zero-sum game Concepts

The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine

by Yaroslav Trofimov · 9 Sep 2008 · 304pp · 87,031 words

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

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

by Kathi Weeks · 8 Sep 2011 · 350pp · 110,764 words

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

The Gated City (Kindle Single)

by Ryan Avent · 30 Aug 2011 · 112pp · 30,160 words

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

Paint Your Town Red

by Matthew Brown · 14 Jun 2021

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

Protecting Pollinators

by Jodi Helmer · 15 Nov 2019 · 249pp · 66,546 words

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

The European Union

by John Pinder and Simon Usherwood · 1 Jan 2001 · 193pp · 48,066 words

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

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on Our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide

by Luke Hart and Ryan Hart · 15 Jul 2018 · 174pp · 52,064 words

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

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States

by Bernadette Hanlon · 18 Dec 2009

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

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity

by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods · 13 Jul 2020

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

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism

by Eric Hobsbawm · 5 Sep 2011 · 621pp · 157,263 words

and unchallengeable both in theory and practice. None of this is tenable any longer. The twentieth-century attempts to treat world history as an economic zero-sum game between private and public, pure individualism and pure collectivism, have not survived the manifest bankruptcy of the Soviet economy and of the economy of ‘market

The end of history and the last man

by Francis Fukuyama · 28 Feb 2006 · 446pp · 578 words

come to regard it as nothing more than a commodity to be sold, or when workers and managers see each other as antagonists in a zero-sum game, rather than as potential collaborators in competition with workers and managers in another country.19 Just as culture affects the ability of countries to establish

Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation

by Serhii Plokhy · 9 Oct 2017 · 476pp · 138,420 words

Stalin in their Kazakhstan exile. RUSSIA’S RETURN TO PRIMACY IN THE 1930S CAME AT THE EXPENSE of many other Soviet nationalities. It was a zero-sum game that began in the wake of the war scare of 1927 with Poland and reached its peak in the months leading up to the outbreak

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

by Erik Brynjolfsson · 23 Jan 2012 · 72pp · 21,361 words

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

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport · 5 Jan 2016

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

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic

by Rachel Clarke · 26 Jan 2021 · 199pp · 63,844 words

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

How to Hygge: The Secrets of Nordic Living

by Signe Johansen · 19 Oct 2016 · 194pp · 49,649 words

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

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture

by Marvin Harris · 1 Dec 1974 · 206pp · 67,030 words

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

Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen · 9 Jan 2018 · 215pp · 61,435 words

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

Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War

by Micah Goodman · 17 Sep 2018 · 225pp · 64,595 words

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

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

by Rose Hackman · 27 Mar 2023

’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

Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone

by Mark Goulston M. D. and Keith Ferrazzi · 31 Aug 2009

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

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders

by Jason L. Riley · 14 May 2008 · 196pp · 53,627 words

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

Antisemitism: Here and Now

by Deborah E. Lipstadt · 29 Jan 2019 · 276pp · 71,950 words

” 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

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah · 27 Aug 2018 · 285pp · 83,682 words

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

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander · 24 Nov 2011 · 467pp · 116,902 words

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

Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings

by Earl Swift · 5 Jul 2021 · 410pp · 120,234 words

’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

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World

by Shaun Rein · 27 Mar 2012 · 251pp · 63,630 words

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

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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

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series)

by James Bloodworth · 18 May 2016 · 82pp · 21,414 words

. 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

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

by Sarah Kendzior · 6 Apr 2020

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 Global Money Markets

by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann and Moorad Choudhry · 14 Jul 2002

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

Secrets of the Sprakkar

by Eliza Reid · 15 Jul 2021

misogyny that is garbed in the language of competitive spirit or a “plainspoken” approach. These are men who realize that gender equality is not a zero-sum game where they stand to lose if they support women too overtly. Quite the opposite, in fact: companies with more gender balance do better on their

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America

by Steven Johnson · 26 Dec 2008 · 200pp · 60,987 words

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

Designing for the Social Web

by Joshua Porter · 18 May 2008 · 201pp · 21,180 words

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

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City

by Jack Brown · 14 Jul 2021 · 101pp · 24,949 words

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

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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

How Long Will Israel Survive Threat Wthn

by Gregg Carlstrom · 14 Oct 2017 · 337pp · 100,541 words

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

The River of Lost Footsteps

by Thant Myint-U · 14 Apr 2006

isolation that has kept Burma in poverty; isolation that fuels a negative, almost xenophobic nationalism; isolation that makes the Burmese army see everything as a zero-sum game and any change as filled with peril; isolation that has made any conclusion to the war so elusive, hardening differences; and isolation that has weakened

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together

by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin · 21 Jun 2023 · 248pp · 73,689 words

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

Demystifying Smart Cities

by Anders Lisdorf

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

Milton Friedman: A Biography

by Lanny Ebenstein · 23 Jan 2007 · 298pp · 95,668 words

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

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?

by David de Cremer · 25 May 2020 · 241pp · 70,307 words

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

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 · 22 May 2017 · 198pp · 52,089 words

, 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

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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 Signal: Watch Out for the Darkness

by Nick Cook · 11 Jul 2018 · 112pp · 28,314 words

,’ 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

Things That Matter: Overcoming Distraction to Pursue a More Meaningful Life

by Joshua Becker · 19 Apr 2022 · 215pp · 62,479 words

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

The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow

by Gil Troy · 14 Apr 2018 · 649pp · 185,618 words

,” for the Montreal Gazette. Some anti-Zionists caricatured the op-ed as a confession: “I am a racist.” Troy responded that identity is not a zero-sum game; if Palestinians and their supporters continue perceiving any affirmation of Jewish nationalism as an attack, there will never be peace. He followed up by writing

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell · 21 Jan 2020 · 450pp · 113,173 words

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

Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

by Rachel Clarke · 14 Sep 2017 · 255pp · 80,190 words

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

The Other Israel: voices of refusal and dissent

by Tom Śegev, Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin · 15 Nov 2002 · 221pp · 67,240 words

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

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy

by David A. Mindell · 12 Oct 2015 · 265pp · 74,807 words

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

Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America's Mexican Migrants

by Ted Conover · 10 Jan 2013 · 301pp · 97,199 words

, 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

Automating Inequality

by Virginia Eubanks · 294pp · 77,356 words

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

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

by Joshua B. Freeman · 27 Feb 2018 · 538pp · 145,243 words

. At least in theory, scientific management, or Taylorism as it was sometimes called, made the struggle between workers and owners over wages no longer a zero-sum game. For this reason, in the eyes of many Progressive Era reformers, scientific management held the promise of eliminating or at least ameliorating the class conflict

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

by Robert Lane Greene · 8 Mar 2011 · 319pp · 95,854 words

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

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier · 28 May 2018 · 151pp · 39,757 words

, 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

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

by Lena Dunham · 28 Sep 2014

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

The Push: A Climber's Search for the Path

by Tommy Caldwell · 15 May 2017

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

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

by Lawrence Lessig · 14 Jul 2001 · 494pp · 142,285 words

the superstore can't help but reduce sales in the smaller shops. But to stop here in the analysis is to make the story a zero-sum game when it is far too soon to know the net effect. The emergence of Amazon.com and the like has created a boom in demand

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order

by Bruno Macaes · 25 Jan 2018 · 287pp · 95,152 words

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

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities

by Alain Bertaud · 9 Nov 2018 · 769pp · 169,096 words

assessment of the matter. Concern for the Loss of Agricultural Land Often cities must expand into valuable agricultural land, which might appear to be a zero-sum game between the area devoted to agriculture and the area occupied by cities. Because the reduction of agricultural area is linked in people’s mind to

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back

by Guy Shrubsole · 1 May 2019 · 505pp · 133,661 words

. Locke ignored common forms of land ownership, the inherent scarcity of land on a finite planet, and how taking private possession of it becomes a zero-sum game. Over the past century and a half, Locke’s detractors have grown in number, reopening conversations about land. ‘Land differs from all other forms of

Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America

by Erik Baker · 13 Jan 2025 · 362pp · 132,186 words

, on plunder as well as productivity.7 Entrepreneurial developmentalism, like other species of Cold War-era modernization theory, insisted that capitalist growth was a non-zero-sum game.8 Since development was as much a psychological as a material process, there was no reason in theory why underdeveloped regions could not catch up

The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business

by Christopher Leonard · 18 Feb 2014 · 444pp · 128,701 words

tough time truly comprehending the mathematic realities of the payment scheme. Chief among these hard mathematical truths is the fact that the tournament is a zero-sum game. The figure “AFC” represents the weighted-average cost of all the flocks in the tournament, and that’s the benchmark used for the ranking. Farmers

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis

by Benjamin Kunkel · 11 Mar 2014 · 142pp · 45,733 words

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

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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

Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy

by John Lewis · 22 Jul 2014 · 183pp · 54,731 words

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 Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich

by Ndongo Sylla · 21 Jan 2014 · 193pp · 63,618 words

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

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

by Walter Scheidel · 17 Jan 2017 · 775pp · 208,604 words

state class likewise resulted in massive turnover and asset transfers. Within elite circles, this constant churn turned the pursuit of power and wealth into a zero-sum game: for some to gain, others had to lose. The dynamics of violent fortune-building and redistribution served as a constraint on the concentration of elite

I Love Capitalism!: An American Story

by Ken Langone · 14 May 2018

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

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions

by Lee Freeman-Shor · 8 Sep 2015 · 121pp · 31,813 words

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

The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World

by Philip Coggan · 1 Jul 2025 · 96pp · 36,083 words

best at making shoes and the blacksmith iron tools, Portugal could be best at making wine and England at producing wool. Trade is not a zero-sum game in which one side must lose. To take Smith’s example, the English end up with both wine and textiles; the Portuguese with textiles and

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US also recognised that Europeans would make great customers for its industries. American leaders of the time were well aware that trade was not a zero-sum game. They signed up to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which came into effect in 1948, to reduce trade barriers. Two groups of

When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World

by Jordan Thomas · 27 May 2025 · 347pp · 105,327 words

hear from them. We listen to them and alter our projects based on their concerns. But there are other groups who view this as a zero-sum game. They won’t walk through the forest with us. And they won’t settle. They always take us to court.” In Santa Barbara, the groups

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 · 20 Nov 2003

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

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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

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak

by Rosie Wilby · 26 May 2021 · 227pp · 67,264 words

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

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

by Tim Wu · 2 Nov 2010 · 418pp · 128,965 words

, the more inducement for the consumer to buy a radio, and the more income for the industry. But once advertisements were introduced, radio became a zero-sum game for the attention of listeners. Each station wanted the largest possible audience listening to its programming and its advertisements. In this way advertising made rivals

Free Speech And Why It Matters

by Andrew Doyle · 24 Feb 2021 · 137pp · 35,041 words

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

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy

by Dr. Jim Taylor · 9 Sep 2008 · 256pp · 15,765 words

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

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places

by Paul Collier · 9 Feb 2010 · 264pp · 74,313 words

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

Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite

by Carne Ross · 25 Apr 2007 · 212pp · 68,690 words

. 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

Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson · 22 Oct 2018 · 492pp · 141,544 words

