, that’s when Wall Street suffers most.” The Market Makers Markets are in one sense a “zero-sum game”—your gain might be someone else’s loss and vice versa—but the popular portrayal of battles of wits like those between Bobby Axelrod and Taylor Mason in the hit show Billions makes it seem like things happen in a vacuum. Even as Gill got rich and Plotkin became less rich on the same stock at the same time, many financial firms found themselves hoping the fight would go a few extra rounds.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
by Bill Gates
Published 2 May 2022

The criticism is that vertical efforts come at the cost of horizontal ones, and that those horizontal efforts are, by their nature, the more effective way to save and improve people’s lives with limited money and effort. I don’t agree with this criticism. The way polio campaigns have shifted to help with COVID shows that horizontal and vertical capabilities are not a zero-sum game. And COVID is not the only example: During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, polio workers in Nigeria were able to step in and help with the Ebola response. Without them, the country’s nearly 180 million citizens would have been at far greater risk—and in fact, in countries without the polio-eradication infrastructure, the outbreak was much worse.

Principles of Corporate Finance
by Richard A. Brealey , Stewart C. Myers and Franklin Allen
Published 15 Feb 2014

Financial transactions undertaken solely to reduce risk do not add value in perfect and efficient markets. Why not? There are two basic reasons. • Reason 1: Hedging is a zero-sum game. A corporation that insures or hedges a risk does not eliminate it. It simply passes the risk to someone else. For example, suppose that a heating-oil distributor contracts with a refiner to buy all of next winter’s heating-oil deliveries at a fixed price. This contract is a zero-sum game, because the refiner loses what the distributor gains, and vice versa.1 If next winter’s price of heating oil turns out to be unusually high, the distributor wins from having locked in a below-market price, but the refiner is forced to sell below the market.

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However, some hedges, such as those that match durations, are dynamic. As time passes and prices change, you need to rebalance your position to maintain the hedge. Hedging and risk reduction sound as wholesome as mom’s apple pie. But remember that hedging solely to reduce risk, with no other business purpose, cannot add value. It is a zero-sum game: risks aren’t eliminated, just shifted to some counterparty. And remember that your shareholders can also hedge by adjusting the composition of their portfolios or by trading in futures or other derivatives. Investors won’t reward the firm for doing something that they can do perfectly well for themselves.

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Finance, 77n Yankee bonds, 616 Yasuda, A., 391, 847n Yermack, D., 551n Yeung, B., 878 Yield convenience, 477n, 670–672 on corporate debt, 66, 585–589 current, 47 dividend, 77, 84, 85, 166–167 on money-market investments, 792–793 Yield curve, 55 Yield spread, 66, 587–589 Yield to maturity bond valuation, 48 default risk and, 592–594 defined, 47 Yoshimori, M., 870n Yu, Jialin, 552n Yuan, K., 884n Yun, H., 628n Z Zeckhauser, R., 312–313, 313n Zell, Sam, 5 Zender, J. F., 467n, 470n Zero-coupon bonds, 55–56, 61 Zero-dividend companies, 401 Zero-maintenance hedges, 677–679 Zero-stage financing, 371–375 Zero-sum game, 659–660 Zheng, L., 884n Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange, 667 Zhu, N., 857 Zhu, Q., 884n Ziemba, W. T., 332, 332n, 885n Zingales, Luigi, 10n, 368, 459, 459n, 470, 470n, 864n, 864–865, 873, 873n, 875n, 878 Zipcar, 387 Zitzewitz, E., 338n “Zombie” firms, 875 Z-scores, 598n

The Best of Best New SF
by Gardner R. Dozois
Published 1 Jan 2005

This is not a situation where every gain on their part is a loss on ours, or vice versa. If we handle ourselves correctly, both we and the heptapods can come out winners.” “You mean it’s a non-zero-sum game?” Gary said in mock incredulity. “Oh my gosh.” “A non-zero-sum game.” “What?” You’ll reverse course, heading back from your bedroom. “When both sides can win: I just remembered, it’s called a non-zero-sum game.” “That’s it!” you’ll say, writing it down on your notebook. “Thanks, Mom!” “I guess I knew it after all,” I’ll say. “All those years with your father, some of it must have rubbed off.” “I knew you’d know it,” you’ll say.

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

Longer papers on this subject (Hanson 1990) consist largely of detailed responses to such objections. Space limitations preclude such detail here so Box 25.3, “A Few Concerns about Ideas Futures,” just gives a list of some issues addressed in those papers. Box 25.3 A Few Concerns about Idea Futures Isn’t gambling illegal? Isn’t betting a useless zero-sum game? Does anyone ever bet this way? What about compulsive gambling? Is there enough interest in science questions? Will these markets be too thin? Doesn’t betting only work for clear-cut questions like horse races? How often do beliefs really converge? What if beliefs never converge? What do convergent beliefs have to do with truth?

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One of the most common is trade: you buy advanced technology or know-how from others in exchange for goods or technology you have. Information trading is interesting because it is win-win: we both keep the information we sell or teach each other. Unequal pricing is of course still possible, but it is even more obvious with information that it is a non-zero sum game than in ordinary trade. It can be argued that advanced information is mainly traded between people with advanced information and not between them and people with little tradable information; this would accentuate the differences by making diffusion act mainly among the haves and not between the haves and have-nots.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

Rather, they reflect a deep and pervasive dysfunction in how we structure and reward training and work—how, in a basic and immediate way, we live our lives. This diagnosis attacks no one, but it should discomfit everybody. The diagnosis, although uncomfortable, also kindles hope for a cure. We are trained to think of economic inequality as presenting a zero-sum game: to suppose that redistribution to benefit the bottom must burden the top. But this is not such a case. Meritocratic inequality does not in fact serve anyone well, and escaping the meritocracy trap would therefore benefit virtually everyone. Emancipation from meritocracy would restore middle-class Americans, now cut off from dignity and prosperity, to full participation in social and economic life.

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See class divide meritocratic inequality, xii–xiii and class divide, xvi, 201–2 as comparable to racism, 50, 201 extent of, 13, 104–6, 294fig, 295, 296fig, 297 and identity politics, 61 and income defense industry, 55 international comparisons, 13 as justified, 14, 16, 24, 31, 63–64, 73, 106–7, 109–10, 265, 269–70 and leisure, 85, 86, 292fig middle-class failure to stop, 108–9 and populism, 64–65 redistribution as cure for, 273–74 and work intensity, 85–86, 89, 292fig as zero-sum game, xxii, 153 See also class divide; educational inequality; labor market polarization; middle-class resentment Merkel, Angela, 271 midcentury society college graduate cohort, 251 consulting industry, 245 consumption, 216–17, 220 dampening of class divide, 46–47, 199–201, 217, 223–24 democratic culture, 29, 47, 170, 197–201 elite education, 6, 7, 111–12, 298fig, 299 elite income, 13, 18, 199 elite leisure, 81–82 elite work, 4, 11, 157, 292fig entertainment industry, 178 finance industry, 81, 163, 165, 167, 238, 303 geographic distribution, 223–24 hiring practices, 203 income-based achievement gaps, 300fig, 301 management, 169, 170–72, 174, 241, 243 middle-class education, 298fig, 299 middle-class prosperity, 3, 20–21, 29, 99, 107 middle-class savings, 218 middle-class work, 9, 20–21, 165, 170, 179, 181–82, 188, 292fig and New Deal, 274 political equality, 70–71 poverty, 77–78, 99–100, 101–2, 103, 106, 107, 293fig public sector wages, 55–56 racial divide, 26, 50, 99, 131 retail industry, 177 sexism, 99, 187 social mobility, 255–56, 308fig, 309 social solidarity, 47, 51 technical innovation at work, 185, 248 wealth as emancipatory in, 41 workplace training, 140–41, 142, 144, 159, 171, 203 See also aristocracy middle class communities centered on, 21–24, 28–29 debt, 218–19, 233–36, 306fig elite contempt for, xviii, 61–62, 69, 70 and gender norms, 209–10 midcentury work, 9, 20–21, 165, 170, 179, 181–82, 188, 292fig numerical decline of, 201–2 middle class, burdens on and mortality rates, 30–31, 65–66, 70, 188 and preservation focus, 22–23, 29–30 and rule of law, 55 and valorization of industry, ix, xiv, xvii, 24, 30–31, 60, 62–64, 187–88, 206 See also educational inequality; labor market polarization; middle-class resentment middle-class resentment, 62–70 and educational inequality, 152–53, 278 and nativism, 63–64, 65–66, 67 and populism, xvi–xvii, 64–66, 188, 271, 272 progressive critiques and, 272–73 and Trump presidency, 63, 67–70 and Trump’s dark vision, xvii, 67–68 mid-skilled jobs, loss of.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
by Walter Scheidel
Published 14 Oct 2019

By the time Rome entered the eastern Mediterranean, the major powers had been locked into unceasing conflict and shifting alliances for more than a century. Between 274 and 101 BCE, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms were to fight no fewer than nine wars for control of their Levantine borderlands, known as the Syrian Wars. Although these conflicts spurred on state formation and honed military capabilities on both sides, it was a zero-sum game, interspersed with a periodic near-collapse of one party or the other.14 More specifically, when Rome first attacked Macedon in earnest from 200 to 197 BCE, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic states were embroiled in their fifth war. Although there is no good reason to believe that greater coordination among these kingdoms would have sufficed to block Rome’s advance, this illustrates the pernicious consequences of their mutual antagonism: I discuss in chapter 4 the deliberately far-fetched scenario of a unified Macedonian empire on the scale of Alexander’s and the odds of its withstanding Roman imperialism.15 Second, the well-trained Hellenistic field armies were precious in that they could not readily be replaced.

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Interstate conflict did not merely foster technological innovation in areas such as ship design and weaponry that proved vital for global expansion, it also raised the stakes by amplifying both the benefits of overseas conquest and its inverse, the costs of opportunities forgone: successful ventures deprived rivals from rewards they might otherwise have reaped, and vice versa. States played a zero-sum game: their involvements overseas have been aptly described as “a competitive process driven as much by anxiety over loss as by hope of gain.” As if rulers’ ambition had not been enough, fear of losing out lent even greater urgency to an open-ended arms race. Persistent and often violent competition called for the formal acquisition of distant strongholds and territories to preserve access to overseas resources: simply getting somewhere first was never enough, as Portugal and Spain were soon to discover.

One Up on Wall Street
by Peter Lynch
Published 11 May 2012

Options are the broker’s gravy train. A broker with only a handful of active options clients can make a wonderful living. The worst thing of all is that buying an option has nothing to do with owning a share of a company. When a company grows and prospers, all the shareholders benefit, but options are a zero-sum game. For every dollar that’s won in the market there’s a dollar that’s lost, and a tiny minority does all the winning. When you buy a share of stock, even a very risky stock, you are contributing something to the growth of the country. That’s what stocks are for. In previous generations, when it was considered dangerous to speculate in stocks of small companies, at least the “speculators” were providing the capital to enable the IBMs and the McDonald’ses and the Wal-Marts to get started.