’t have to worry about every crazy idea the Chinese choose to pursue.” “Don’t we?” “I don’t think so. It’s not a zero-sum game.” “But what if there are people in Washington who think it is—wouldn’t they come up here and try to do something about it

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn

by Chris Hughes · 20 Feb 2018 · 173pp · 53,564 words

, 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

Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

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

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

by Jacqueline Novogratz · 15 Feb 2009 · 391pp · 117,984 words

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

Water: A Biography

by Giulio Boccaletti · 13 Sep 2021 · 485pp · 133,655 words

. 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

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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

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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

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)

by Tim Marshall · 10 Oct 2016 · 306pp · 79,537 words

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

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community

by Marc J. Dunkelman · 3 Aug 2014 · 327pp · 88,121 words

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

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change

by Ronald Cohen · 1 Jul 2020 · 276pp · 59,165 words

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

The Googlization of Everything:

by Siva Vaidhyanathan · 1 Jan 2010 · 281pp · 95,852 words

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

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: 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

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales From Neurosurgery

by Frank Vertosick · 1 Jan 1996 · 250pp · 75,586 words

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

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it

by Dom Nozzi · 15 Dec 2003 · 282pp · 69,481 words

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

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life

by Bernard Roth · 6 Jul 2015 · 231pp · 73,818 words

.” 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

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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

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age

by Manuel Castells · 19 Aug 2012 · 291pp · 90,200 words

, 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

The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals

by Daniel R. Solin · 7 Nov 2006

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

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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

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

by Michael Pollan · 15 Jan 1997 · 317pp · 107,653 words

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

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted

by Daniel Sokatch · 18 Oct 2021 · 556pp · 95,955 words

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

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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

Legacy of Empire

by Gardner Thompson · 427pp · 114,531 words

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

Brave New World of Work

by Ulrich Beck · 15 Jan 2000 · 236pp · 67,953 words

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

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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

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

by Charles Montgomery · 12 Nov 2013 · 432pp · 124,635 words

, 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

In Defense of Global Capitalism

by Johan Norberg · 1 Jan 2001 · 233pp · 75,712 words

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

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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

Sundiver

by David Brin · 15 Jan 1995 · 367pp · 99,711 words

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

Empire of Guns

by Priya Satia · 10 Apr 2018 · 927pp · 216,549 words

entire nation in fear of invasion and that was understood as defense of property on a national scale. To eighteenth-century Britons, war was a zero-sum game to protect state property and the property relations ushered in by 1689. This was why disarmament was so galling to many: by denying Englishmen the

Life Will Be the Death of Me: ...And You Too!

by Chelsea Handler · 8 Apr 2019 · 211pp · 66,203 words

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

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel

by Max Blumenthal · 27 Nov 2012 · 840pp · 224,391 words

? And this was a question that troubled them. They could not answer it.” The state had supplied the answer where many parents could not. “The zero sum game begins around kindergarten,” Gur said. “The games of opposites—night is opposite of day—the concept of opposites are emphasized in early stages. That reinforces

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

by Andrew Blum · 28 May 2012 · 314pp · 83,631 words

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

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think

by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley · 1 Jan 2006 · 286pp · 90,530 words

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

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

by Gaia Vince · 22 Aug 2022 · 302pp · 92,206 words

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

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia

by Adrian Shirk · 15 Mar 2022 · 358pp · 118,810 words

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

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

by Carl Benedikt Frey · 17 Jun 2019 · 626pp · 167,836 words

political rights. And the economic logic of many Parliamentary decisions was still guided by the flawed doctrine of mercantilism: the belief that trade is a zero-sum game. Some acts of Parliament prohibited the exportation of machinery and the emigration of artisans. Others were passed to protect British commerce and manufacturing from foreign

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante · 9 Sep 2019

could double the budget of the National Institutes of Health and set forty thousand scientists to work on lifesaving medicines. Human ingenuity is not a zero-sum game. Longer, healthier lives will do us little good if we consume ourselves into oblivion. The imperative is clear: whether or not we increase human longevity

Globalists

by Quinn Slobodian · 16 Mar 2018 · 451pp · 142,662 words

, including the ordoliberals Böhm and Eucken, they perceived that there was an “inherent tendency of nationalism to subvert economic policy of democratic states into a zero-sum game.”186 Tumlir adopted their insight that the masses capture the state under conditions of democracy. After this point, the state “ceases to be a government

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

by Kathryn Paige Harden · 20 Sep 2021 · 375pp · 102,166 words

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

The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets

by Alan Boss · 3 Feb 2009 · 221pp · 61,146 words

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

The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

by Mehrsa Baradaran · 14 Sep 2017 · 520pp · 153,517 words

://www.prri.org /wp-content/uploads/2015/11/PRRI-AVS-2015-Web.pdf; Michael L. Norton and Samuel R. Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing," Perspectives on Psychological Science 6(3) (2011): 215-218, http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20sommers.pdf. 6. Ben

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

by William Rosen · 31 May 2010 · 420pp · 124,202 words

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

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes

by Ian Leslie · 23 Feb 2021 · 280pp · 82,393 words

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

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, 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

CTOs at Work

by Scott Donaldson, Stanley Siegel and Gary Donaldson · 13 Jan 2012 · 458pp · 135,206 words

we've gotten to be so large that we're now an attractive target for others to recruit from, so that's at best a zero-sum game. But also, if you want to maintain freshness in technology, you've got to make sure you're not only talking to the experienced technologists

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy

by Benjamin Barber · 20 Apr 2010 · 454pp · 139,350 words

mediating third domain between the overgrown but increasingly ineffective state governmental and the metastasizing private market sectors. Our choices need not be limited by the zero-sum game between government and commercial markets in which growth for the one spells encroachment for the other: a massive statist bureaucracy or a massive McWorld. Although

Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project

by Karl Fogel · 13 Oct 2005

for avoiding common pitfalls of open source development, but also for dealing with the growth and maintenance of a successful project. Success is not a zero-sum game, and this book is not about winning or getting ahead of the competition. Indeed, an important part of running an open source project is working

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old

by Andrew Steele · 24 Dec 2020 · 399pp · 118,576 words

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

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

by Jenny Blake · 14 Jul 2016 · 292pp · 76,185 words

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

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs

by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson · 23 Mar 2011 · 512pp · 131,112 words

behaving more and more like center cities and metropolises embrace both as they become more polycentric. We should no longer consider ourselves players in a zero-sum game wherein a suburb’s gain is the city’s loss. Our research shows that the areas where suburban retrofits are most thriving—such as Washington

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug

by Augustine Sedgewick · 6 Apr 2020 · 668pp · 159,523 words

, “and it will no doubt bring the present system to an end.”30 The second law of thermodynamics cast the passage of time as a zero-sum game: energy versus entropy. Life was an opportunity for productivity, but time was wasting. Until the lights went out, what was required, productivists believed, was “a

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration

by Kent E. Calder · 28 Apr 2019

the Bretton Woods system, even as it weakens the West-centric “regulatory” foundations beneath it. The US-China relationship is by no means necessarily a zero-sum game. China’s distributive globalism, by promoting connectivity, is likely to 252 chapter 11 p romote more rapid international economic growth. It also, however, is provoking

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

by Adam Aleksic · 15 Jul 2025 · 278pp · 71,701 words

to a constant and increasing bombardment of stimuli that ultimately causes our attention spans to decline further (and further escalates the competition). It’s a zero-sum game against every other creator on the app, and success can come down to the smallest details. Each additional attention-grabbing strategy exponentially contributes to a

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

by Matt Ridley · 14 Aug 1993 · 474pp · 136,787 words

species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for another rival species. Van Valen’s mind went back to his childhood and lit upon

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability

by David Owen · 16 Sep 2009 · 313pp · 92,907 words

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

Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe · 26 Aug 2019 · 287pp · 92,194 words

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

The Flat White Economy

by Douglas McWilliams · 15 Feb 2015 · 193pp · 47,808 words

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

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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

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan · 8 Aug 2020 · 438pp · 84,256 words

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

The Wars of Afghanistan

by Peter Tomsen · 30 May 2011 · 1,118pp · 309,029 words

partnership” and signed an extradition treaty.7 Singh’s 2010 state visit to Saudi Arabia spotlighted the warming trend in Saudi-Indian relations. In the zero-sum game of Indo-Pakistani rivalry in the subcontinent, the visit was a gain for India at Pakistan’s expense. It contrasted with the tight Saudi-Pakistani

How to Fix Copyright

by William Patry · 3 Jan 2012 · 336pp · 90,749 words

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

Python for Finance

by Yuxing Yan · 24 Apr 2014 · 408pp · 85,118 words

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

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. 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

Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide

by Lonely Planet

– and use some 10% of the country's electricity. For the first time in the history of the Middle East, water is no longer a zero-sum game. In the mid-1960s, clashes between Israel and Syria over water rights almost led to war, and Israel has disagreements over water both with Jordan

The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy

by Brian Klaas · 15 Mar 2017

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

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle

by Jeff Flake · 31 Jul 2017 · 138pp · 43,748 words

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

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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

Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier · 29 Mar 2017

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

Capital Allocators: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest

by Ted Seides · 23 Mar 2021 · 199pp · 48,162 words

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

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

by Walter Scheidel · 14 Oct 2019 · 1,014pp · 237,531 words

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

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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

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

by Anne Case and Angus Deaton · 17 Mar 2020 · 421pp · 110,272 words

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

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency

by Vicky Spratt · 18 May 2022 · 371pp · 122,273 words

, 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

What's the Matter with White People

by Joan Walsh · 19 Jul 2012 · 284pp · 85,643 words

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

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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

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson · 14 Sep 2020 · 470pp · 137,882 words

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

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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

Trading in the Zone: Master the Market With Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude

by Mark J. Douglas · 1 Apr 2000 · 235pp · 74,577 words

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

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work

by Scott Berkun · 9 Sep 2013 · 361pp · 76,849 words

'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

Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear · 4 Mar 2008 · 623pp · 155,587 words

neutrino storm, Hans’ leadership instincts had always seemed acute. But Martin’s gut reaction to this pronouncement was abhorrence. To go up against crewmates in zero-sum games, physical exercises, competing for the physical affection of a few…he could think of no other words for them, prostitutes, whores, seemed as far wrong

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson · 5 Feb 2019 · 280pp · 83,299 words

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

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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

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

by Paul Collier · 26 Apr 2007 · 222pp · 75,561 words

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

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb · 16 Apr 2018 · 345pp · 75,660 words

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

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg · 31 Aug 2016 · 262pp · 66,800 words

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

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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

Age of Anger: A History of the Present

by Pankaj Mishra · 26 Jan 2017 · 410pp · 106,931 words

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

Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States

by Francis Fukuyama · 1 Jan 2006

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

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever

by Alex Kantrowitz · 6 Apr 2020 · 260pp · 67,823 words

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

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol

by Holly Glenn Whitaker · 9 Jan 2020 · 334pp · 109,882 words

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

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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 Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes

by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder and David Ashton · 3 Nov 2010 · 209pp · 80,086 words

, 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

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, 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 Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

by John Warrillow · 5 Feb 2015 · 186pp · 49,251 words

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

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy

by George Magnus · 10 Sep 2018 · 371pp · 98,534 words

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

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

by Bill Gates · 2 May 2022 · 406pp · 88,977 words

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

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

by Stephen Witt · 8 Apr 2025 · 260pp · 82,629 words

, and I got a good look at the large owl embroidered on the front of his sweater. “AI isn’t going to be interested in zero-sum games with us because there’s so much more to do in this universe. For example, if an artificial intelligence is trying to build a huge

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists

by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus · 10 Mar 2009 · 454pp · 107,163 words

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

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

by Nicholas Wapshott · 2 Aug 2021 · 453pp · 122,586 words

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

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher · 9 Oct 2017 · 223pp · 60,909 words

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

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

by Marc Levinson · 1 Jan 2006 · 477pp · 135,607 words

(The Case of the West Coast Ports)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2002), p. 86. Rabach’s assertion that port competition is a zero-sum game is not correct; as this study argues, declining costs throughout the transportation system have stimulated the flow of international trade. 11. UNCTAD, Review of Maritime

The End of Indexing: Six Structural Mega-Trends That Threaten Passive Investing

by Niels Jensen · 25 Mar 2018 · 205pp · 55,435 words

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

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia

by Dariusz Jemielniak · 13 May 2014 · 312pp · 93,504 words

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

The New Science of Asset Allocation: Risk Management in a Multi-Asset World

by Thomas Schneeweis, Garry B. Crowder and Hossein Kazemi · 8 Mar 2010 · 317pp · 106,130 words

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

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

by Stephen R. Covey · 9 Nov 2004 · 398pp · 108,026 words

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

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

by Sam Quinones · 20 Apr 2015 · 433pp · 129,636 words

heroin addicts, who were usually old and poor. A crew new to town had to steal customers from the crews who were already there. The zero-sum game that ensued taught the Xalisco Boys the importance of branding and marketing. To keep customers, they learned to emphasize customer service, discounts, the convenience and

One Up on Wall Street

by Peter Lynch · 11 May 2012

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

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment

by Guy Spier · 8 Sep 2014 · 240pp · 73,209 words

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

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Frederick Kempe · 30 Apr 2011 · 762pp · 206,865 words

the merits of their respective systems. Thompson complained about a January 6 speech in which Khrushchev had portrayed the U.S.–Soviet struggle as a zero-sum game of class struggle around the world. Yet the two men tangled in an amicable manner that reflected an improved atmosphere of cooperation. Khrushchev joked that

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

by Johann Hari · 1 Jan 2018 · 428pp · 126,013 words

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

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

by Christian Davenport · 20 Mar 2018 · 390pp · 108,171 words

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

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter · 9 Jan 2007 · 280pp · 82,623 words

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

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge · 14 May 2014 · 372pp · 92,477 words

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

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

by Talia Lavin · 14 Jul 2020 · 231pp · 71,299 words

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

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”: “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

Economic Dignity

by Gene Sperling · 14 Sep 2020 · 667pp · 149,811 words

a fundamentally inclusive vision. The premise is that these basic guarantees are universal goals that can be achievable for everyone—and not based on a zero-sum game where some people’s economic dignity must come at the expense of others. No doubt the elephant in the room—and in this book—is

Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century

by Jonathan Sacks · 19 Apr 2010 · 305pp · 97,214 words

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

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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

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

by Scott Anderson · 5 Aug 2013

the day. Among all the jockeying European powers at the close of the nineteenth century, there was a growing tendency to regard diplomacy as a zero-sum game—any accord between one’s competitors translated as a direct loss or threat to oneself—but nowhere was this tendency more pronounced than in Wilhelm

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

by Tom Vanderbilt · 5 Jan 2021 · 312pp · 92,131 words

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

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 · 14 Aug 2020 · 375pp · 105,586 words

. 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

Inner Entrepreneur: A Proven Path to Profit and Peace

by Grant Sabatier · 10 Mar 2025 · 442pp · 126,902 words

way to be a successful entrepreneur is to constantly outsmart your competition. But when you see your competition as the enemy, you enter into a zero-sum game where only one party can win. You don’t succeed at business by “winning”; you succeed by building something sustainable. Most markets and opportunities are

Why Buddhism is True

by Robert Wright

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

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?

by Ian Bremmer · 12 May 2010 · 247pp · 68,918 words

—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

On the Wrong Line: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain's Railways

by Christian Wolmar · 29 May 2005

at on this macro scale, the proclaimed benefits of the privatisation project are exposed as a ridiculous conceit. In effect, the railways are almost a zero-sum game. You can only increase the profit by reducing what is available for investment or raising the amount that you need to extract from taxpayers. There

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg · 11 Oct 2021 · 521pp · 118,183 words

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

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us

by Carole Hooven · 12 Jul 2021 · 372pp · 117,038 words

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

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

by Chrystia Freeland · 11 Oct 2012 · 481pp · 120,693 words

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

Money: Vintage Minis

by Yuval Noah Harari · 5 Apr 2018 · 97pp · 31,550 words

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

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How

by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang · 10 Mar 2020 · 257pp · 76,785 words

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

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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

Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success

by Greg Nudelman and Pabini Gabriel-Petit · 8 May 2011

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

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope

by John A. Allison · 20 Sep 2012 · 348pp · 99,383 words

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

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

by Seth G. Jones · 12 Apr 2009 · 566pp · 144,072 words

As early as 2001, the CIA had “detected serious rifts and competition between the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks.” One assessment reported: “Afghanistan truly is a zero sum game. Anytime anyone advances all others consider this to be at their expense.”47 Consequently, many have assumed that the insurgency was caused by interethnic grievances

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

by Emanuel Derman · 1 Jan 2004 · 313pp · 101,403 words

. 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

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

by John Markoff · 24 Aug 2015 · 413pp · 119,587 words

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

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy

by Dani Rodrik · 8 Oct 2017 · 322pp · 87,181 words

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

Forty Signs of Rain

by Kim Stanley Robinson · 29 May 2004 · 362pp · 104,308 words

—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

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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

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

by William J. Bernstein · 5 May 2009 · 565pp · 164,405 words

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

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"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

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes

by Mark Skousen · 22 Dec 2006 · 330pp · 77,729 words

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

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

by Ken Auletta · 1 Jan 2009 · 532pp · 139,706 words

. If old media gets with the program, makes a push to be more Internet-centric and share with Google, there will be no losers, no zero-sum games in this brave new digital world. But these claims did not allay the anxiety of Sorrell, who feared Google would vie to obviate his creative

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq

by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan · 31 Aug 2009 · 423pp · 126,375 words

2003 had turned into an existential struggle for power and resources among competing sectarian and ethnic groups. Iraqi politics had turned into a winnertake-all, zero-sum game that largely destroyed any sense of trust and cooperation among competing sectarian and ethnic communities. We had been ignorant of the extent to which sectarian

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections

by Patrick Smith · 6 May 2013 · 309pp · 100,573 words

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

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It

by Robert B. Reich · 3 Sep 2012 · 124pp · 39,011 words

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

The Rights of the People

by David K. Shipler · 18 Apr 2011 · 495pp · 154,046 words

loose. So the notion that we must give up some liberty for more security, that somehow our safety and our freedom are juxtaposed in a zero-sum game, looks like a false premise. Only after the Soviet Union collapsed, for example, and courts gained a modicum of independence, did Russia’s police have

It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong · 9 Apr 2009 · 403pp · 125,659 words

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

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History

by Derek S. Hoff · 30 May 2012

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

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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

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil

by Nicholas Shaxson · 20 Mar 2007

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

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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

Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs

by Jamie Fiore Higgins · 29 Aug 2022 · 263pp · 86,709 words

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

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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

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze · 13 Nov 2014 · 1,057pp · 239,915 words

behaviour both of General Pershing and the Wilson administration, it became commonplace in Britain to discuss the strategic balance on the Western Front as a zero sum game. If the war were won in 1918, it would be a triumph for the British Empire. If the war dragged on into 1919, Britain, like

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle

by Dinny McMahon · 13 Mar 2018 · 290pp · 84,375 words

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

Bad Company

by Megan Greenwell · 18 Apr 2025 · 385pp · 103,818 words

those teachers and firefighters who served their communities for decades deserve a nice retirement?—but what they are in fact describing is a sort of zero-sum game in which cutting wages for working- and middle-class employees in one place helps working- and middle-class retirees in other places, a phenomenon labor

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

by Bruno Maçães · 1 Feb 2019 · 281pp · 69,107 words

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

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

by Jonathan Rauch · 21 Jun 2021 · 446pp · 109,157 words

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

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It

by Jonathan Zittrain · 27 May 2009 · 629pp · 142,393 words

the only way to access useful proprietary content, such as archived news and some scholarly journal articles.53 Of course, there need not be a zero-sum game in models of software creation, and generative growth can blend well with traditional market models. Consumers can become enraptured by an expensive, sophisticated shooting game

The New Prophets of Capital

by Nicole Aschoff · 10 Mar 2015 · 128pp · 38,187 words

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

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

by Charles L. Marohn, Jr. · 24 Sep 2019 · 242pp · 71,943 words

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

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

by P. W. Singer and August Cole · 28 Jun 2015 · 537pp · 149,628 words

why you want to have both options when it comes to balancing this ship’s strike capability with its defense systems. But it’s a zero-sum game for what I need. I need Zumwalt to think of itself as a battleship if we’re going to use it.” “Admiral, this is not

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present

by Thomas J. Dilorenzo · 9 Aug 2004 · 283pp · 81,163 words

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

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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

The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con

by Amy Reading · 6 Mar 2012 · 349pp · 112,333 words

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

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork

by Reeves Wiedeman · 19 Oct 2020 · 303pp · 100,516 words

,” 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

Moonwalking With Einstein

by Joshua Foer · 3 Mar 2011 · 329pp · 93,655 words

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

Commodity Trading Advisors: Risk, Performance Analysis, and Selection

by Greg N. Gregoriou, Vassilios Karavas, François-Serge Lhabitant and Fabrice Douglas Rouah · 23 Sep 2004

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

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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

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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

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening

by John Elder Robison · 6 Apr 2016 · 316pp · 106,321 words

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

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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

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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

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

by Wendy Brown · 6 Feb 2015

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

In the Age of the Smart Machine

by Shoshana Zuboff · 14 Apr 1988

approach to team- work. Ambitious managers believed that their individual knowledge had to remain private in a world where excellence was a strictly en- forced zero-sum game. We work against each other. Five people can sit at a table working on a project, but they are all working against each other because

The Wisdom of Crowds

by James Surowiecki · 1 Jan 2004 · 326pp · 106,053 words

’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

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win

by Chris Kuenne and John Danner · 5 Jun 2017 · 276pp · 64,903 words

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

Learn Algorithmic Trading

by Sebastien Donadio · 7 Nov 2019

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

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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

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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

Stacy Mitchell

by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

countywide retail earnings of 2.8 percent—a total payroll reduction of more than $2 million on average.9 Because the underlying market dynamics—the zero-sum game—are the same regardless of the name on the box, it’s likely that all of the other chains—from Target to Barnes & Noble—also