Sundiver
by David Brin
Published 15 Jan 1995

“But the conditioning needed to change a man’s response to instantaneous stimuli ... to an image flashed so fast that only the unconscious has time to react . . . would leave too many side effects, new patterns that would have to show up in the test. “The final analysis is very simple; does the subject’s mind follow a plus or zero sum game, qualifying him for Citizenship, or is it addicted to the sick-sweet pleasures of a negative sum. That more than any index of violence, is the essence of this test.” Martine turned to Physician Laird. “That’s right, isn’t it, Doctor?” Laird shrugged. “You’re the expert.” He had been allowing Martine to slowly win her way back into his good graces, still not quite forgiving her for prescribing to Kepler without consulting him.

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 3 Nov 2009

He fired Pellegrini in 1995, after nine years at the firm, telling him that “"a knife-and-fork role isn’'t suited for you.”" “"He’'s very, very smart, and his analytical skills are extraordinary,”" Wilson recalls, “"but he’'s a classic hot-blooded Italian; he got into situations where everything was a zero-sum game.”" Pellegrini says more bluntly, “"He thought I was full of shit.”" Pellegrini was thirty-eight years old, unemployed, and newly single. He threw a party at his apartment, trying to meet some new friends, but he was too uncomfortable to enjoy it very much, retreating to a corner of the room.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014

Companies can realise this potential by looking for ways to do things differently, and by putting our people and the planet right up there alongside growth, and profit as our raison d’être. And the amazing thing is that, contrary to popular perception, these are not opposing poles but are mutually reinforcing opportunities. Business doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, where some win and others lose. When done properly, everybody stands to gain: companies, communities, and the beautiful planet on which we are privileged to live. To achieve lasting progress we must identify, nurture and learn from the next generation of business leaders. Some of these rising stars are already ahead of the curve, especially in the way they weave together their social and entrepreneurial passions and I wish all of us in business could wise up to this fact and start doing more to encourage and support them.

The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy
by Brian Klaas
Published 15 Mar 2017

Even after the rise of Thaksin, an elected populist, extrajudicial killings, corruption, and bad governance persisted.22 The West initially pressed Thailand more aggressively on these issues, exposing key human rights abuses and warning Thailand it needed to improve in order to stay in the good graces of the West. â•… But, over time, Western governments (and the United States in particular) have become increasingly timid in condemning Thailand’s government. The strategic importance that Thailand lost at the close of the Vietnam War has resurged, as Western governments see the map of Southeast Asia increasingly in terms of a zero-sum game against China. Moreover, in the context of the early phase of the so-called War on Terror, Bangkok may have bought itself a longer diplomatic leash with the West by allegedly hosting a CIA “black ops” base codenamed Detention Site Green at Udon Thani in northeast Thailand, near the Cambodian border.23 In 2003, the George W.

Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement
by Robert Clyatt
Published 28 Sep 2007

One recent study shows the average mutual fund underperforms the market by 1%, and Vanguard’s John Bogle recently calculated that the average stock mutual fund achieved just 9.9% in annual returns over a recent 20-year period, falling 3.1% short of the S&P 500 Index, which returned 13% over that same period. He argues that fees and trading costs make up the difference in this zero-sum game. With thousands of funds out there, a few can always be found that outperform for several years running. But you can never be sure if this year will be the last. 170 | Work Less, Live More As a Rational Investor, you aren’t trying to find the perfect manager, the perfect stock, or even the perfect fund.

The New Science of Asset Allocation: Risk Management in a Multi-Asset World
by Thomas Schneeweis , Garry B. Crowder and Hossein Kazemi
Published 8 Mar 2010

In addition, options traders may also directly trade market/security characteristics, such as price volatility, that underlie the contract. As for hedge funds, the sources of managed futures returns have also been described as being based on the unique skill or strategy of the trader. Because CTAs actively trade, manager skill is important. Many managed futures strategies trade primarily in futures markets, which are zero-sum games. If CTAs were only trading against other CTAs, then it may be concluded that an individual managed futures program’s returns are based solely on manager skill. However some spot market players are willing to sell or hedge positions even if they expect spot prices to rise or fall in their favor (e.g., currency and interest rate futures may trend over time due to government policy to smooth price movements).

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance
by Emanuel Derman
Published 1 Jan 2004

Best of all, we worked closely with traders such as 1)an O'Rourke to bridge the gap between academic theory and trading practice. Our body was in the business world but our head was inspired by academia. It was a rich existence. To top it off, we had ample resources because we worked for traders who understood that spending money on research and development is not a zero-sum game. We believed that our models and systems were the best on Will Street. But business is cyclical. After the punishing rise in interest rates of late 1994, power shifted from our traders to our salespeople, who had difficulty imagining that investment in new models and trading systems could lead to more business.

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
by Robert Lane Greene
Published 8 Mar 2011

But all in all, the European Union is one of the most liberal and diverse places on earth, with proud and centuries-old nation-states respecting the principle of tolerance not only within the Union but within national borders. Will the Balkan countries and Turkey make it into Europe’s bureaucratic and boring, but also pluralistic and successful, postnationalist experiment? Or will the imperatives of nationalism—not least linguistic nationalism—continue to trap them in an atavistic zero-sum game, Turks versus Kurds, Croats versus Serbs, faith versus faith, and people versus people, fighting it out for the dream of one people, one state? The future of a large and volatile chunk of the world hangs in the balance. * Even today, a movie in a regional dialect, such as 2008’s Gomorra about the Naples mafia, must be subtitled in standard Italian in order to be understood nationwide.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
by Brian Christian
Published 1 Mar 2011

This is enough to fluster most humans, and flummox many,2 and it’s a good bet that a machine parser wouldn’t have nearly the savvy to react appropriately. Zero-Sumness In looking at the way chess programs work, we discussed the “minimax” and “maximin” algorithm, two terms that we treated as synonymous. In “zero-sum” games, like chess, for one player to win necessitates that the other must tose—no “win-win” outcomes are possible—and so minimizing your opponent’s outcome and maximizing your own constitute, mathematically anyway, the same strategy. (In the history of chess world champions, “prophylactic” players like Tigran Petrosian and Anatoly Karpov, playing for safety and to minimize their opponents’ chances, stand alongside wild attackers like Mikhail Tal and Garry Kasparov, playing for chaos and to maximize their own chances.)

Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks
by Susan Casey
Published 29 May 2006

The aquatic environment is being altered radically before we’ve even begun to understand it, an insane game of brinksmanship with potentially catastrophic results. And even as $10 billion is allocated for interplanetary exploration, ocean conservationists—monitoring 71 percent of the Earth—struggle for funding. Meanwhile, commercial fishing remains a zero-sum game, habitats are being destroyed, species lost forever. As for the Farallon great whites, they may have adapted to everything that’s been thrown at them for the past 11 million years, but here’s the question: Will they survive another decade of us? About the Author Susan Casey is the development editor of Time Inc., where she was previously an editor at large, as well as the editor of Sports Illus trated Women.

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections
by Patrick Smith
Published 6 May 2013

Have its competitors at those crowded airports reduced their schedules in response? Heck no. If a certain number of passengers are siphoned away, the tendency isn’t to eliminate flights outright; it’s to reduce the size of the aircraft. A 767 becomes a 737; a 737 becomes an RJ. Airline competition is seldom a zero-sum game. The market splinters and keeps on growing. These very same points are what make the high-speed rail “solution” similarly misunderstood. There’s no reason to oppose trains on their own merits, but any effect on air traffic would be negligible. See Europe, where railways are fast, dependable, and ultra-convenient, yet the number of annual airline passengers is only marginally lower than it is in the United States. 4.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

As Mario Monti, a former EU Competition Commissioner (and Prime Minister of Italy from 2011 to 2013), once noted, such tax breaks constitute disguised trade- and investment-distorting state aid that is hidden from public scrutiny because it does not appear on company balance sheets. One study estimated that US state and local governments spend $80 billion a year on incentives and subsidies to companies, accounting for 7 per cent of their budget. Much of this goes on ‘beggar-my-neighbour’ subsidies to win jobs and investment at the expense of other states – a zero-sum game. General Motors has extracted $1.7 billion over the years from sixteen US states, which has not stopped it closing factories in places that have given it cash. Shell, Ford and Chrysler have received over $1 billion each, Amazon, Microsoft, Prudential and Boeing over $200 million each.11 Then there is the widespread practice of allowing firms to deduct debt repayments from taxable earnings.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

“As far as individual projects are concerned,” says Teller, “this allows for a fairly freewheeling approach. But taken together, in aggregate, it’s actually a fairly rigorous process.” It’s also Darwinian evolution applied to rapid iteration. Big ideas for progress are competing against other big ideas for progress. While it’s not a zero-sum game—as there’s more than one winner—it’s ruthless nonetheless. To put this in different terms, just as Google’s version of skunk amps up the risk taking with the size of the goals they set (their 10x requirement), forcing those goals to compete in an experimental ecosystem amps up the risk mitigation.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Record high corporate profit margins are merely the other side of the coin of suppressed wages. Long gone are the days when Henry Ford could double his workers' wages and do so happily. As Ford explained, “Unless industry can keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of customers.” Ford understood that the economy was not a zero sum game between himself and his workers.32 During the Great Depression, the British economist John Maynard Keynes was trying to figure out why the economic collapse was so severe. He realized that in downturns, it is logical for each household to demand more cash and save money on a precautionary basis to put itself on a better footing.

Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond
by Bruce C. N. Greenwald , Judd Kahn , Paul D. Sonkin and Michael van Biema
Published 26 Jan 2004

There are successful macrofundamentalist investors. Analysts who energetically pursue information from company and industry sources, ferreting out trends ahead of the pack, should in theory-and sometimes do in practice-obtain above-average investment returns. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that security trading is a zero-sum game. For every buyer there is a seller, and the future will prove one of them to have made a mistake. Indeed, when we take effort and expense into account, approximately 70 percent of active professional investors have done worse than they would have by adhering to a passive and low-cost strategy of simply buying a share of the market as a whole-a representative sample of all available securities.

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden
Published 20 Sep 2021

It is, rather, a byproduct of the fact that humans exist at the boundary between the natural and the social worlds. That genetic and environmental factors are braided together is simply a description of reality. A century of the so-called “nature-nurture debate” has conditioned people to think of genes as competing against the environment in a zero-sum game, where any attention to biology must necessarily be accompanied by a reduction in the attention paid to society. But to design social interventions and policies to improve people’s lives is to ask, “What would happen if x—but only x—changed about people’s environments?” Answering such questions requires reckoning with all of the other features of people’s lives that ordinarily go along with x—a very long list, a list that includes their DNA.