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century

by Tom Bower · 1 Jan 2009 · 554pp · 168,114 words

price’s wild fluctuations, and regardless of whether he was earning or losing millions of dollars, Hall coolly controlled his emotions: “This is not a zero-sum game because we’ve been doing it for too long to get excited. Emotionally the ups and downs get evened out.” Over the years Hall had

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro · 11 Sep 2017 · 850pp · 224,533 words

of the powerful and influential economic theory of mercantilism. According to mercantilist thought, which held sway in much of Western Europe, economic growth was a zero-sum game.14 As Voltaire put it: “It is clear that one country can only gain if another country loses.”15 The government’s charge, then, was

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard · 3 May 2021 · 392pp · 124,069 words

, 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

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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

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

by Dan Bouk · 22 Aug 2022 · 424pp · 123,180 words

to others. It doesn’t have to be this way. In 1929, Congress first passed legislation that made it possible to operate apportionment as a zero-sum game. That is, if New York won an extra seat, then another state lost one. Thus, if New York had kept that seat, Minnesota would be

Adam Smith: Father of Economics

by Jesse Norman · 30 Jun 2018

utterly misguided and counter-productive. In reality ‘Nothing… can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.’ Trade was not a zero-sum game in which each nation could gain only by beggaring its neighbour, as the mercantilists imagined. On the contrary, such a view was not merely individually

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business

by Alan Murray · 15 Dec 2022 · 263pp · 77,786 words

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

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

by William Cronon · 2 Nov 2009 · 918pp · 260,504 words

that enabled both to prosper. Although the countryside did pay tribute that allowed a city like Chicago to grow, the exchange was anything but a zero-sum game. After all, if rural areas failed to become tributary to a metropolis, they would have no market and could only languish. Under such circumstances, commercial

The Little Book of Hedge Funds

by Anthony Scaramucci · 30 Apr 2012 · 162pp · 50,108 words

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

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

by Ha-Joon Chang · 1 Jan 2010 · 365pp · 88,125 words

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

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck · 13 Nov 2012 · 342pp · 86,256 words

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

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away

by Doug Henwood · 9 May 2005 · 306pp · 78,893 words

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

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

by Dave Rubin · 27 Apr 2020 · 239pp · 62,005 words

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

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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

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization

by Jeff Rubin · 19 May 2009 · 258pp · 83,303 words

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

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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

I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50

by Annabelle Gurwitch · 6 Mar 2014 · 200pp · 64,050 words

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

Market Risk Analysis, Quantitative Methods in Finance

by Carol Alexander · 2 Jan 2007 · 320pp · 33,385 words

, 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

The Chomsky Reader

by Noam Chomsky · 11 Sep 1987

Cold War in certain respects but to be crucially different in others. Consider first some likely similarities. The Cold War is generally described as a “zero-sum game” in which the gains of one antagonist equal the losses of the other. But this is a highly questionable interpretation. It would be more realistic

Iron Sunrise

by Stross, Charles · 28 Oct 2004 · 462pp · 142,240 words

bigger, to reduce the news, to work toward the end of history, to make the universe safe for peace. And you knew it was a zero-sum game at best and eventually you’d lose, but you were on the right side so that didn’t matter. Somebody had to do it. And

Ethics in Investment Banking

by John N. Reynolds and Edmund Newell · 8 Nov 2011 · 193pp · 11,060 words

of completing. 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

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. 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

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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

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy

by Marc Levinson · 31 Jul 2016 · 409pp · 118,448 words

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

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase

by Duff McDonald · 5 Oct 2009 · 419pp · 130,627 words

Chase’s annual meeting a few weeks previously had a jubilant feel. Wall Street, for all its pretense to sophistication and complexity, is largely a zero-sum game—someone loses, someone wins. In a comic moment at the meeting, Evelyn Davis, an eccentric gadfly shareholder who has exasperated CEOs for decades, stood up

The Making of Global Capitalism

by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin · 8 Oct 2012 · 823pp · 206,070 words

states to resolve international economic imbalances through domestic austerity policies, but generated growing worries about price stability, productivity and profits. Because this was not a zero-sum game, and capital was also strong by virtue of its having been restored to health so effectively, the contradiction became intense amid rising inflation and class

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas · 27 Aug 2018 · 296pp · 98,018 words

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

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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

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill · 1 Jan 2007 · 924pp · 198,159 words

up Blackwater’s Azerbaijan work as evidence of successful U.S. government contracting to help allied governments build up their forces. “This is not a zero-sum game. We’re not trying to take as much of the pie and leave the government with nothing so we can get as much money as

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality

by Branko Milanovic · 15 Dec 2010 · 251pp · 69,245 words

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

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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

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.

by Mitch Joel · 20 May 2013 · 260pp · 76,223 words

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

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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

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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

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day

by Craig Lambert · 30 Apr 2015 · 229pp · 72,431 words

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

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

by Niall Ferguson · 1 Jan 2002 · 469pp · 146,487 words

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

The Cold War: A World History

by Odd Arne Westad · 4 Sep 2017 · 846pp · 250,145 words

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

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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

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition

by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek · 17 Aug 2015 · 257pp · 64,285 words

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

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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

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines

by William Davidow and Michael Malone · 18 Feb 2020 · 304pp · 80,143 words

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

Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome

by Will Bulsiewicz · 15 Dec 2020 · 431pp · 99,919 words

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

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation

by Sebastien Page · 4 Nov 2020 · 367pp · 97,136 words

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

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win

by Sachin Khajuria · 13 Jun 2022 · 229pp · 75,606 words

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

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas

by Janek Wasserman · 23 Sep 2019 · 470pp · 130,269 words

. Measurement would not consist of the calculation of marginal units using infinitesimal calculus but computation of the expected, maximum result in an n-person (generally zero-sum) game. Theory of Games was the monograph that would guide the way forward.52 Morgenstern had traveled a great distance in his own intellectual development in

Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling

by Danny Funt · 20 Jan 2026 · 285pp · 100,897 words

months in prison. Upon his release, he worked briefly as a tout for a pick-selling service. III. Keep in mind that gambling is a zero-sum game, so, for some bettors, Donaghy’s scheme cheated them out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Bookmakers also rarely refund bets lost on fixed games

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

by Hu Anyan · 240pp · 83,473 words

to, others weren’t, and when people took the good addresses, the rest of us were lumped with the bad ones. It was like a zero-sum game between colleagues; inevitably someone lost out. Everybody worked the worst neighborhoods early on, and some people left as a result. Those who didn’t might

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science

by Paul Krugman · 18 Feb 2010 · 162pp · 51,473 words

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

World Cities and Nation States

by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen · 19 Dec 2016

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

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

by Fredrik Deboer · 4 Sep 2023 · 211pp · 78,547 words

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

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

by Jean M. Twenge · 25 Apr 2023 · 541pp · 173,676 words

who were very happy, by race, 1972–2018 Source: General Social Survey Over the same time, though, White adults’ happiness declined. Is happiness a racial zero-sum game, with Whites less happy because they felt they were losing out to Blacks? That seems unlikely based on timing: Black adults’ happiness rose the most

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb

by Dorie Clark · 14 Oct 2021 · 201pp · 60,431 words

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

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War

by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff · 8 Jul 2024 · 272pp · 103,638 words

the first time, you’ll be threatening their turf, asking them to do things that are hard.” “Remember,” Raj said, “in Washington it’s a zero-sum game. It’s not like Silicon Valley, where folks can expand the pie by working together. In D.C., power is budget and people. The only

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

by Anupreeta Das · 12 Aug 2024 · 315pp · 115,894 words

, the thinking goes, is dwarfed by the social, economic, and scientific progress they have created. Moreover, wealth creation in technology is seen as not a zero-sum game but an uplift for all members of society. Lauding Billionaire Largesse If the acquisition of money is an American fixation, so is giving it away

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

by Mary L. Trump · 13 Jul 2020 · 269pp · 72,752 words

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

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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

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence

by Robert I. Rotberg · 15 Nov 2008 · 651pp · 135,818 words

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

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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

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life

by Ian Dunt · 15 Oct 2020

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

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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

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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

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder · 2 Apr 2018

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

Running Money

by Andy Kessler · 4 Jun 2007 · 323pp · 92,135 words

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

Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks

by Susan Casey · 29 May 2006

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

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution

by Fred Vogelstein · 12 Nov 2013 · 275pp · 84,418 words

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

Succeeding With AI: How to Make AI Work for Your Business

by Veljko Krunic · 29 Mar 2020

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

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

by K. Eric Drexler · 6 May 2013 · 445pp · 105,255 words

, 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

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy

by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake · 7 Nov 2017 · 346pp · 89,180 words

marketing, organizational capital, and training really investments? 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

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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. An investment is something

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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

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called our exemplar of this sort of country Ruritania. Unlike most of the recommendations in this chapter, the ideas that Ruritania adopt tend to be zero-sum games: they are based on the principle of attracting economic activity from other countries, and, to the extent that Ruritania gains, other countries lose out. That

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari · 29 Aug 2018 · 389pp · 119,487 words

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

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett · 1 Jan 2009 · 309pp · 86,909 words

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

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 · 11 May 2014 · 249pp · 66,383 words

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

Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good

by Kevin Smith · 20 Mar 2012 · 244pp · 70,369 words

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

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing

by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman · 19 Feb 2013 · 407pp · 109,653 words

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

The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50

by Jonathan Rauch · 30 Apr 2018 · 277pp · 79,360 words

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

Capital Without Borders

by Brooke Harrington · 11 Sep 2016 · 358pp · 104,664 words

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

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

by Peter Morville · 14 May 2014 · 165pp · 50,798 words

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

Bureaucracy

by David Graeber · 3 Feb 2015 · 252pp · 80,636 words

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

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems

by Irene Aldridge · 1 Dec 2009 · 354pp · 26,550 words

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

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis

by Julie Holland · 22 Sep 2010 · 694pp · 197,804 words

, security, or success to which one has been aspiring is, itself, delusional and based on the exploitation of someone else. Straight life is dualism: the zero-sum game of scarce resources, winners and losers, college admissions, test scores, job applications, and making “something” of oneself. Stoned life is the knowledge that none of

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire

by Wikileaks · 24 Aug 2015 · 708pp · 176,708 words

and harassing WikiLeaks, the United States needs to overhaul its foreign policy. Continuing to view a state such as Russia as a rival in a zero-sum game, as well as an energy resource and an emerging market, instead of as representing a people, only perpetuates conflict. The source of other states’ mistrust

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth

by Tom Burgis · 24 Mar 2015 · 413pp · 119,379 words

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

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap

by Graham Allison · 29 May 2017 · 518pp · 128,324 words

upon the water, and that mastery of the seas was a necessity of national existence.”26 Both believed there were only two choices in this zero-sum game: “either the voluntary submission of one of the rivals to the other, or a trial of strength by ordeal of battle.”27 The Dutch Republic

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?

by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland · 15 Jan 2021 · 342pp · 72,927 words

– 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

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital

by Kimberly Clausing · 4 Mar 2019 · 555pp · 80,635 words

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

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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

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation

by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler · 14 Sep 2021 · 735pp · 165,375 words

.” 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

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, 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

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life

by Alan B. Krueger · 3 Jun 2019

, 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

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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

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company

by Eva Dou · 14 Jan 2025 · 394pp · 110,159 words

the United States and China, which has changed calculations. Now the assumption on both sides is that the other nation sees the competition as a zero-sum game and believes that it will not act in good faith, that it will be willing to go to extreme lengths to come out ahead, and

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict

by Kenneth Payne · 16 Jun 2021 · 339pp · 92,785 words

, 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

The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns

by Mohnish Pabrai · 17 May 2009 · 172pp · 49,890 words

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

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 · 11 Jul 2011 · 350pp · 103,270 words

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

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone · 14 Oct 2013 · 380pp · 118,675 words

,” 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

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America)

by Louis Hyman · 3 Jan 2011

a particular issuer’s card became the challenge of the mid-1980s. In some ways, the credit card business in the mid-1980s was a zero-sum game: either you used one particular card or another. With rising fees, consumers tended, more and more, to consolidate their cards. Convincing creditworthy borrowers to get

The Post-American World: Release 2.0

by Fareed Zakaria · 1 Jan 2008 · 344pp · 93,858 words

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

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It

by Robert B. Reich · 24 Mar 2020 · 154pp · 47,880 words

, 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

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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

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation

by Grace Blakeley · 9 Sep 2019 · 263pp · 80,594 words

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

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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

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal

by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz · 20 Jul 2020 · 520pp · 134,627 words

a pole vaulter. And with a few clicks, Jancen’s years of sweat and sacrifice were stolen. * * * • • • AT SELECTIVE SCHOOLS LIKE USC, admissions is a zero-sum game—as Singer told many parents. If one kid gets in, another is rejected. The wreckage left behind by Singer’s scheme included actual teens who

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

by Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber · 9 Feb 2014 · 436pp · 141,321 words

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

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, 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

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty · 10 Mar 2014 · 935pp · 267,358 words

taxes is that this type of tax allows for de facto taxation of imported goods and small-scale competitive devaluations. This is of course a zero-sum game: the competitive advantage vanishes if other countries do the same. It is one symptom of a monetary union with a low level of international cooperation

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code

by Jeff Atwood · 3 Jul 2012 · 270pp · 64,235 words

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

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest

by Yochai Benkler · 8 Aug 2011 · 187pp · 62,861 words

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

Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio

by Victor A. Canto · 2 Jan 2005 · 337pp · 89,075 words

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

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

by Paul Collier · 4 Dec 2018 · 310pp · 85,995 words

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

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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

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‘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

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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

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

by David Brin · 1 Jan 1998 · 205pp · 18,208 words

, or that liberty and efficiency must each suffer in order for both to eke along. It is the odious worldview of those who believe in zero sum games, the dour theory that each win must be balanced by a loss, and therefore the best one can hope for in life is a tenuous

You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing

by John Scalzi · 28 Jan 2007 · 168pp · 9,044 words

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

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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

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

by Stephen D. King · 22 May 2017 · 354pp · 92,470 words

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 Bogleheads' Guide to Investing

by Taylor Larimore, Michael Leboeuf and Mel Lindauer · 1 Jan 2006 · 335pp · 94,657 words

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

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz

by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig · 5 Jan 2016 · 377pp · 110,427 words

)? 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

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements

by Haym Benaroya · 12 Jan 2018 · 571pp · 124,448 words

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

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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

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption

by Ben Mezrich · 20 May 2019 · 304pp · 91,566 words

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

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

by Shawn Lawrence Otto · 10 Oct 2011 · 692pp · 127,032 words

… 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

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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

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention

by Simon Baron-Cohen · 14 Aug 2020

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

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. 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

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); 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

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari · 1 Jan 2011 · 447pp · 141,811 words

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

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power

by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie · 6 May 2019 · 328pp · 84,682 words

-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

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World

by Michal Zalewski · 11 Jan 2022 · 337pp · 96,666 words

, 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

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business

by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro · 30 Aug 2021 · 345pp · 92,063 words

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

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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

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie · 8 Oct 2019

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

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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

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. 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

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known breach of campaign finance law in British history. But even if it wasn’t, elections, like a 100-meter sprint in the Olympics, are zero-sum games, where the winner takes all. Whoever comes first, even if it’s by just a few votes or milliseconds, wins the whole race: They get

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

by Grace Blakeley · 11 Mar 2024 · 371pp · 137,268 words

writing in opposition to mercantilists, who believed that national prosperity was best protected by maximizing exports and minimizing imports. To the mercantilist, trade was a zero-sum game, and the balance of payments was the scorecard: those states with the largest current account surpluses were winning, while those with deficits were losing. Building

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch · 30 Jun 2011 · 551pp · 174,280 words

the truth – or should be, if they are rational. And there is an objective truth of the matter. Problems are soluble. Society is not a zero-sum game: the civilization of the Enlightenment did not get where it is today by cleverly sharing out the wealth, votes or anything else that was in

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street

by Jackson Lears

. What they gain, he loses; and he must lay his plans so as to make them lose, that he may pocket their losses.” Playing a zero-sum game, he becomes a “shrewd, cold-blooded operator”—the very opposite of a man of feeling. The consequences could be public as well as personal. Yielding

Madoff: The Final Word

by Richard Behar · 9 Jul 2024

its simplest form, a Ponzi involves taking money from one investor (as an investment) and passing it to another investor (as a profit) in a zero-sum game of financial musical chairs. In other words, robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s a crime that’s been around for thousands of years but

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

by Tim Wu · 14 May 2016 · 515pp · 143,055 words

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

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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 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 · 5 Mar 2013 · 474pp · 120,801 words

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

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader

by Colin Lancaster · 3 May 2021 · 245pp · 75,397 words

.” 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

The Mission: A True Story

by David W. Brown · 26 Jan 2021

that footprint was, it was the endless thirst for dollars required by Mars Science Laboratory that was throttling the planetary science program. This was a zero-sum game: MSL’s cost overruns meant that Discovery missions—prolific and profitable scientifically—would be delayed or canceled outright. Mars had killed at least one Pluto

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

by Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton · 15 Mar 1991 · 242pp · 60,595 words

. 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

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead

by David Callahan · 1 Jan 2004 · 452pp · 110,488 words

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

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy

by Daniel Gross · 7 May 2012 · 391pp · 97,018 words

—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

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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

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink · 1 Dec 2012 · 243pp · 61,237 words

, 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

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right

by George R. Tyler · 15 Jul 2013 · 772pp · 203,182 words

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

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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

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

by Eric Siegel · 19 Feb 2013 · 502pp · 107,657 words

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

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne · 20 Jan 2014 · 287pp · 80,180 words

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

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, 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

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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

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through which it either expands the existing market boundaries or creates new market spaces. Such a strategy therefore allows firms to largely play a non– zero-sum game, with high payoff possibilities. How, then, does reconstruction, such as what we see in Cirque du Soleil, differ from the “combination” and “recombination” that have

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

by Calum Chace · 28 Jul 2015 · 144pp · 43,356 words

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

The New Geography of Jobs

by Enrico Moretti · 21 May 2012 · 403pp · 87,035 words

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

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. 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

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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

Libertarian Idea

by Jan Narveson · 15 Dec 1988 · 371pp · 36,271 words

a career of stark competition. If A and B are “into” glory, then they are not in a Prisoner‟s Dilemma, but instead in a zero-sum game: A‟s loss is B‟s gain and vice versa. So the only way A can achieve the value he‟s after is by coming

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything

by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey · 27 Feb 2018 · 348pp · 97,277 words

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

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance

by Julia Angwin · 25 Feb 2014 · 422pp · 104,457 words

, 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

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder

by Sean McFate · 22 Jan 2019 · 330pp · 83,319 words

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

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia and Bill George · 7 Jan 2014 · 335pp · 104,850 words

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

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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

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It

by Scott Kupor · 3 Jun 2019 · 340pp · 100,151 words

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

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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

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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

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 · 25 Sep 2017 · 391pp · 71,600 words

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

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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

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, 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

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

by Jonathan Tepper · 20 Nov 2018 · 417pp · 97,577 words

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

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design

by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc · 15 Feb 2010 · 1,233pp · 239,800 words

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

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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

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life

by Steven Johnson · 2 Jan 1999 · 294pp · 86,601 words

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

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right and left hemispheres of selectivity of specific tasks assigned to specific regions of technology and exploration of triune uniqueness of unknowable “black box” of zero-sum games of see also specific components Braincare, Inc., brain scans conventional MRI fMRI brain science arts and see also neuroscience brain stem amygdala link to brain

The Upside of Inequality

by Edward Conard · 1 Sep 2016 · 436pp · 98,538 words

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

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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

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis

by Beth Macy · 15 Aug 2022 · 389pp · 111,372 words

.” 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

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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

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World

by David Kerrigan · 18 Jun 2017 · 472pp · 80,835 words

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

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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

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto

by Mark Helprin · 19 Apr 2009 · 272pp · 83,378 words

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

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physical property treat it as such. 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

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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

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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

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle · 6 Apr 2022 · 502pp · 132,062 words

hand, and the benefits will accrue to both. The most powerful lesson we can learn from these discussions is that political progress is not a zero-sum game. Throughout the history of human society, the improvements in our collective lives have been driven by an increase in the set of people we see

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan · 1 Feb 2019 · 309pp · 81,975 words

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

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World

by Peter Frankopan · 14 Jun 2018 · 352pp · 80,030 words

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

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization

by Harold James · 15 Jan 2023 · 469pp · 137,880 words

would deprive their societies and their tax systems of expensively educated individuals. In economies with widespread job losses, trade appeared to many people as a zero-sum game, with imports destroying livelihoods. Capital movements were condemned as being potentially wild and destabilizing, and the policymaking community responded with plans to manage them. Twelve

Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate

by M. E. Sarotte · 29 Nov 2021 · 791pp · 222,536 words

inspired Clinton to try to find the maximum possible amount of agreement. Always the optimist, he was inclined not to see foreign policy challenges as zero-sum games; instead, in any situation where persuasion was required, he tried to bring everybody along to a mutually agreeable conclusion.32 He also felt, based on

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view of enlargement, she argued that it would demonstrate “from Ukraine to the United States” that “the quest for European security is no longer a zero-sum game.”21 On this, as on all issues, Clinton’s senior foreign policy advisors continued to enjoy strong backing from the NATO secretary general, Javier Solana

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid

by Meredith. Angwin · 18 Oct 2020 · 376pp · 101,759 words

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

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life

by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky · 18 Jun 2012 · 279pp · 87,910 words

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

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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

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century

by Rodrigo Aguilera · 10 Mar 2020 · 356pp · 106,161 words

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

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, 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

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future

by Mervyn King and John Kay · 5 Mar 2020 · 807pp · 154,435 words

insights of economics. Two hundred and fifty years before Donald Trump’s presidency, Adam Smith had refuted the mercantilist view of foreign trade as a zero sum game in which one country gained at the expense of a weaker or foolish partner – trade could benefit both parties. 3 Ricardo developed Smith’s argument