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation
by Sebastien Page
Published 4 Nov 2020

Thus, any trader forced to engage in a material volume of liquidity-motivated trading in a financial market that is in informational equilibrium will be unable to avoid below-average performance, ceteris paribus. Academic theories that rely on assumptions of “an asymmetrically informed market with costly information production” and “informational equilibrium” may seem opaque to investors, but the idea is simple: if we believe in a zero-sum game, stock pickers who trade just to provide liquidity to their investors are at a disadvantage to those who trade based on information. Edelen provides an intuitive example: Consider the performance of an open-end fund manager who occasionally has private information that leads to positive risk-adjusted returns, but who also satisfies investors’ liquidity demands.

Capital Without Borders
by Brooke Harrington
Published 11 Sep 2016

Jonathan Beaverstock, Philip Hubbard, and John Short, “Getting Away with It? Exposing the Geographies of the Super-rich,” Geoforum 35 (2004): 401–407. 9. Michel Pinçon and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, Grand Fortunes: Dynasties of Wealth in France, trans. Andrea Lyn Secara (New York: Algora, 1998). 10. Stuart Turnbull, “Swaps: A Zero-Sum Game?” Financial Management 16 (1987): 15–21. 11. Graham Moffat, Trust Law: Text and Materials (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 113. 12. U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Taxation, Report of Investigation of Enron Corporation and Related Entities Regarding Federal Tax and Compensation Issues, and Policy Recommendations, Report JCS-3-03 (Washington, DC: General Printing Office, 2003), 260. 13.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

Rather than framing the exchanges that define our life—of labor, assets, and ideas—as a means to acquire a particular form of money that’s defined by a symbolic banknote, we should explore new value models, whether with tokens or something else, that incentivize collaboration for the betterment of all. The accumulation of wealth has never been a zero-sum game. When we engage in behavior that fosters a self-reinforcing feedback loop of inclusion, efficiency, and innovation, it’s possible to build wealth by creating it rather than taking it. Designed right, these new economic systems could marshal the forces of the market not to incentivize overpaid CEOs to build coal-powered generation plants but to make the most efficient use of our resources and those of the planet so that we all prosper.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy
by George Magnus
Published 10 Sep 2018

Citing China as existential economic competition to the US, it vowed stricter enforcement of trade violations, which is diplomatic code for tariffs. China wasn’t the only country in the crosshairs of the White House, but it is the major one, and one with which the US runs a large deficit. President Trump’s view about trade is that it is a zero-sum game in which there can only be one winner. China’s view about trade is ostensibly much more aligned with that of other advanced economy and international organisations, but Xi’s China is certainly not blameless in allowing trade tensions between the two countries to reach boiling point. The rest of us look on with curiosity and concern at both the Trump administration and China.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

Uber had been exhausting, but Morselli found WeWork to be the more frustrating experience. “Travis [Kalanick] can come across as hard to work with, but he’s to the point in a very intelligent and constructive way,” Morselli said. “Adam was always finding ways to force teams, and people within teams, to compete with each other, as if it were all a zero-sum game.” One of the new executives Adam hired was Jennifer Skyler, a Facebook spokesperson, whom he brought in to build a communications team as the company continued to push the idea that it was more than an office-leasing operation. In the press, WeWork was talking up the new version of its member network, and the idea of a “WeWork effect”—that companies would want to join WeWork’s network less for the physical space than for access to its community of entrepreneurs.

Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America's Mexican Migrants
by Ted Conover
Published 10 Jan 2013

If these folks are not just faceless foreigners, in other words, but rather our neighbors, then common decency dictates that now we’re going to have to share—share roads, schools, hospitals, parks, whatever we have that’s nice. And watch as it all runs down. The larger truth, however, is that immigration is not a zero-sum game: migrants bring enterprise and vitality, and what we have to share is not a fixed amount but a growing amount. All evidence suggests that a rising tide will help us all. Another kind of nervousness about immigration seems tied less to economic concerns than to a parochial, sometimes visceral fear of the unknown, of the stranger (particularly the young and fertile), of the dark horde.

Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome
by Will Bulsiewicz
Published 15 Dec 2020

Fungi are multicellular organisms that, similar to animals and plants, have a nucleus and other organelles. They’re more sophisticated than bacteria but, similar to bacteria, they are often thought to be bad even though many are trying to help us. They also compete with bacteria, which means that there’s a zero-sum game: if one is flourishing, then the other is withering. Viruses are tiny particles made up of DNA (or RNA) that don’t have a cell at all and aren’t even considered to be living, even though they share some qualities with us animate folk. Illnesses like influenza, HIV, and hepatitis B are often the first to come to mind when we think of viruses, but not all viruses are trying to hurt humans.

How Long Will Israel Survive Threat Wthn
by Gregg Carlstrom
Published 14 Oct 2017

In hindsight, his speech was a warning, one that has gone largely unheeded by the rest of the government. From religion to education to culture, the disagreements would only grow worse over the next two years, amplified by an increasingly shortsighted and authoritarian prime minister. “Israeli politics, to a great extent, is built as an inter-tribal zero sum game. One tribe, the Arabs, whether or not by its own choice, is not really a partner in the game,” Rivlin said. “The other three, it seems, are absorbed by a struggle for survival, a struggle over budgets and resources for education, housing, or infrastructure, each on behalf of their own sector.” 5 THE DIVIDE “America is something that can be easily moved.”

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World
by Michal Zalewski
Published 11 Jan 2022

The valuation of the stock is also grounded in the fact that it provides a proportional claim on the company’s assets if the business ever decides to liquidate, and entitles the shareholders to a fair payout if the business is acquired or goes private. It follows that as the enterprise grows, so does the valuation of the shares. The equities market has an odd reputation. In political speeches, it’s often cast as a “casino,” a zero-sum game in which the small guy always gets the short end of the stick. In reality, it’s a fantastic and accessible tool that allows investors to take principled and equitable risks, often permitting both sides of the transaction to satisfactorily accomplish their goals. That said, it also allows people to go broke chasing extremely speculative profits in up-and-coming industries such as biotech, machine learning, self-driving vehicles, cryptocurrency mining, or recreational pot.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

People have worried about technology killing jobs ever since the industrial revolution, two hundred years ago. In those two centuries, technology has rocketed forward and, yes, destroyed many jobs. But employment rates have remained strong, notwithstanding crises like the Depression or the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We think of trade as a zero-sum game, as if someone wins while someone else loses. Instead of applause for a process that streamlines production, maximizes output, and lowers costs, we often face a backlash focused on job displacements. That’s where we are today, perched on a precarious precipice—instead of improving social safety nets, many countries are shutting their borders and erecting tariffs.

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid
by Meredith. Angwin
Published 18 Oct 2020

So, why are the New England utilities pushing conservation in the summer? The utilities are urging conservation in summer because they are playing the Game of Peaks. It’s a utility game about money. If they play the Game of Peaks well, they can shift some costs from themselves over to neighboring utilities. Yeah, it’s a zero-sum game (“I win” can happen only if “you lose”). Let’s look at the rules for that game. CHAPTER 25 THE GAME OF PEAKS CUTTING BACK ON ELECTRICITY use on the hottest day of the summer is not a moral imperative. It is merely part of The Game of Peaks. This game allows large utilities to shift costs to smaller utilities and co-operatives.

The Cold War: A World History
by Odd Arne Westad
Published 4 Sep 2017

US military assistance to Britain and France intensified, as did US determination to re-arm West Germany. Nuclear weapons programs were put into high gear. Perhaps most important was the perception, promoted by the Eisenhower Administration, that US commitment to protect associates abroad had to be total. The Cold War was a zero-sum game. Any further reasoning invited enemy attack. The Korean armistice was signed almost exactly three years after the war broke out. The Communist powers accepted most of the proposals that had been holding up negotiations before. It had been a useless and terrible war for everyone involved. Worse, though, were the consequences for Korea itself.

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The Vietnamese Communists could also count on the assistance of the Communist Chinese next door and on Soviet help. But successive American Administrations believed that the United States had to act to avoid a Communist victory in Indochina. The domino theory, first invented for China, was moved to Vietnam. To them, the Cold War was a zero-sum game, in which a loss for one side was a gain for the other. And the Soviet Union, or, even worse, China, was seen as controlling Vietnamese Communism and standing to gain through its success. INSIDE VIETNAM THINGS looked rather different. For Ho Chi Minh and those who had worked with him in the Communist movement of Vietnam since the 1920s, the 1954 Geneva Conference had been a disaster.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona , Tim Heath , Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc
Published 15 Feb 2010

Since its regeneration in the 1970s and 1980s, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor has spawned copycat leisure spaces around the world (Yang 2006: 102–7) The spread of this formula raises doubts about the competitive edge that can be attained. If the result is that all cities ultimately look similar, then a consequence is loss of identity and that pursuing distinctiveness as a competitive strategy becomes a zero-sum game (see Sklair 2006b). In the specific case of iconic buildings, Sklair (2006a: 37) refers to the problems of oversupply (and hence diminishing returns) and of undersupply: ‘… a delicate balancing act to perform in its efforts to feed the stream of iconic buildings, spaces and architects, in the knowledge that too few means the loss of profits but too many means the devaluation of the currency of iconic architecture.’

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Each step reflects a change in the public authority's attitude to involvement, starting from autocratic and journeying through manipulative, technical, enabling, and collaborative, to confrontational; the last because an alternative seat of decision-making and power is suggested by devolving powers to an autonomous body. In this respect, design is no different to any other area of public policy. Assuming a zero-sum game, the more power transferred to local populations, the less power resides in the hands of those financing, developing, designing and politically sanctioning the project. More generally, this may also mean empowering those on the right-hand side of McGlynn's powergram (see Chapter 10). Power is a complex phenomenon and has been extensively theorised (see Lukes 1975), but is best considered to be multi- rather than uni-dimensional.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

Since President Trump took office in 2017, the conflict between the two countries has evolved into a full-blown trade and technology war, leaving companies and other governments to navigate the uneasy terrain between them. The US and China both view technological supremacy as a key to economic and political dominance and regard each other as strategic rivals with whom they are locked in a geopolitical conflict. This dynamic has converted the digital economy into a zero-sum game between the two countries with little space for collaboration and compromise and hastened the decoupling of Chinese and US technology assets. It has also galvanized an increasingly techno-nationalist response in other jurisdictions, including in the European Union (EU), as trust in global technology supply chains has eroded and governments around the world are hastening their efforts to safeguard access to key technologies in the midst of growing US–China tensions.