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham · 27 Jan 2021 · 460pp · 107,454 words

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

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets

by John Plender · 27 Jul 2015 · 355pp · 92,571 words

-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

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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

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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

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Underlying both what might be called the civic republican view and the Christian view is the notion, expounded in Chapter One, that trade is a zero-sum game. In a pre-capitalist world where there was virtually no growth in per capita incomes, it was natural to assume that if one party to

Accelerando

by Stross, Charles · 22 Jan 2005 · 489pp · 148,885 words

make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition – his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do something

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 · 21 May 2012 · 318pp · 87,570 words

. 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

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis

by Anatole Kaletsky · 22 Jun 2010 · 484pp · 136,735 words

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

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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

The Narcissist Next Door

by Jeffrey Kluger · 25 Aug 2014 · 295pp · 89,280 words

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

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

by Garry Kasparov · 1 May 2017 · 331pp · 104,366 words

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

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities

by Benjamin R. Barber · 5 Nov 2013 · 501pp · 145,943 words

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

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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

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril

by Satyajit Das · 9 Feb 2016 · 327pp · 90,542 words

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

Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff · 22 Jan 2019 · 196pp · 54,339 words

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

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class

by Frederick Taylor · 16 Sep 2013 · 473pp · 132,344 words

effect of the hyperinflation was to encourage cynicism and selfishness. Life in early Weimar Germany felt, for most Germans alive at the time, like a zero-sum game, in which the main object was to avoid being left holding worthless paper money. And where the race for survival belonged to the swift, the

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

by Rana Foroohar · 16 May 2016 · 515pp · 132,295 words

capitalism more suited to a third-world autocracy than a supposedly free-market democracy.47 Thanks to these changes, our economy is gradually becoming “a zero-sum game between financial wealth-holders and the rest of America,” says former Goldman Sachs banker Wallace Turbeville, who runs a multiyear project on financialization at the

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs

by Tim Draper · 18 Dec 2017 · 302pp · 95,965 words

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

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink · 1 Jan 2008 · 204pp · 54,395 words

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

Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement

by Robert Clyatt · 28 Sep 2007

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

Traders at Work: How the World's Most Successful Traders Make Their Living in the Markets

by Tim Bourquin and Nicholas Mango · 26 Dec 2012 · 327pp · 91,351 words

. 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

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return

by Mihir Desai · 22 May 2017 · 239pp · 69,496 words

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

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

by Francis Fukuyama · 29 Sep 2014 · 828pp · 232,188 words

traced to Moi’s ascendancy and increasing levels of patronage and corruption that followed. Since that time, much of Kenyan politics has revolved around a zero-sum game between the country’s ethnic groups to grab the presidency and state resources. This culminated in mass killings in the wake of the 2007 presidential

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis

by Martin Wolf · 24 Nov 2015 · 524pp · 143,993 words

out of vulnerable countries. It makes little sense to insist that the latter become more competitive if overall demand does not expand. This is a zero-sum game. Building the future of the Eurozone on such a game is folly. This has important implications. One is that the ECB must do more to

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age

by Steven Levy · 15 Jan 2002 · 468pp · 137,055 words

to crack the cryptogram. The concepts of signal and noise loomed large in Shannon’s view of cryptology. He saw crypto as a high-stakes zero-sum game between secret keeper and foe, where a successful secret was a signal that could not be teased out of the apparent noise. In his sixty

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street

by Jeff John Roberts · 15 Dec 2020 · 226pp · 65,516 words

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

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets

by Donald MacKenzie · 24 May 2021 · 400pp · 121,988 words

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

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

by Yascha Mounk · 15 Feb 2018 · 497pp · 123,778 words

. 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

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

by Klaus Schwab · 7 Jan 2021 · 460pp · 107,454 words

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

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

by Rush Doshi · 24 Jun 2021 · 816pp · 191,889 words

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

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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

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber · 1 Jan 2010 · 725pp · 221,514 words

once lay behind the habit of reckoning the honor of Irish “sacred” beings in slave-women, the principle is clearly the same. Honor is a zero-sum game. A man’s ability to protect the women of his family is an essential part of that honor. Therefore, forcing him to surrender a woman

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism

by Ed West · 19 Mar 2020 · 530pp · 147,851 words

twenty-first the Right increasingly came to adopt the logic of cultural relativism. This was related to a worldview in which all politics was a zero-sum game. Limbaugh argued that the ‘core institutions and norms of American democracy have been irredeemably corrupted by an alien enemy. Their claims to transpartisan authority – authority

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

by Richard Heinberg · 1 Jun 2011 · 372pp · 107,587 words

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

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

by Keach Hagey · 19 May 2025 · 439pp · 125,379 words

truth of his writing.” Graham saw the program as doing something fundamentally different than what venture capitalists do. “These later-stage investors are playing a zero-sum game. There is a fixed amount of deal flow, and they’re just trying to find the good startups in it, whereas YC is trying to

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World

by David Sax · 15 Jan 2022 · 282pp · 93,783 words

. 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

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. 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

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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

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. “Why Other Countries Keep Outperforming Us in Education (and How to Catch Up).” Education Week. May 13, 2021. Labaree, David. Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen. Emotions, Learning, and the Brain. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Dewey

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990

by Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds · 24 Aug 2016 · 627pp · 127,613 words

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

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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

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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

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy

by Robert A. Sirico · 20 May 2012 · 267pp · 70,250 words

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

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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

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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

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business enterprise but instead when a player has successfully taken everyone else’s money and driven them all into bankruptcy. Monopoly, then, is literally a zero-sum game. But it seems that some people confuse the real world with a game of Monopoly—and fall into the fallacy of thinking that people can

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. The Value of the 1 Percent The Occupy crowd views the rich, the 1 percent, as exploiters. As I say, this, again, is the old zero-sum-game fallacy. If someone has an abundance, he must have acquired it at the expense of someone else. The proof is in the fact that the

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

by Tyler Cowen · 15 Oct 2018 · 140pp · 42,194 words

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

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, 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

Left Behind

by Paul Collier · 6 Aug 2024 · 299pp · 92,766 words

gets the deal ahead of rivals.iv That is why there is no official forum where DFIs meet: the DFIs see their situation as a zero-sum game against each other. This is a very limited view of the world and brings almost no intellectual suppleness to assist in helping solve the challenges

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

by Winifred Gallagher · 9 Mar 2009 · 280pp · 75,820 words

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

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership

by Richard Branson · 8 Sep 2014 · 315pp · 99,065 words

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

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future

by Jeff Booth · 14 Jan 2020 · 180pp · 55,805 words

, 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

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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. For one country to export or

Panderer to Power

by Frederick Sheehan · 21 Oct 2009 · 435pp · 127,403 words

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

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age

by Michael Wolff · 22 Jun 2015 · 172pp · 46,104 words

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

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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

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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

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy

by David Hoffman · 1 Jan 2009 · 719pp · 209,224 words

Cold War approach of toe-to-toe competition. Gorbachev was naturally open to this argument; he also wanted, in principle, to move away from the zero-sum game. But it was Velikhov who helped lead Gorbachev to something different. The Soviet weapons designers wanted to match what Reagan was doing, a symmetrical response

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 · 2 Mar 2010 · 613pp · 181,605 words

. 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

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, 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

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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

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?

by Raj Raghunathan · 25 Apr 2016 · 505pp · 127,542 words

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

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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

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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

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Conscious Capitalism, “conscious” business practices. Until just a few decades back, the typical business enterprise operated more on the basis of the “life’s a zero-sum game” ideology than on the basis of “there’s room for everyone to grow.” As a result, firms exhibited the types of behaviors—hypercompetition, lack of

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

by Ken Kocienda · 3 Sep 2018 · 255pp · 76,834 words

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

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

by Ellen Ruppel Shell · 2 Jul 2009 · 387pp · 110,820 words

. 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

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles

by Ruchir Sharma · 8 Apr 2012 · 411pp · 114,717 words

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

Meat: A Benign Extravagance

by Simon Fairlie · 14 Jun 2010 · 614pp · 176,458 words

collective wealth of organic matter; and (b) those who convert from arable to grass. To an extent (but only to an extent) this is a zero sum game. A recent paper by a Dutch agronomist, G van der Burgt, takes a ‘whole systems’ approach to the prospects for carbon sequestration in the Netherlands

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous · 23 Mar 2018 · 571pp · 106,255 words

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

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety

by Gideon Rachman · 1 Feb 2011 · 391pp · 102,301 words

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

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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

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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

Aerotropolis

by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay · 2 Jan 2009 · 603pp · 182,781 words

this and you win, I asked, then who loses? Does Chicago have to fall for Detroit to prevail? Is this a win-win or a zero-sum game? “We’re in a fight with the rest of the world, not just Chicago,” Ficano countered. “We’re in a fight with Beijing, Shanghai, Dubai

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small

by Steve Sammartino · 25 Jun 2014 · 247pp · 81,135 words

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

The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History

by David Enrich · 21 Mar 2017 · 513pp · 141,153 words

viewed most competitors as enemies. “You’re in a war,” he would explain later. “At the end of the day, this is a sort of zero-sum game and you’re up against people who are fighting for the same customers, you’re up against people who you’re trading with on a

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt · 26 Dec 2005 · 405pp · 130,840 words

. 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

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, 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

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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

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elsewhere. If everyone is chasing the s a m e limited a m o u n t 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. T h e pursuit of luxury g o o d

Invisible Women

by Caroline Criado Perez · 12 Mar 2019 · 480pp · 119,407 words

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

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century

by Torben Iversen and David Soskice · 5 Feb 2019 · 550pp · 124,073 words

, 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

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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

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, 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

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

by Douglas Rushkoff · 1 Jun 2009 · 422pp · 131,666 words

in the debiting of one account and the crediting of another. This made achieving a favorable balance of trade the highest priority, and fostered a zero-sum-game mentality among all participants. International trade became a fierce competition between states for positive balances, which led to wars unlike any seen before. Where armies

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

by Geoffrey Parker · 29 Apr 2013 · 1,773pp · 486,685 words

more concisely a decade later: ‘All men by their nature hate one another.’1 These writers, like many of their contemporaries, saw life as a ‘zero-sum game’ in which assets could only be redistributed, not created – or, in the aphorism of Francis Bacon: ‘whatsoever is some where gotten is some where lost

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] fierce and unrelenting nevertheless. Farming was the arena of conflict, and the tools of victory were skill, ingenuity, hard work and perseverance.’2 The same ‘zero-sum game’ created similar rivalries in towns – where, as in the country, the only way to maintain one's position in the community was constantly to protect

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles

by Fintan O'Toole · 5 Mar 2020 · 385pp · 121,550 words

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

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy

by Philip Coggan · 6 Feb 2020 · 524pp · 155,947 words

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

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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

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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

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pay for the nation’s defence (and court luxuries). For a while, this manifested itself in a philosophy crudely known as mercantilism – trade was a zero-sum game in which the aim was to ensure that your own nation’s coffers had more gold and silver and other countries had less. This led

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–45 period. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey has written, the danger of a corrupt society is that citizens start to feel that commerce is a zero-sum game and that the only way to get ahead is via theft or corruption.14 China and India have made such rapid gains in the last

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

by Tim O'Reilly · 9 Oct 2017 · 561pp · 157,589 words

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

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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

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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

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 · 27 Mar 2016 · 421pp · 110,406 words

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

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

by Vivek Ramaswamy · 16 Aug 2021 · 344pp · 104,522 words

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

Finance and the Good Society

by Robert J. Shiller · 1 Jan 2012 · 288pp · 16,556 words

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

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest

by Andrew W. Lo and Stephen R. Foerster · 16 Aug 2021 · 542pp · 145,022 words

of survival of the fittest. One of the interesting things about a derivative or option, there’s one buyer and one seller. It’s a zero-sum game in that sense. And so, if I have a buyer and the buyer overpays for the option, a seller is willing to come in and

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney · 7 Mar 2017 · 526pp · 160,601 words

civics disappeared from the curriculum and that courses on financial literacy never really existed. It is also a tragedy that many view life as a zero-sum game, where wealth can never be created, only reallocated. However disappointing growth has been under the Boomers, the economy has still expanded. These are not the

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

by Bhu Srinivasan · 25 Sep 2017 · 801pp · 209,348 words

less pragmatic than the new chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. None of this made it any less painful for workers. To the displaced, it seemed a zero-sum game in which someone else was gaining at their expense. Who could explain to them that to increase the overall standard of living required the occasional

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes · 1 Jun 2021 · 342pp · 114,118 words

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 Broken Ladder

by Keith Payne · 8 May 2017

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

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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

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang · 10 Sep 2018 · 745pp · 207,187 words

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

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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

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders

by Jack D. Schwager · 7 Feb 2012 · 499pp · 148,160 words

traders have a special talent? In a sense. By definition, there can only be a relatively small group of superior traders, since trading is a zero-sum game. What is the balance of trading success between talent and hard work? If you don’t work very hard, it is extremely unlikely that you

The Internet of Money

by Andreas M. Antonopoulos · 28 Aug 2016 · 200pp · 47,378 words

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

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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

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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

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, Currencies Evolve expression, Currency as a Means of Expression index, Index Currency paradigm, Born into Currency sovereignty, Currency Creates Sovereignty value, Valuing Currencies by Use zero-sum game, Born into Currency Currencyas an application, Currency as an App meta-politics, Choosing Currencies and Communities D data, From Voice to Data decentralization, Communications Expanding

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the Internet W wallet, Wallets aren’t wallets, Bitcoin’s Atomic Structure, Fee Optimization and Scaling wire transfer, The Joys of International Wire Transfer Z zero-sum game, Born into Currency

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US

by Rana Foroohar · 5 Nov 2019 · 380pp · 109,724 words

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

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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

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason

by William Davies · 26 Feb 2019 · 349pp · 98,868 words

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

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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

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–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

Humankind: Solidarity With Non-Human People

by Timothy Morton · 14 Oct 2017 · 225pp · 70,180 words

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

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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

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 · 25 Nov 2012 · 263pp · 89,368 words

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

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value

by Eduardo Porter · 4 Jan 2011 · 353pp · 98,267 words

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

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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

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook · 28 Mar 2016 · 345pp · 92,849 words

, 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

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 · 9 Sep 2019 · 327pp · 84,627 words

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

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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

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World

by Paul Collier · 30 Sep 2013 · 303pp · 83,564 words

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

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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. Even if training programs collapse, firms may still in the aggregate gain because they

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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

The Capitalist Manifesto

by Johan Norberg · 14 Jun 2023 · 295pp · 87,204 words

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

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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

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed

by Robert Skidelsky · 3 Mar 2020 · 290pp · 76,216 words

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

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’ 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

The City

by Tony Norfield · 352pp · 98,561 words

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

Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading

by Joel Hasbrouck · 4 Jan 2007 · 209pp · 13,138 words

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

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era

by Ellen Ruppel Shell · 22 Oct 2018 · 402pp · 126,835 words

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

The Best Business Writing 2013

by Dean Starkman · 1 Jan 2013 · 514pp · 152,903 words

is having insured yourself well. An important but sad reason why our requirement for wealth-as-insurance is insatiable is because insurance is often a zero-sum game. Consider a libertarian Titanic, whose insufficient number of lifeboat seats will be auctioned to the highest bidder in the event of a catastrophe. On such

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom

by Martin Jacques · 12 Nov 2009 · 859pp · 204,092 words

, the relationship between the two remains frozen in the manner of the Cold War, with each twist and turn being seen in terms of a zero-sum game.157 The issues of contention between the two are many, though the historical questions clearly predominate over all others. In terms of the present, by

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common

by Alan Greenspan · 14 Jun 2007

expense of the rest of the world, particularly, as is alleged, the United States and Europe? The answer is no. Trade expansion is not a zero-sum game. In fact, global exports and imports have been rising significantly faster than world GDP for more than half a century This occurred in the case

The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling

by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross · 30 Jun 2013

need to satisfy business users' requirements. You have several options when confronted with changes: Increase the scope (by adding time, resources, or budget), play the zero-sum game (by retaining the original scope by giving up something in exchange), or say “no” (without actually saying “no” by handling the change as an enhancement

Making Globalization Work

by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 16 Sep 2006

up to its promise. But the basic logic of trade—its potential to make most, if not all, better off—remains. Trade is not a zero-sum game, in which those who win do so at the cost of others; it is, or least it can be, a positive-sum game, in which

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

by Guy Standing · 13 Jul 2016 · 443pp · 98,113 words

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

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity

by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt · 18 Oct 2000 · 353pp · 355 words

. 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

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin · 14 Oct 2004 · 1,509pp · 416,377 words

doubted that the divided country would reunite, eventually, under one system or the other. It was natural enough that both Kim and Rhee saw a zero-sum game in which one system and set of leaders would win totally while the other would lose just as totally.76 A big difference, however, was

Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler · 1 Jun 1984 · 286pp · 94,017 words

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

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump

by James Naughtie · 1 Apr 2020

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

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity

by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 28 Jan 2020 · 408pp · 108,985 words

. 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

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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

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency

by Roger L. Martin · 28 Sep 2020 · 600pp · 72,502 words

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

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information

by Frank Pasquale · 17 Nov 2014 · 320pp · 87,853 words

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

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society

by Will Hutton · 30 Sep 2010 · 543pp · 147,357 words

of banking business models, to replace a world in which banks play cat and mouse with each other through their proprietary trading desks in a zero-sum game of trying to catch each other out by betting on future derivative prices – in effect, gambling deposits in a volatile market. Paul Volcker suggests that

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow

by Tim Jackson · 8 Dec 2016 · 573pp · 115,489 words

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

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy

by Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter · 14 Sep 2020 · 627pp · 89,295 words

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

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order

by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey · 27 Jan 2015 · 457pp · 128,838 words

-bank power, this sounds like a nightmare. It’s the antithesis of a cryptocurrency utopia. But here’s the rub: none of this is a zero-sum game. In a world in which anyone can create a cryptocurrency, government issuers of fiat digital currencies will face competition like never before. The Fed will

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

by John Brockman · 19 Feb 2019 · 339pp · 94,769 words

. 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

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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

The Best of Best New SF

by Gardner R. Dozois · 1 Jan 2005 · 1,280pp · 384,105 words

. 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

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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

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence

by Amy B. Zegart · 6 Nov 2021

more effectively. A new DNI would also free up the CIA director to concentrate on running the CIA. Government reform, however, is nearly always a zero-sum game. Empowering one bureaucratic actor requires weakening another, as well as its champions in Congress. In intelligence, a powerful, independent DNI threatened the discretion, budgets, and

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World

by Matt Alt · 14 Apr 2020

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

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

by Anu Bradford · 25 Sep 2023 · 898pp · 236,779 words

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

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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

Dealers of Lightning

by Michael A. Hiltzik · 27 Apr 2000 · 559pp · 157,112 words

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

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. 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

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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

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm

by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe · 3 Oct 2022 · 689pp · 134,457 words

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

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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

For Profit: A History of Corporations

by William Magnuson · 8 Nov 2022 · 356pp · 116,083 words

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

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice

by Fredrik Deboer · 3 Aug 2020 · 236pp · 77,546 words

’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

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. 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

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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

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

by David S. Landes · 14 Sep 1999 · 1,060pp · 265,296 words

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

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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

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos

by Sarah Lacy · 6 Jan 2011 · 269pp · 77,876 words

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

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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

Why Aren't They Shouting?: A Banker’s Tale of Change, Computers and Perpetual Crisis

by Kevin Rodgers · 13 Jul 2016 · 318pp · 99,524 words

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

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(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

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen · 13 Sep 2021

are you laughing at?” Allison said, glaring. “Sorry…I just realized that every time we argue, it ends in deadlock. 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

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, 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?” “I’ve done the math. Let me guess. You take the unemployment benefits and training subsidies from the government, add

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History

by Liam Vaughan · 11 May 2020 · 268pp · 81,811 words

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

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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

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy

by Kevin Mellyn · 18 Jun 2012 · 183pp · 17,571 words

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

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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

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-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

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

by Victor Davis Hanson · 15 Nov 2021 · 458pp · 132,912 words

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

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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

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history

by Gregory Zuckerman · 3 Nov 2009 · 342pp · 99,390 words

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

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds

by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes and Mohamed El-Erian · 29 May 2012 · 302pp · 86,614 words

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

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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

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers

by Stefan Fatsis · 27 Jul 2001 · 385pp · 25,673 words

, R, A, H, N, C, D, M, T, I, J, K, L, P, O, Y, F, B, G, W, U, V, Q. Scrabble is a zero-sum game, Ballard and Sheppard theorized, with the value of the hundred tiles totaling zero. Players could perform running calculations of the value of plays and of

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation

by Richard Bookstaber · 5 Apr 2007 · 289pp · 113,211 words

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

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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

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters

by Diane Coyle · 21 Feb 2011 · 523pp · 111,615 words

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

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

by Michael Wolff · 5 Jan 2018 · 394pp · 112,770 words

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

Paper Promises

by Philip Coggan · 1 Dec 2011 · 376pp · 109,092 words

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

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari · 1 Mar 2015 · 479pp · 144,453 words

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

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, 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

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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

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

by Timothy Ferriss · 6 Dec 2016 · 669pp · 210,153 words

how I’ve built the podcast, put together Kickstarter campaigns, etc. I do this because of two core beliefs. Belief #1—It’s rarely a zero-sum game (if someone wins, someone else must lose), and the more I help people with details, the more detailed help I receive. Belief #2—If it

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure

by Tim Harford · 1 Jun 2011 · 459pp · 103,153 words

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

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

by Carl Sagan · 11 May 1998 · 272pp · 76,089 words

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

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

by Francis Fukuyama · 11 Apr 2011 · 740pp · 217,139 words

Yanomamö Indians Y chromosome Yellow Turban rebellion Ying Zheng Young Turk movement Yuan Dynasty Yuezhi Yugoslavia Yurok Indians Yushchenko, Viktor Zaire Zakaria, Fareed zemskiy sobor zero-sum games Zhang Shicheng Zhao Kuangyin Zheng He Zhongzong, Emperor of China Zhou Dynasty; bureaucracy during; Confucianism during; Eastern (see also Spring and Autumn period; Warring States