…

This outlook pushes governments to adopt policies that maximize their technological self-sufficiency, which in turn feeds techno-nationalist policies aimed at greater decoupling of digital regimes. In particular, a near-term resolution of the US–China tech war seems unlikely as tensions between the two powers persist. The US and China continue to view each other as economic and geopolitical rivals and approach their technological competition as a zero-sum game where an advantage for one side is a loss for the other. In contrast, the horizontal conflict between the US and the EU shows signs of abating as the domestic preferences in the US are shifting toward those prevailing in the EU. The growing demand for China’s state-driven regulatory model across the world further enhances the likelihood that the US will increasingly align itself with the EU—a trend that is already underway.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 2 Jul 2009

“They link price to profit, and they grossly overestimate profit margins.” The skyrocketing cost of fuel and food in mid-2008 seemed to confirm our deepest fears that unchecked inflation would be our ruin. Now we really were paying too much! And how could we not worry given that in recent years corporate profits and wages had become a zero-sum game? Despite astonishing productivity growth, median family income, adjusting for inflation, dropped by $1,175 between 2000 and 2007, at the same time that average family spending on basic expenses grew $4,655. Meanwhile, corporate profits doubled. As the gross domestic product ballooned, ordinary Americans lost both ground and faith—and rising prices seemed to be at the heart of the matter.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

A group of criminals open financial accounts that improve their respective credit ratings by transferring funds among themselves. Since the money transfers take place only between these accounts, the fraudsters need not spend any real money in conducting these transactions; they play their own little zero-sum game. Once each account has built up its own supposedly legitimate record, they strike, taking out loans, grabbing the money, and running. These schemes can be detected only by way of social data to reveal that the network of transactors is a closed group. Naturally, criminals respond by growing more creative.

The Wisdom of Crowds
by James Surowiecki
Published 1 Jan 2004

But given that logic, tipping, and especially tipping strangers, is a resolutely prosocial behavior, and one that the shadow of the future alone cannot explain. Why are we willing to cooperate with those we barely know? I like Robert Wright’s answer, which is that over time, we have learned that trade and exchange are games in which everyone can end up gaining, rather than zero-sum games in which there’s always a winner and a loser. But the “we” here is, of course, ill defined, since different cultures have dramatically different ideas about trust and cooperation and the kindness of strangers. In the next section, I want to argue that one of the things that account for those differences is something that is rarely associated with trust or cooperation: capitalism.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
by David Callahan
Published 1 Jan 2004

He concluded from his own experience that nearly all the students who are cheating are those with an "excessively demanding parent."2 The knowledge that some students are cheating creates angst on the part of other students and may fuel their own cheating—what researchers call "the cheating effect." Students at Stuyvesant perceive college admissions as a zero-sum game in which another student's gain is your loss. "You're simply competing with your classmates for a spot at a school," says Meijer, who is now at Amherst. "Harvard only takes a certain number of students from Stuyvesant each year." HORACE MANN AND Stuyvesant High Schools are unusually competitive places, but more and more students are under the kinds of pressures found at these schools.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

In other words, the long-term trend in our modern lives is that most goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore most goods and services are candidates for rental and sharing. The downside to the traditional rental business is the “rival” nature of physical goods. Rival means that there is a zero-sum game; only one rival prevails. If I am renting your boat, no one else can. If I rent a bag to you, I cannot rent the same bag to another. In order to grow a rental business of physical things, the owner has to keep buying more boats or bags. But, of course, intangible goods and services don’t work this way.

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
by Garry Kasparov
Published 1 May 2017

The question is whether or not there is a type of cognitive opportunity cost. Having seen this entire process in action in a relatively quantifiable way thanks to chess, I think this is undeniable, but also that it isn’t necessarily negative if we are aware of it. I reject the notion that everything must be a zero-sum game in which for every cognitive gain there is a corresponding loss. Big changes in how we manage our minds can, and often do, result in net positives. As with other aspects of what I call upgrading our mental software, self-awareness is the vital ingredient. I’ve already mentioned how having a Grandmaster-strength computer in your home or pocket has encouraged the appearance of strong players around the world.

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market
by Scott Patterson
Published 11 Jun 2012

Every reasonably sophisticated firm, including Trading Machines, was putting orders into the market designed to earn the rebate. That posed a conundrum for the exchanges, Bodek theorized, because everyone couldn’t get the rebate. Everyone couldn’t win, because for every winner there had to be a loser. It was a zero-sum game—simple math. And so, Bodek reasoned, a complex system was designed to pick winners and losers. It was done through speed and exotic order types. If you didn’t know which orders to use, and when to use them, you lost nearly every time. Which is exactly what happened to Trading Machines. Worse, if you weren’t getting the rebate, you were paying the fee.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jun 2011

The Spitfire is one of countless examples of these unlikely ideas, which range from the sublime (the mathematician and gambler Gerolamo Cardano first explored the idea of ‘imaginary numbers’ in 1545; these apparently useless curiosities later turned out to be essential for developing radio, television and computing) to the ridiculous (in 1928, Alexander Fleming didn’t keep his laboratory clean, and ended up discovering the world’s first antibiotic in a contaminated Petri dish). We might be tempted to think of such projects as lottery tickets, because they pay off rarely and spectacularly. They’re rather better than that, in fact. Lotteries are a zero-sum game – all they do is redistribute existing resources, whereas research and development can make everyone better off. And unlike lottery tickets, bold innovation projects do not have a known payoff and a fixed probability of victory. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, calls such projects ‘positive black swans’.

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again
by Nicholas Dunbar
Published 11 Jul 2011

The first line of defense that Basel market rules required was a team of independent risk managers within the banks, with enough clout to stand up to profit-hungry CEOs—precisely the opposite of the sort of people the Richmond Fed encountered at BofA. If that barrier is breached, what is the next line of defense? For a deposit-insured commercial bank, it is the regulator who can force it to hold a risk capital reserve. Prudent regulation and trading profits are a zero-sum game: if the regulator demands more capital, there is less PV to be shared out between bankers and shareholders. At the level of individual deals, the Basel VAR-based capital rules became an incentive for banks to “prove” that replication worked in order to reduce VAR and hence reduce the “tax” that cut into their immediate profits.

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
by William Poundstone
Published 18 Sep 2006

Collectively, active investors must do no better or worse (before fees and taxes) than the passive investors. Some active investors do better than others, as we all know. Every active investor hopes to do better than the others. One thing’s for sure. Everyone can’t do “better than average.” Active investing is therefore a zero-sum game. The only way for one active investor to do better than average is for another active investor to do worse than average. You can’t squirm out of this conclusion by imagining that the active investors’ profits come at the expense of those wimpy passive investors who settle for average return. The average return of the passive investors is exactly the same as that of the active investors, for the reason just outlined.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Jan 1997

Not that this troubles Robert Venturi. He has said he can’t see much point in building grand public spaces anymore, now that television makes it possible to watch other people without leaving home. As Venturi’s comment suggests, the relationship between the information society and architecture may resemble a zero sum game. The culture of information is ultimately hostile to architecture, as it is to anything that can’t be readily translated into its terms—to the whole of the undigitizable world, everything that the promoters of cyberspace like to refer to as RL (for “real life”). And yet notice how even these people are drawn to architectural and spatial metaphors, as if to acknowledge that, even now, architecture holds an enviable, inextinguishable claim on our sense of reality.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

But if Kinky Friedman bought a passel of television ads, would it boost his name recognition scores from zero percent to five percent (because TV ads are worth five points)? From zero percent to 25% (because they’d indicate he was a serious contender)? From zero percent to zero percent (because nobody will ever take him seriously)? It’s hard enough to measure the effect of a simple action on the wider social world. It’s practically impossible in a hard-fought zero-sum game like a political race. But while time taken out to record ads is crucial, most of the candidate’s days are spent on what’s now called “earned media” (the old term, “free media,” was deemed misleading because it required too much work to really be “free”). These are the endless series of bogus campaign “events” held in the hopes of persuading some reporter to write about it or, even better, some television station to cover it.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future
by Levi Tillemann
Published 20 Jan 2015

The world is on the cusp of a physical revolution that could make our roads safe, clean, fast, and efficient—and could free our society from the shackles of oil. We simply need to reach out and grasp it. These changes are part of a broader transformation and decarbonization of the global economy in the twenty-first century that is in fact quite urgent. In this sense, victory in the Great Race, and in the $70 trillion global economy, is not a zero-sum game—at least not necessarily. At the end of the day, this sprint to build the car of the future is a race we all run together. That “we” is not only Americans, Japanese, and Chinese, but all of humanity and life on earth itself. And the sooner we cross the finish line, the better. * * * I. Anegawa had laid a sturdy foundation and the support for Japan’s EV program now extended to the very top of Japan’s ruling hierarchy.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

Governments were determined to hang on to as much money as possible, by prohibiting the export of precious metals, and by promoting exports and prohibiting imports. The flaws in this strategy, a precursor of protectionism, are many and varied. If countries hoard gold, how will their trading partners have enough money to buy their goods? The approach also assumes that trade is a zero-sum game, which it is not. Imagine how inefficient it would be if a country tried to produce everything it consumed, from apples to yachts. It is far better for countries to specialize and to produce what they are best at (or least worst at). Some argue that the Chinese and German governments are pursuing mercantilist policies today by piling up trade surpluses without any regard for the effect on their neighbours.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
by Stephen R. Covey
Published 9 Nov 2004

Competition, not cooperation, lies at the core of the educational process. Cooperation, in fact, is usually associated with cheating. Another powerful programming agent is athletics, particularly for young men in their high school or college years. Often they develop the basic paradigm that life is a big game, a zero sum game where some win and some lose. "Winning" is "beating" in the athletic arena. Another agent is law. We live in a litigious society. The first thing many people think about when they get into trouble is suing someone, taking them to court, "winning" at someone else's expense. But defensive minds are neither creative nor cooperative.

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
by Julia Angwin
Published 25 Feb 2014

The two are sometimes considered to be at odds with each other. After all, we are constantly being asked to give up privacy in the name of security. Consider just a few instances: airport body scanners, programs to scan the Internet for terrorist keywords, cameras on every street corner. “We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game,’” Ed Giorgio, a security consultant who used to work at the NSA, once told the New Yorker. But in fact privacy is nothing without security. “We have to cast aside the notion that our liberty and our security are two opposing values that are on the opposite sides of a seesaw, that when one is up the other necessarily must be down,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano in a 2012 speech.

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Blyth
Published 24 Apr 2013

If anything, it’s the absence of the state in the repo markets that’s worth commenting upon, since the absence of the state’s guarantee of insurance explains the system’s vulnerability to a bank run. 11. Assets are tied to the economy and can be a win-win thing for both buyer and seller. Derivatives are a zero-sum game in which only the bank makes money on both sides of the trade since one person’s payout is another’s loss. I thank Bruce Chadwick for this succinct formulation. 12. Futures and forwards typically allow purchasers to hedge against future price movements; swaps typically allow the trading of risks; options confer the right to buy or sell something in the future. 13.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
by K. Eric Drexler
Published 6 May 2013

As nations expand industrial capacity, carbon emissions rise. Expectations of resource scarcity drive wars and preparations for war as tensions grow over water from rivers, metals from Africa, oil from the Middle East, and fresh oil fields beneath the South China Sea. Everywhere progress and growth are beginning to resemble zero-sum games. The familiar, expected future of scarcity and conflict looks bleak. These familiar expectations assume that the technology we use to produce things will remain little changed. But what if industrial production as we know it can be changed beyond recognition or replaced outright? The consequences would change almost everything else, and this new industrial revolution is visible on the horizon.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

The mission had been just a hair’s breadth away from being a total loss, but this mission was described as a success. Rogers went to both teams to talk about the missions. He found that the members of the second team were steadfast in their belief that theirs had been a successful mission: they didn’t see that they’d just gotten lucky. They saw successes and failures as a zero-sum game: the other guys had lost, and they’d won. With the tragedy of Columbia still fresh in everyone’s mind, Rogers took the briefing reports to his bosses at Goddard, suggesting they conduct a study to determine how near-miss bias might affect NASA decision making. They agreed, but they didn’t even know who could run such a study.

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems
by Irene Aldridge
Published 1 Dec 2009

The advantages of highfrequency trading in the developing electronic markets are two-fold: r First-to-market high-frequency traders in the newly electronic markets are likely to capture significant premiums on their speculative activity simply because of the lack of competition. r In the long term, none of the markets is a zero-sum game. The diverse nature of market participants ensures that all players are able to extract value according to their own metrics. CHAPTER 5 Evaluating Performance of High-Frequency Strategies he field of strategy performance measurement is quite diverse. Many different metrics have been developed over time to illuminate a strategy’s performance.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton
Published 8 Jun 2020

Since our lawmakers have not yet had the benefit of seeing MMT’s insights, they view debt service as a growing financial burden on the federal government. That’s a mistake. In truth, paying interest on government bonds is no more difficult than processing any other payment. To pay the interest, the Federal Reserve simply credits the appropriate bank account. Right now, Congress looks at the federal budget as a zero-sum game. Lawmakers look at rising interest expenditure the way we might look at a rising cable bill—it means less money to spend on everything else. So, when the CBO says that the federal government is on track to “spend more on interest payments than the entire discretionary budget, which includes defense and all domestic programs, by 2046,” many lawmakers begin to panic.15 They think it shrinks the amount of money that’s left over, forcing them to spend less on other priorities.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
by Anne Case and Angus Deaton
Published 17 Mar 2020

Lower growth sharpens the fight over resources, it gives each group incentives to lobby to get more than its share, and it poisons politics, much of which is concerned with the division of resources. Since 1970, growth has predominantly gone to those who are already better off, who are much better equipped to defend their share. When people feel they must protect their economic position in a tougher world, they divert their time and their resources to the zero-sum game of distribution and away from the positive-sum game of innovation and growth. Rent-seeking replaces creation, and we can get into a vicious circle that impoverishes everyone. Today, the facts about income inequality are widely known, that those in the middle and bottom of the distribution have gained very little while those above the middle, and especially those at the very top—the famous 1 percent—have done very well indeed.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

It has … given those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination a platform to project their bigotry.… The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”26 A variant is that free expression in the real world is a zero-sum game. “Granting speech opportunities to some often denies speech opportunities to others,” a law professor wrote in 2018.27 The most straightforward claim—the oldest and simplest argument against free expression—is that toleration allows people to say bad and wrong things: “For too long, a flawed notion of ‘free speech’ has allowed individuals in positions of power to spread racist pseudoscience in academic institutions, dehumanizing and subjugating people of color and gender minorities,” a Middlebury student wrote in 2017.28 Or, as a university administrator wrote, “Free speech protections … should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.”29 And so on, and on.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 26 Jan 2017

He outlined, long before the recent epidemic of mass killings, the temptations and perils of privatized violence against the powers that be. He also affirmed early a now widespread view of society as a war of all against all, which has turned politics in even democratic countries into an existential struggle, a zero-sum game of all or nothing with few moral restraints, while inciting disaffected individuals worldwide into copycat acts of extreme violence against their supposed enemies. The beliefs and practices of this ‘lone wolf’ connect him to apparently very disparate and incongruous people, including the sworn enemies of the United States.

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
by Kathi Weeks
Published 8 Sep 2011

But there is more to it: freedom is also a creative practice, what Zerilli describes as a collective practice of world building and Brown characterizes in terms of a desire “to participate in shaping the conditions and terms of life,” a longing “to generate futures together rather than navigate or survive them” (1995, 4). Freedom thus depends on collective action rather than individual will, and this is what makes it political. Though freedom is, by this account, a relational practice, it is not a zero-sum game in which the more one has, the less another can enjoy. Freedom considered as a matter of individual self-determination or self-sovereignty is reduced to a solipsistic phenomenon. Rather, as a world-building practice, freedom is a social—and hence necessarily political—endeavor. It is, as Marx might put it, a species-being rather than an individual capacity; or, as Zerilli contends, drawing on an Arendtian formulation, freedom requires plurality (2005, 20).

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Published 20 Mar 2018

Gravity is not watching us and saying, ‘Uh-oh those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I’m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.’ Gravity doesn’t care about us at all.” The cosmos stretched far and wide, with plenty of room for lots of companies to live long and prosper. The business of space didn’t have to be a zero-sum game. “Oftentimes, it’s very natural to think of business competition like a sporting event,” Bezos said during a Q & A with Alan Boyle of Geekwire at an annual space conference in 2016. “Somebody leaves the arena a winner, and somebody leaves the arena a loser. In business, it’s usually a little different from that.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
by Saifedean Ammous
Published 23 Mar 2018

But once sound money was destroyed, it became very easy for these criminals to take over power and take command of all of their society's resources by increasing the supply of unsound money. Unsound money makes government power potentially unlimited, with large consequences to every individual, forcing politics to the center stage of their life and redirecting much of society's energy and resources to the zero‐sum game of who gets to rule and how. Sound money, on the other hand, makes the form of government a question with limited consequences. A democracy, republic, or monarchy are all restrained by sound money, allowing most individuals a large degree of freedom in their personal life. Whether in the Soviet or capitalist economies, the notion of the government “running” or “managing” the economy to achieve economic goals is viewed as good and necessary.

Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

Executives who cut jobs aggressively are often rewarded with a temporary run-up in their stock price. But in the long run, they are not only undermining morale but sacrificing the innovation, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the heartfelt commitment of the very people who could elevate the company to greater heights. What many in business don’t realize is that it’s not a zero-sum game. Treating employees benevolently shouldn’t be viewed as an added cost that cuts into profits, but as a powerful energizer that can grow the enterprise into something far greater than one leader could envision. With pride in their work, Starbucks people are less likely to leave. Our turnover rate is less than half the industry average, which not only saves money but strengthens our bond with customers.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Instead, it remained with the businessowners and executives, a phenomenon known as the “decoupling” of wages from productivity.35 Since the 2007–2009 financial crisis, US productivity growth has fallen to the meager level of 1.3 percent per year. That is a problem, because it means it is not possible to grow the pie for everyone anymore. The distribution of today's economic gains is a quasi-zero-sum game. Other countries, such as Germany, Denmark, and Japan, have kept up productivity gains better and translated them also in higher wages. But the trendline is unmistakable: productivity gains in the West are experiencing a marked decline. Taken together, the indicators presented in this chapter—growth, interest rates, debt, and productivity—point to a systemic design error in the Western economic development model.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

I’m not an enthusiast for Marxist alternatives to capitalism, but few match Marx’s perceptiveness as an analyst of its structure. 104. Overton 1996. 105. Durand 2017. 106. Harvey 2010. 107. WDI n.d. 108. See, for example, Lawton, Graham (2017) ‘Effortless Thinking: Why Life Is More Than a Zero-Sum Game,’ New Scientist, 3156:28. 109. Ricardo 1817, 83. 110. See, for example, Hickel 2017; Milanovic 2016. 111. Heilbroner 1999, 99. 112. For example, Allen 1992; Dyer 2012. 113. The pioneering work is Wallerstein 1974. 114. Hobsbawm 1976; Rodney 1972. 115. Bagchi 2009. 116. Cronon 1991; Wallerstein 1974. 117. 

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

This is the common thread that binds these American thinkers from different eras and ideologies. They’re all pointing out that there’s an enormous difference between working off a debt and repaying one. Working off debt has its place in our capitalist tradition, but it belongs in the realm of zero-sum games about the efficient division of resources. Civic service belongs to an entirely different tradition, our democratic one. In this realm, our task is not to divide scarce material resources but to grow a shared spiritual one. In our democratic tradition, like our gift-giving one, when we show others that we value them, we become better ourselves.

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
by Matt Alt
Published 14 Apr 2020

Supporters quickly labeled any who attempted to push back against them online as “betas,” “cucks” (cuckolds), or “social justice warriors,” which in Gamergate’s twisted vernacular meant a man who espoused progressive stances for the sole purpose of tricking women into sleeping with him. Fueling it all was the deep-seated belief that feminism was a zero-sum game. It was bad enough that women were hell-bent on stripping all the fun out of life for boys in the real world, with all the political correctness and sensitivity training and forced inclusiveness. Now they were coming for the video games! The irony, of course, was that women had always been there.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Instead, it remained with the businessowners and executives, a phenomenon known as the “decoupling” of wages from productivity.35 Since the 2007–2009 financial crisis, US productivity growth has fallen to the meager level of 1.3 percent per year. That is a problem, because it means it is not possible to grow the pie for everyone anymore. The distribution of today's economic gains is a quasi-zero-sum game. Other countries, such as Germany, Denmark, and Japan, have kept up productivity gains better and translated them also in higher wages. But the trendline is unmistakable: productivity gains in the West are experiencing a marked decline. Taken together, the indicators presented in this chapter—growth, interest rates, debt, and productivity—point to a systemic design error in the Western economic development model.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
Published 10 Mar 2009

In turning CAFE into an environmental issue prosecuted solely by the major national environmental groups, environmentalists came to concern themselves with the automobile only insofar as gasoline goes into it and pollution comes out of it, and they failed to address any of the larger dynamics that were driving the failure of American automakers to produce competitive, efficient, and innovative automobiles. They transformed CAFE from a win-win proposition that had helped both to get the American auto industry back on its feet and to reduce pollution in the 1970s and 1980s into a zero-sum game in which either the environment, represented by environmentalists, or the auto industry and auto workers, represented by the UAW and the Big Three, would win. The conventional wisdom today is that the auto industry and the UAW “won” the CAFE fight. And in the literal, interest-group view of the fight, they did.

Why Buddhism is True
by Robert Wright

My various genes are in the same intergenerational boat (i.e., my genome) and so can profit (in the Darwinian sense of surviving and proliferating through the generations) by cooperating with one another. This, one could argue, is the reason my toes and my nose both feel like part of me: because the genes for my toes and for my nose are playing a highly non-zero-sum game—and, perhaps more to the point, because they have a non-zero-sum relationship with the genes for the brain that is considering them part of me. †trees also lack self, and so do rocks: The use of the term not-self to denote the absence of essence has one notable implication. Vipassana meditation, as we’ve seen, is intended to foster clear apprehension of the “three marks of existence”—to help us see that things in general are characterized by three properties, one of which is not-self.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Published 14 Apr 2001

In the single year of 1927, for example, while still a mere instructor at the University of Berlin, von Neumann had put the newly emerging theory of quantum mechanics on a rigorous mathematical footing; established new links between formal logical systems and the foundations of mathematics; and cre- ated a whole new branch of mathematics known as game theory, a way of ana- lyzing how people make decisions when they are competing with each other (among other things, this field gave us the term "zero-sum game"). Indeed, Janos Neumann, as he was known in his native Budapest, had been just as remarkable a prodigy as Norbert Wiener. The oldest of three sons born to a wealthy Jewish banker and his wife, he was enthralled by the beauty of mathe- matics from the beginning. He would discuss set theory and number theory on long walks with his childhood friend Eugene Wigner, himself destined to be- come a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

…

Let's admit that we've all been playing a little too much in the sandbox, and let's quit thinking that applications are somehow at odds with pure research. Instead, let's start making common cause with the engineers-and start taking responsibility for our own future. "[The] new modus operandi. . . will not, over a long period, be a zero-sum game," Lick wrote with determined optimism. "It takes advantage of every demonstrated success to increase both the basic research and application budget." Yes, he wrote, there will be a significant shift in the com- munity's center of gravity, from pure research toward engineering. "[But] the shift will give the university research groups an engineering arm, a marketplace, cus- tomers, users.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

To be sure, the towns and cities were themselves shaped by the countryside: immigrants from the fields brought with them values, habits, and attitudes that made more sense on the land and then set them as a straitjacket on urban activity. Thus the organization of tradesmen and craftsmen in corporate guilds assumed a zero-sum game—one man’s increase was another’s diminution—like pieces in a bounded field. Besides, the urban setting itself made it necessary to ration space and time, again with an eye to discouraging self-aggrandizement. So, no stealing a march and selling before a certain hour or after another; no price competition; no trade-off of quality and solidity for cheapness; no buying low (“jewing down,” in popular parlance—bad habits always belong to someone else) to sell high; in short, no market competition.

…

The economic objectives were to control entry, typically via obligatory apprenticeship and limitations on mastership; to uphold quality standards (no amateurs or “botchers” (bunglers) allowed); and to restrict competition both within (limitations on size of workshop and numbers employed) and without (prohibition of nonguild manufacture within the jurisdiction and exclusion of all imports from outside). Behind this array of rules lay a set of moral principles, themselves derived from the values of the rural village community and transposed to the urban context. Two considerations dominated: first, the sense of limited resources, whether in land or custom (market demand), hence of a zero-sum game (one person’s gain is someone else’s loss); and second, the priority of moral criteria over commercial. So long as a craftsman did his work conscientiously and to standard, he was entitled to a living. Against this good worker ethic, however, beat the forces of greed and ambition—the morality of market and money.

On Thermonuclear War
by Herman Kahn
Published 16 Jul 2007

The treatment of real uncertainty is somewhat controversial, but we believe actually fairly well understood, practically. It is handled mainly by what we call, "Contingency Design." Uncertainty Due to Enemy Reaction. This uncertainty is a curious and baffling mixture of statistical and real uncertainty, complicated by the fact that we are playing a non-zero-sum game.5 It is often very difficult to treat satisfactorily. A reasonable guiding principle seems to be (at least for a rich country), to compromise designs so as to be prepared for the possibility that the enemy is bright, knowledgeable, and malevolent, and yet be able to exploit the situation if the enemy fails in any of these qualities.

…

This is sometimes an awful prospect and, in addition, plainly pessimistic, so one may wish to design against a "rational" rather than a malevolent enemy; but as much as possible, one should carry some insurance against the latter possibility. (The quotation from Techniques of Systems Analysis ends here.) 4 See the discussion on committees on pages 120-124. 5 The terminology "non-zero-sum game," refers to any conflict situation where there are gains to be achieved if the contenders cooperate. Among other things, this introduces the possibilities of implicit or explicit bargaining between the two contenders. Many of our concepts of deterrence come out of the notion that the game we are playing with Russia is non-zero-sum. 6.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
Published 24 Nov 2011

It would offer a positive vision of what we can strive for—a society in which all human beings of all races are treated with dignity, and have the right to food, shelter, health care, education, and security.62 This expansive vision could open the door to meaningful alliances between poor and working-class people of all colors, who could begin to see their interests as aligned, rather than in conflict—no longer in competition for scarce resources in a zero-sum game. A human rights movement, King believed, held revolutionary potential. Speaking at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff retreat in May 1967, he told SCLC staff, who were concerned that the Civil Rights Movement had lost its steam and its direction, “It is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights.”

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio
by William J. Bernstein
Published 26 Apr 2002

I certainly don’t recommend this as an investment strategy, but it’s an excellent example of the dangers of chasing performance, because of the tendency for asset classes to “mean-revert,” that is, to follow good performance with bad, and vice versa. Watching the Cookie Jar As you can see, the conflict of interest between you and your fund company is just as direct as that between you and your broker. You are engaged in a zero-sum game with both—every dollar in fees and commissions paid to a fund company or broker is a dollar irretrievably lost to you. But the brokerage industry has one big advantage over the fund industry; the river of cash flowing to the broker is much better hidden than the management fees paid to the fund company.

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff
by Christine S. Richard
Published 26 Apr 2010

Huge swings in the price of that protection over the last year meant that this hypothetical person would have gained and lost massive fortunes. “On paper, the value of the trade peaked north of $2.6 billion” and had lost about half its value since, Brown wrote. “The reality is that for the guys who play in this $45-trillion zero-sum game, $30 million is chump change. It’s also why, given the amount of money that can be made here, people will go to no ends insisting the company will be broke in mere weeks.” FOR NOW, ALL EYES WERE ON Ambac and whether Wall Street could organize a bailout. To Bill Gross, who runs one of the world’s biggest bond funds at Pacific Investment Management Company, the premise was absurd.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

Many of the insights embodied in the five forces, resource-based, and hypercompetition models remain valid, but two new realities are now shaking up the world of strategy. First, firms that understand how platforms work can now intentionally manipulate network effects to remake markets, not just respond to them. The implicit assumption in traditional business strategy that competition is a zero-sum game is far less applicable in the world of platforms. Rather than re-dividing a pie of more-or-less static size, platform businesses often grow the pie (as, for example, Amazon has done by innovating new models, such as self-publishing and publishing on demand, within the traditional book industry) or create an alternative pie that taps new markets and sources of supply (as Airbnb and Uber have done alongside the traditional hotel and taxi industries).

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
by Jacqueline Novogratz
Published 15 Feb 2009

I don’t think you could accept that.” “You’re assuming those in power necessarily oppress the rest,” I said. She just looked at me blankly. Her fear and paranoia summed up the insecurity of a small elite trying fanatically to hold on to power in a society based on a strictly Hobbesian worldview. Power ruled in a zero-sum game. In one sentence, Agnes laid out her view of Rwanda: “Those who had the power, who didn’t want to let it go, had to use any means necessary not to lose it; and those who wanted it also had to use any means to get it.” As I listened, I realized there was only so much I could learn from her.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
by Pedro Domingos
Published 21 Sep 2015

The European Union’s Court of Justice has decreed that people have the right to be forgotten, but they also have the right to remember, whether it’s with their neurons or a hard disk. So do companies, and up to a point, the interests of users, data gatherers, and advertisers are aligned. Wasted attention benefits no one, and better data makes better products. Privacy is not a zero-sum game, even though it’s often treated like one. Companies that host the digital you and data unions are what a mature future of data in society looks like to me. Whether we’ll get there is an open question. Today, most people are unaware of both how much data about them is being gathered and what the potential costs and benefits are.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

Bezos said that he did not view Amazon and eBay as fighting a winner-take-all battle. “Our job is to grow the e-commerce pie and if we do that there is going to be room for five Amazons and five eBays,” Bezos said. “I’ve never said a negative thing about eBay and I never will. I don’t want anyone to view this as a zero-sum game.” That year, eBay’s stock lost over half its market value, and in July, Amazon’s valuation surpassed eBay’s for the first time in nearly a decade. Bezos had now accomplished many of his early goals, like turning Amazon into the primary storefront on the Web. The website was selling more kinds of things—and just generally selling more things—than ever before.

The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con
by Amy Reading
Published 6 Mar 2012

What happened next depended on the exact form of chicanery in which each bucket shop indulged. All orders were “bucketed”; that is, none of them were exercised on a legitimate exchange. Such orders were side bets between a customer and the bucket shop on the fluctuations of prices on the stock ticker, a zero-sum game in which the bucket shop took the other side of the customer’s “trade” and almost invariably profited by it through a menu of tricks. If the price referenced by a buy order went down by even a small amount, the customer’s margin would be swallowed up, and the order would be closed out. A bucket shopper could simply fake the prices he displayed on the board.

The Global Money Markets
by Frank J. Fabozzi , Steven V. Mann and Moorad Choudhry
Published 14 Jul 2002

The payoff of the forward contract for the long position on the expiration date is simply the difference between the price of the underlying minus the forward price. Conversely, the payoff of the forward contract for the short position on the expiration date is the difference between the forward price minus the price of the underlying. Clearly, a forward contract is a zero-sum game. Now that we have introduced forward contracts, it is a short walk to futures contracts. FUTURES CONTRACTS A futures contract is a legal agreement between a buyer (seller) and an established exchange or its clearinghouse in which the buyer (seller) agrees to take (make) delivery of something at a specified price at the end of designated period.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Moises Naim
Published 5 Mar 2013

These are the dynamics that unfold at international conferences and summit meetings, and they have an impact on the outcome. Keeping tabs on them is more than a matter of jingoism or attachment to bygone ways: it does make a difference. But the decay of power means that obsessing about which great power is on the rise and which one is declining, as if geopolitics in the end reduced to a zero-sum game among a global elite, is a red herring. Yes, each issue on which they face off is significant on its own merits. The alignment of military forces between the United States, Russia, and China is certainly worthy of concern. So is the nature of China’s response to American entreaties that it manage its currency differently.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

However, it makes no sense to believe that the price of commodities such as oil will rise indefinitely based on an expanding China, because the price of oil will eventually reach a height where it acts to slow China’s factories. Further, the hype about China’s manufacturing prowess and its exploding oil demand misses a basic point: the shift of global manufacturing to China is essentially a zero-sum game. Commodity prices should reflect overall manufacturing output and overall demand for oil, but neither is in fact rising sharply. Even though China’s share of global manufacturing has risen dramatically in the last two decades, from 4 to 17 percent, the manufacturing share of the global economy has fallen in the same period, from 23 to 17 percent, largely at the expense of Europe, Japan, and the United States.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

As Woodstock had marked the entrance of the Baby Boom generation onto the American public scene, the crash of 2008 marked its spectacular exit, along with the archetypal political type of their era: the “Happy Warrior.” Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes—they avoided confrontation when they could. Their Baby Boom supporters did not view politics as a “zero-sum game.” If a cynic is one who, as Oscar Wilde said, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, the Boomers were the opposite. They knew the value of everything and the price of nothing. But that could not last. The debt crisis was a sign that the United States was nearing the limits of its ingenuity in finding new ways to borrow money.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

The political vision of Koinonia, much like the Simple Way, was about particularity, and the spiritually transformative power of living out reconciliation in a specific place, through the daily work of living and loving, and tending, with other people. Societal transformation was, they suggested, something that works itself out at that scale, but it seems obvious, of course, from this vantage point that this is not, and never was, a zero-sum game. As I watched Briars in the Cotton Patch in the empty, fluorescent-buzzing classroom, I stumbled into an intersecting story I hadn’t anticipated: Linda and Millard Fuller had a watershed moment themselves in their mid-twenties. They sold all their things and traveled around United States in their camper van, trying to find a community.

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us
by Carole Hooven
Published 12 Jul 2021

AGGRESSION AND SEXUAL SELECTION In most species, males do not all have the same level of sexual access to mates. It’s just a fact of life that there are reproductive—and thus evolutionary—winners and losers. Wisdom 11, the red deer stag from the previous chapter, was a big winner. And the more he wins, the more others lose: there are only so many fertile hinds to go around. Hinds, however, play no such zero-sum game. While they may compete for resources like food that impact reproductive success, they don’t need to fight among themselves for mates. That would be a risky strategy with little benefit. In other animals, like humans, females do compete for mates, but the competition tends to be less physically risky than for males.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff
Published 5 Jan 2018

* * * Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by decree in the United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the Obama administration, with a recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs. During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier joined the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher, assembled a list of more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred days.

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump
by James Naughtie
Published 1 Apr 2020

There’s no compromise position. So that’s an understandable but unfortunate political dynamic. And similarly with votes on judges. If one judge has a radically different vision of the constitution from another, and those constitutional theories map out onto the separated parties, then in effect you do have a zero-sum game on judicial appointments as well. The conservative Federalist Society provides Trump with a regularly updated list of judges at all levels in the system whom they deem right-minded on constitutional questions – that is, that the judicial system, above all the Supreme Court itself, should concern itself with setting limits on government power, rather than with being an instrument for modernity and change.

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old
by Andrew Steele
Published 24 Dec 2020

Mice engineered to have both extra telomerase and three additional DNA-defending genes, which encourage cells to die or go senescent if they’ve got pre-cancerous mutations, lived 40 per cent longer on average than unmodified mice. This offers a ray of hope – the battle between cancer and ageing seems not to be a zero-sum game, where every victory over one results in death by the other. In a complex biological system, ramping up two competing effects can – and in this case, does – synergise to give a net benefit. A follow-up experiment tried a different kind of gene therapy in adult mice. The mice were injected with billions of viruses* which, rather than causing an infection, delivered an extra, temporary telomerase gene to their cells.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

The project, Szabolcs noted, involves a consortium of three companies; two are Chinese, and one is owned by Orban’s childhood friend, the billionaire Mészáros. “So it’s quite clear what the scheme is.” I asked Szabolcs if he thought Orban was worried about his exposure, the leverage that others might have on him given his corruption. He said that this was precisely why power was such a zero-sum game for Orban. “I think he’s reached a point of no return in a sense that he’s involved in so many corrupt dealings with the Chinese and Russians that there’s no way back for him. He cannot turn his back because he’s going to be stabbed by them. And also with his schoolmate being the richest businessman in Hungary, and his son-in-law and daughter having hundreds of millions of dollars.

Legacy of Empire
by Gardner Thompson

The observation of Palestinian-born historian Walid Khalidi is pertinent here. The Western public’s attitude to the Palestine conflict, he wrote in 1971, seems to be characterised by ‘a certain aversion to the task of identifying the roles of the protagonists, and an almost grateful acceptance of the topsy-turvy versions put about’.15 This is not a troubling, zero-sum, game: recognition of one people’s ‘history’ does not exclude recognition of another’s. The opposite is the case. A prerequisite for moving towards reconciliation is sympathetic imagination, applied on behalf of all involved. These include not only the colonisers – many, of the first generation, traumatised survivors of the Holocaust – but also the colonised and dispossessed.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder
Published 2 Apr 2018

“Son of a bitch”: Aric Jenkins, “Read President Trump’s NFL Speech on National Anthem Protests,” Time, Sept. 23, 2017. See Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady (London: Continuum, 2006). Insofar as the American politics Michael I. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 6, no. 215, 2011; Kelly and Enns, “Inequality and the Dynamics of Public Opinion”; Victor Tan Chen, “Getting Ahead by Hard Work,” July 18, 2015. When asked about health insurance on May 24, 2017, the congressional candidate Greg Gianforte physically attacked the reporter.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

DON’T TAKE ALL THE PIE FOR YOURSELF Corporations exist to promote the common good. They do so by channeling our work into productive avenues, from growing crops to building houses to inventing new technologies. Their goal is to create value and increase the size of the economic pie. When the pie gets bigger, everyone can have more of it. It is not a zero-sum game. But there is nothing inevitable about just how much of that extra pie goes to one group versus another. One piece might go to the corporation’s executives, another might go to the workers, another might go to the corporation’s customers, and perhaps another piece might go to society. But all too often, corporate executives take the lion’s share of the pie and leave only crumbs for others.

Market Risk Analysis, Quantitative Methods in Finance
by Carol Alexander
Published 2 Jan 2007

At the time of writing this foreword, the total notional size of all derivative products exceeds $500 trillion whereas, in rough figures, the bond and money markets stand at about $80 trillion, the equity markets half that and loans half that again. Credit derivatives by themselves are climbing through the $30 trillion mark. These derivative markets are zero-sum games; they are all about market risk management – hedging, arbitrage and speculation. This does not mean, however, that all market risk management problems have been resolved. We may have developed the means and the techniques, but we do not necessarily Foreword xxi understand how to address the problems.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

Everyone is better off living in the midst of plenty, To some people, this point is obvious—an economic axiom that doesn't deserve highlighting. But to many others, economic growth is seen as highly suspect if not outright dangerous. This is particularly true of many environmentalists, who see a zero-sum game of more economic growth automatically translating into more damage to the environment. With the increasing environmental anxiety about global warming, this no-growth or slow-growth attitude could become more ascendant. So the "Grow more" principle needs elaboration here. First, taken as a whole, the world is a pretty poor place.

Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2006

In sharp contrast, the political stakes were higher and sharper in the countries in which organized labor was a pillar of the incorporating party or movement: Argentina (PJ), Mexico (PRI), Peru (APRA), and Venezuela (AD). Such high stakes were fueled by each of these parties in their effort to become the dominant political force. Actors not identified with, or uncomfortable with, the pro-labor party felt excluded and came to see politics as a zero-sum game: they win, we lose. How did the fight for shares impact policy? If we consider inflation as a proxy for the intensity of the distributive conflict, countries that saw labor incorporated through populist parties (Argentina and Peru) suffered the highest rates. Countries with radical populist parties (Mexico, Venezuela, and those countries with traditional two-party systems, although not Uruguay) had the lowest inflation rates (see figure 6.2).

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

It is almost irresistibly tempting to see Watt’s life as the embodiment of the entire Industrial Revolution. An improbable number of events in his life exemplify the great themes of British technological ascendancy. One, of course, was his early experience with the reactionary nature of a guild economy, whose raison d’être was the medieval belief that the acquisition of knowledge was a zero-sum game; put another way, the belief that expertise lost value whenever it was shared. Another, as we shall see, was his future as the world’s most prominent and articulate defender of the innovator’s property rights. But the most seductive of all was Watt’s simultaneous residence in the worlds of pure and applied science—of physics and engineering.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Indeed, even the exercise of trying to separate the virtuous plutocrats from the venal ones, and to treat them differently, is an invitation to precisely the sort of rent-seeking that creates the “wrong” kind of wealth in the first place. As Emmanuel Saez, the economist who tracks the 1 percent, told me, “It’s probably true that some activities are truly creative, like a normal market, while others are more zero-sum game.” But deciding which was which was a different story: “I would say it is very hard who is going to make that case. I don’t think anyone would be comfortable having the government decide this is a good business and this is a bad business, and the bad business punish it with, say, special taxes.

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
by Dariusz Jemielniak
Published 13 May 2014

Jemielniak, 2009). Similarly, it creates pathologies, as organizational actors understand how the system works and act accordingly (for example, by working late to create a better impression). Moreover, even though Wikipedia is a voluntary community and geared to collaboration rather than playing a zero-sum game, the problem with editcountitis is exacerbated by friendly competition. Even users whose organizational status cannot change as a result of their edit count (for example, because they are well established or are already administrators) still often compete with another on doing something quicker.

It's Our Turn to Eat
by Michela Wrong
Published 9 Apr 2009

Another way is to play the ethnic identity card: ‘And that,’ says Collier, ‘is incredibly easy.’ Analyst Gerard Prunier has christened Kenya's post-independence system of rule a form of ‘ethno-elitism’.7 A pattern of competing ethnic elites, rotating over time, was established which made a mockery of the notion of equal opportunity. This was viewed as a zero-sum game, with one group's gain inevitably entailing another's loss. In Francophone Africa, the approach is captured in one pithy phrase: ‘Ote-toi de la, que je m'y mette’ – ‘Shift yourself, so I can take your place.’ In Anglophone Africa, the expression is cruder, bringing to mind snouts rooting in troughs: ‘It's our turn to eat.’

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

As a program manager in 1961, Taylor was responsible for several areas of research funding, one of them called “manned flight control systems.” Another colleague in the same funding office was responsible for “automatic control systems.” The two got along well enough, but they were locked in a bitter budgetary zero-sum game. Taylor began to understand the arguments his colleagues made in support of automated control, though he was responsible for mastering arguments for manned control. His best card in the debate was that he had the astronauts on his side and they had tremendous clout. NASA’s corps of astronauts had mostly been test pilots.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

While there are political and financially motivated disagreements, when it comes to standards development, the process has thus far fostered globally shared interest in maintaining a functioning Internet. This ethic of shared interest, however, becomes more difficult in dealing with property rights and other scarce resources on the Internet. The Internet may be seemingly infinite in size, but it still has zero-sum games. Identifiers such as IP addresses and domains have to be unique—the Internet wouldn’t work if multiple parties attempted to use the same IP address or wanted to resolve a domain name to a competing address. One of the earliest oversight roles was apportioning these numbers and names. What emerged was the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a collaborative effort of the US government and the early researchers who had developed the original technology.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery
Published 12 Nov 2013

It taints central cities, where systems have been reconfigured for speed—not just in neighborhoods lacerated by freeways but also on avenues where traffic signals, asphalt, and sidewalks have been redesigned to favor travelers passing through in private vehicles over the people who live there. Dispersal has drawn cities into a zero-sum game: as it distilled and privatized some material comforts in detached suburban homes, it off-loaded danger and unpleasantness to the streets of dense cities. It reverberates in the car horns that wake Brooklynites at dawn, and it gets sucked into the lungs of Manhattanites who choose to walk to work.* It seeps into once-quiet neighborhoods in suburban Los Angeles, where long-distance commuters barrel through residential streets to avoid now-congested freeways, and children have been banned from playing street ball.

Panderer to Power
by Frederick Sheehan
Published 21 Oct 2009

Keep it up.” 34 Martin Mayer, The Fed, (New York: The Free Press, 2001) pp. 138–139. 35Alan Greenspan, “Financial Derivatives,” speech at the Futures Industry Association, Boca Raton, Florida, March 19, 1999. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. Greenspan also stated that “derivatives are mainly a zero sum game.”39 He appeared inattentive to the scandal and joke of Wall Street bookkeeping. This would be expressed by Paul Volcker in 2006. In mock confusion, Volcker asked why it was that derivatives were the only financial instrument with no losers. Everyone wins.40 He was referring to Wall Street earnings reports, which consistently showed banks profiting from derivatives trading quarter after quarter.

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth
by Tom Burgis
Published 24 Mar 2015

They simply ditched their political demands from the years of ‘freedom fighting’. The Delta is the scene of the most direct struggle for a share of Nigeria’s oil. But the same struggle has consumed the entire Nigerian political system. As in Africa’s other resource states, there is a finite pot of oil – or gold, or copper, or diamonds – so it is a zero-sum game: for me to win, you must lose. Umaru Yar’Adua lured the warlords from the creeks with the classic bargain of the rentier state: pledge yourself to the status quo, and we shall cut you in on the resource money. It is the unspoken pact that governs Nigeria – and that catalyses the oil of the Delta into the violence that stalks the nation.

Finance and the Good Society
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2012

According to an 1881 summary of its prospectus, its purpose was “to inculcate, among other things, the immorality of acquiring wealth by winning it from others rather than by earning it through service to others.”2 Here Wharton was on to a fundamental truth about nance: it is not, and should not be, merely a zero-sum game, but rather an adjunct to, and a means toward, a productive life. Wharton’s was not the rst business school in the United States, but its predecessors were not university-a liated and were strictly vocational, teaching only basic business skills. An even older example of a business school was Bryant and Stratton College, founded in 1854 and incorporating the earlier Folsom Business College.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

The constant pressure for quarterly earnings makes each cut to scientific investment look rational at the time, but the long-range consequences are chilling—both medically for all of us and economically for the millions of Americans who are exiled from relatively prosperous sectors into low-paying ser vice jobs, or worse. Is it any wonder that those outside finance feel like they are bickering over slices of a shrinking pie?42 The finance sector at present is more invested in positional competition for buying power than in increasing goods and ser vices available to buy.43 This is a zero-sum game in which the goal is not sustainable investment or the construction of lasting value, but complex risk-shifting that mulcts the unwary. The self-seeking might be excusable if its leading exemplars weren’t so abjectly dependent on public subvention to stay afloat. Given their too-big-to-fail status, we should expect far more in the way of public ser vice from these critical financial firms than we are currently getting.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 23 Aug 1996

Bernoulli's theory of utility reveals an asymmetry that explains why an even-Steven game like this is an unattractive proposition. The 50 ducats that the losing player would drop have greater utility than the 50 ducats that the winner would pocket. Just as with the pile of bricks, los ing 50 ducats hurts the loser more than gaining 50 ducats pleases the winner.* In a mathematical sense a zero-sum game is a loser's game when it is valued in terms of utility. The best decision for both is to refuse to play this game. Bernoulli uses his example to warn gamblers that they will suffer a loss of utility even in a fair game. This depressing result, he points out, is: Nature's admonition to avoid the dice altogether ....

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

Since then, it has been flat.28 This has heralded a radical change in American politics: Citizens never especially liked politicians—and yet they did, by and large, trust that elected officials would stick to their end of the deal, and that their lives would keep getting better as a result. Today, that trust and that optimism have evaporated. As citizens have grown deeply anxious about the future, they have started to see politics as a zero-sum game—one in which any gain for immigrants or ethnic minorities will come at their expense.29 This is exacerbating a second difference between the comparatively stable past and the increasingly chaotic present. All through the history of democratic stability, one racial or ethnic group has been dominant.

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market
by Nicholas Wapshott
Published 2 Aug 2021

The intervention of the Fed tended to reduce interest rates, leading to a stimulation of investment that would otherwise not have taken place, as well as “an upward capitalization of the value of existing assets,”62 which in turn promoted “a certain expansionary influence on consumer spending, and in a degree on business spending for investment.”63 But the newly created money could not be compared with new money “created by gold mining or money created by the printing press of national governments or the Fed and used to finance public expenditures in excess of tax receipts.”64 In many respects the action of the Fed was a zero-sum game, “taking from the system an almost equal quantum of money substitutes in the form of government securities.”65 By buying its own assets, the Fed was “merely a dealer in secondhand assets, contriving transfer exchanges of one type of asset for another, and in the process affecting the interest rate structure that constitutes the terms of trade among them,” whereas the creation of newly mined gold and the printing of money by the state left the community “permanently richer in its ownership of monetary wealth.”

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

Agency for International Development spearheads a Digital Connectivity and Cybersecurity Partnership “to advance an open digital economy and the expansion of secure, market-driven, and rules-based internet use.”60 Yet its focus is largely limited to the Indo-Pacific, and its $25 million funding ($26.5 million initial funding so far) is a pittance compared to what China is spending to install digital infrastructure in developing countries.61 (Huawei’s Kenyan data center alone cost $173 million.)62 Going forward, we should appreciate that building this back-end infrastructure—especially in places like Africa—is effectively a zero-sum game with China. If we don’t do it, China will. Right now, it’s China—and Beijing’s “aid” comes with major strings attached, often leaving the recipients mired in debt traps and increasingly dependent on the Chinese Communist Party. Providing assistance and financing that authentically empower recipient governments and local populations could help shift the economic orientations of nations that would prefer to be less entwined with China.

Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings
by Earl Swift
Published 5 Jul 2021

Later still: “Hey, Joe, you never did tell me that drill was that important. Just tell me that it’s that important, and then I’ll feel a lot better.” Allen finally responded: “It’s that important, Dave.” And indeed, they extracted a core sample offering a detailed record of geologic events spanning eons. But lunar stays are necessarily zero-sum games, and the delay, along with the promise of struggling further with the drill at the EVA’s end, cut into the time available for the third drive. When they finally got going, their last excursion was sure to be truncated. Scott and Irwin headed west, straight toward the Hadley Rille, moving along at a brisk five miles an hour, and discovered that, while the surface was smooth and relatively free of rocks, it rose and fell like Saharan dunes.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
by Johann Hari
Published 1 Jan 2018

She thought there was something wrong with her. But as she began to read about envy, she realized that our culture was priming her to feel this way. She had been raised to constantly compete and compare, she said. “We’re highly individualistic,” she explained, and we’re constantly told that life is a “zero sum game. There’s only so many pieces of the pie, so if somebody else has success, or beauty, or whatever, somehow it leaves less for you. Or if you can get it, too, it’s less meaningful if all these other people have it.” We are trained to think that life is a fight for scarce resources—“even if it’s for something like intelligence, when there’s no limit to how much human intelligence can grow across the world.”

Invisible Women
by Caroline Criado Perez
Published 12 Mar 2019

If both SMD and PR quotas were adhered to, the South Korean parliament would be around 33.6% female. As it is, female representation currently stands at 15.7%. It’s not hard to see why there’s such a stark difference in quota compliance between the two systems: FPTP and SMD electoral systems are a zero-sum game.34 Winner takes all. And so while on a macro level all-women shortlists in such systems are a fair corrective to an unfair system, on a micro level they certainly feel less fair – particularly to the specific man who wasn’t even allowed to compete. This was the argument of two rejected Labour candidates, Peter Jepson and Roger Dyas-Elliott.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

The good news is that the legitimate grievances of so many, and the political forces that fed on these grievances, have ignited a renewed public faith in collective action. What we’ve come to recognize is that bad jobs are not a law of nature to be obeyed but a societal construct to be remedied. What I also hope we’ve come to recognize is that work is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers. On the contrary, work in a free-market democracy is meant to shrink, not grow, inequality. While education and expertise are always good things, we should pull back from our too-tight focus on “skills above all.” It’s not enough to train people to try to stay one step ahead of the machines.

The Push: A Climber's Search for the Path
by Tommy Caldwell
Published 15 May 2017

Some people did not like the idea of sport climbers “polluting” their favorite crags with bolts. No one ever confronted my dad directly, and that’s probably a good thing. He was beyond his steroid days, but he was still a massive physical presence who held his beliefs firmly and would have stood up to anyone who challenged him. My dad refused to see climbing as a zero-sum game. In his mind, there was room enough for everyone, every style, and every type of climbing. This open-minded approach cost him friends. It seems weird now—why couldn’t people from a mountain background also embrace the gymnastic style and techniques of sport climbing? After all, in addition to having more fun, those who could combine new-school skills with a big-route mind-set might just change the game entirely.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition)
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 5 Jan 2015

CAPITALIZATION-WEIGHTED INDEXING REMAINS AT THE TOP OF THE CLASS In conclusion, capitalization-weighted indexing is unlikely to be deposed as the overwhelming favorite in the battle for index supremacy. Even if markets were inefficient, departing from the weightings given by the market as a whole would have to be a zero-sum game. All the stocks in the market must be held by someone. If some investors hold portfolios that do better than the market, it must follow that some other investors hold portfolios that do worse. Because of their greater costs, however, active management or “smart” indexing must be a negative-sum game.

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets
by Donald MacKenzie
Published 24 May 2021

Once electronic competition was fully in place, says RZ, “most of the people that were on the [SEC] staff thought that we could probably get rid of the trade-through rule [order protection] in three years because it would’ve done its work already.” Instead of that happening, though, Reg NMS became largely locked in place. To alter it fundamentally is dauntingly difficult, for reasons that are in a broad sense political, even if not “party political.” “On every NMS issue,” explains RZ, “it’s a zero-sum game”: There’s winners and losers, and the people that have gained something fought to keep it [Reg NMS and order protection]. And the people that had lost something fought to change it. Then you had a succession of [SEC] commissioners that were either too busy or just didn’t understand it well enough to have the confidence to weigh into this brutal dogfight.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

Instead, as Mulheirn says, the pernicious decision was made to cut Housing Benefit, which penalised private renters instead of limiting what landlords could ask them to pay. Understanding how Housing First can be applied more broadly, but grasping its potential, ‘demands politicians who have an understanding of human dignity’, Kaakinen said before we ended our Zoom call. This is not a zero-sum game. Ending this emergency requires the joined-up approach that has been so missing. Putting housing first is an operating principle and a philosophy. It is an exercise in utopian thinking which centres on the importance of the home and the right to housing and, in doing so, shows us what’s possible when there is a political commitment. 13 Out of Options Sugar Hill Close and Wordsworth Drive, Oulton Council: Leeds City Council Average House Price: In the year 2020/21 the majority of sales in Oulton were detached properties, selling for an average of £410,261.

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them
by Dan Bouk
Published 22 Aug 2022