Darwin Among the Machines

by George Dyson · 28 Mar 2012 · 463pp · 118,936 words

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

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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

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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

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), 63, 66 World War I, 62, 79, 86, 193–98, 220–21 World War II, 9–10, 63–67, 79–81, 144, 175, 221 Z zero-sum game, defined, 154 Zoonomia (Erasmus Darwin), 19 Zworykin, Vladimir (1889–1982), 85, 87, 99, 104–105 Zygalski, Henryk, 64

The Power of Passive Investing: More Wealth With Less Work

by Richard A. Ferri · 4 Nov 2010 · 345pp · 87,745 words

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

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York Federal Reserve had to orchestrate a bailout by several leading Wall Street firms. How the Dumb Money Gets Divided Tactical asset allocation is a zero-sum game. When someone underperforms the market it means someone must have outperformed before fees and expenses. The grand total dollar-weighted for the average investor in

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Swendon, David F. Swensen, David Swiss Finance Institute Systematic risk Tactical asset allocation: passive asset allocation and strategic asset allocation and timing gap and as zero-sum game Taxes: active funds and control of income tax payment personal trusts and tax-deferred savings tax efficiency Tax loss harvesting/tax swapping Tax Reform Act

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Winner’s curse, the Winning the Loser’s Game (Ellis) World War II X-Ray portfolio management tool Your Money & Your Brain (Zweig) Zechhauser, Richard Zero-sum game: alpha as market timing strategies as non-market risk and tactical asset allocation as Zweig, Jason

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 3 Feb 2015 · 368pp · 96,825 words

’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

The Scandal of Money

by George Gilder · 23 Feb 2016 · 209pp · 53,236 words

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

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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

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000

by Paul Kennedy · 15 Jan 1989 · 1,477pp · 311,310 words

currency. 249. Balfour, Adversaries, p. 204. 250. Ibid., p. 193. 251. L. Thurow, “America Among Equals,” in Ungar (ed.), Estrangement, pp. 159— 78; idem, The Zero-Sum Game (New York, 1980), passim, but espec. chs. 1 and 4; DeGrasse, Military Expansion, Economic Decline, espec. ch. 2. 252. See, in particular, Grosser, Western Alliance

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The

by Mariana Mazzucato · 25 Apr 2018 · 457pp · 125,329 words

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

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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

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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

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: https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciu012 Hill, C., The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 (London: Nelson, 1980). Hill, J. M., ‘Alpha as a net zero-sum game: How serious a constraint?', Journal of Portfolio Management, 32(4) (2006), pp. 24-32: https://doi.org/10.3905/jpm.2006.644189 Hill, P., ‘The

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets

by Thomas Philippon · 29 Oct 2019 · 401pp · 109,892 words

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

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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

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism

by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart · 31 Dec 2018

, the loyalty of allies, and objective truth. Outsiders and politicians cannot be trusted; they are out to swindle you and lies are everywhere. In a zero-sum game, their gain is our loss. Authoritarians know that in this world, the only protection is strength. Part IV Conclusions 445 Given these assumptions, the authoritarian

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less

by Michael Hyatt · 8 Apr 2019 · 243pp · 59,662 words

. 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

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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

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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

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’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

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Thomas Nelson Publishers, 43–45 Timashev, Ratmir, 200 time, 59, 86–87 control of, 60 as finite resource, 101–2 as fixed, 95, 157 as zero-sum game, 95 time and energy, 67–68 time blocking, 103 time famine, 137–38 Tolkien, J. R. R., 71 “total work,” 32 trade-offs, 95–96

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–20, 163 workflow, 125–29, 147 Workflow Optimizer, 129, 136 working backwards, 66 work obligations, 35 workout, 75 work (theme), 176, 177 worry creep, 85 zero-sum game, 93–95 Michael Hyatt is the founder and CEO of Michael Hyatt & Company, a leadership coaching and development firm twice listed on the Inc. 5000

How the World Ran Out of Everything

by Peter S. Goodman · 11 Jun 2024 · 528pp · 127,605 words

the pursuit of compensation. The dockworkers represented an outlier in the story of downward mobility. They did not need handouts from anyone. Yet in the zero-sum game of the American economy—in a supply chain hollowed out by reverence for Just in Time, and optimized for the betterment of shareholders—their gains

You Are Not So Smart

by David McRaney · 20 Sep 2011 · 270pp · 83,506 words

. In situations like the imaginary lake above, in an effort not to fall behind, everyone loses. A big holiday meal, for example, can become a zero-sum game if everyone piles a plate, but if everyone takes only what he or she needs, everyone wins. The tragedy of taking from a common good

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, and bridges would collapse if people weren’t forced to pay taxes. Purely logical creatures could be trusted to figure out life isn’t a zero-sum game, but you are not a purely logical creature. You will cheat if you think the system is cheating you. The urge to help others and

Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-And What We Can Do About It

by Jennifer Breheny Wallace · 21 Aug 2023 · 309pp · 86,747 words

, 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

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

by Nicholas A. Christakis · 26 Mar 2019

name-calling between the groups began when this same boy referred to one of the Rattlers as “Dirty Shirt.”68 The two groups competed in zero-sum games such as baseball, tug-of-war, football, tent-pitching competitions, and a climactic treasure hunt. Though the Eagles appeared to be the weaker of the

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

by Raghuram Rajan · 26 Feb 2019 · 596pp · 163,682 words

exacerbate the tendency towards cronyism. When many countries engage in nostalgic nationalism, each pining for an era when they were strong, international relations become a zero sum game, and cooperative international action an impossibility. As countries assert a muscular nationalism, nations come closer to conflict. For this reason, the natural offset to an

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber · 29 Oct 2024 · 292pp · 106,826 words

than their present, and to attribute such worsening to the behavior of others. Under such circumstances, ambitious people will be attracted to jobs that involve zero-sum games: adversarial politics, irresponsible speculation, fraud, even revolutions and coups. From this perspective, bubbles can be seen as an outlet for restless energy. They offer a

The Transhumanist Reader

by Max More and Natasha Vita-More · 4 Mar 2013 · 798pp · 240,182 words

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

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

by George Packer · 4 Mar 2014 · 559pp · 169,094 words

seemed possible, because there was no sort of internal structure where people were competing for diminishing resources.” Unlike New York, Silicon Valley wasn’t a zero-sum game. It took two more years. In the summer of 1998, Thiel gave a guest lecture at Stanford on currency trading. It was a hot day

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein · 17 Aug 2020

large corporations found that only thirty-seven had had any communications with Congress in the previous two years. Business lobbying was practiced as a political zero-sum game: Pratt & Whitney fighting Lockheed for the contract to make the engine for a new Air Force jet; spinners of natural wool vs. manufacturers of synthetics

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more money became available for investment, whether for factories, roads, or the social safety net: a virtuous circle. When productivity stalled, economics became a nasty zero-sum game. Which looked a whole lot like America now. The prospect of reversing the calamity with a single small jigger in the tax code—almost like

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future

by Levi Tillemann · 20 Jan 2015 · 431pp · 107,868 words

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

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

by Victor Davis Hanson · 16 Oct 2017 · 908pp · 262,808 words

, continuous battles on the Eastern Front had begun to sap German Panzers. British and American strategic planning was beginning to be envisioned as a specialized zero-sum game: the huge Soviet tank force, with its tens of thousands of T-34s, ensured that the majority of first-rate upgraded PzKpfw IVs, Tigers, and

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe

by Greg Ip · 12 Oct 2015 · 309pp · 95,495 words

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

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)

by Charles Wheelan · 18 Apr 2010 · 386pp · 122,595 words

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

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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

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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

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all, the Red Sox would never complain that the Yankees were not doing enough in the off-season to improve their team. Baseball is a zero-sum game. Only one team can win the World Series. International economics is the opposite. All countries can become richer over time, even as individual firms within

Architects of Intelligence

by Martin Ford · 16 Nov 2018 · 586pp · 186,548 words

also means they potentially have a lot more young Turings or von Neumanns in the pipeline. RAY KURZWEIL: I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. An engineer in China who comes up with a breakthrough in solar energy or in deep learning benefits all of us. China is publishing a

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

by Annie Jacobsen · 14 Sep 2015 · 558pp · 164,627 words

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

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

by Nick Bostrom · 3 Jun 2014 · 574pp · 164,509 words

walk. There may, however, be a moral case for de-emphasizing or refraining from second-guessing moves. Trying to outwit one another looks like a zero-sum game—or negative-sum, when one considers the time and energy that would be dissipated by the practice as well as the likelihood that it would

Thinking in Bets

by Annie Duke · 6 Feb 2018 · 288pp · 81,253 words

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

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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

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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

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell · 11 May 2015 · 409pp · 105,551 words

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

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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

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

by Natasha Dow Schüll · 15 Jan 2012 · 632pp · 166,729 words

control. She had learned that it was risky to depend on others, whose desires so often proved obscure and volatile. She narrated her relationships as zero-sum games in which there had to be a loser. She married a man because he beat her at a contest; when all he did was “sit

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

by Mark Blyth · 24 Apr 2013 · 576pp · 105,655 words

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

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff · 21 Mar 2013 · 323pp · 95,939 words

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

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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

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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

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy

by Stephanie Kelton · 8 Jun 2020 · 338pp · 104,684 words

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

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

by Douglas Rushkoff · 1 Mar 2016 · 366pp · 94,209 words

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

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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

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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

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

by Mohamed A. El-Erian · 26 Jan 2016 · 318pp · 77,223 words

. 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

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns

by John C. Bogle · 1 Jan 2007 · 356pp · 51,419 words

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

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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

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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

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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

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

by Matthew Syed · 19 Apr 2010 · 304pp · 84,396 words

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

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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

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time by 10 percent, I will find myself in precisely the same position as I did before taking the drug. In sport (or any other zero-sum game), an enhancement that is available to all is practically equivalent to an enhancement that is available to none. This tells us something of great importance

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). “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

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in, 50 simple activities in, 50–51 speed in, 32, 34 steroids in, 239–45 ten years to excellence in, 16 variables in, 10, 45 zero-sum games, 109–12 sports science, 29 Springstein, Thomas, 246 standards: lowering, 132 rising, 100 Starkes, Janet, 31–32 Steele, Claude, 285 steroids: benefits and costs of

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), 169-71 World Series (1986), 184 World War II, placebos in, 155–56 Wright, Ron, 204–5 Xinhua, Chen, 81–82, 92, 101–2, 105 zero-sum games, 109–12, 249–51 Zico (soccer), 86, 88 Acknowledgments I first came across the name Anders Ericsson in a roundtable discussion with sports scientists in

Reset

by Ronald J. Deibert · 14 Aug 2020

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

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, 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

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat

by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff · 15 Oct 2018 · 568pp · 164,014 words

, and they all have unique flavors. If Vladimir Putin’s Russia viewed democracy as an existential threat and its battle against the West as a zero-sum game, that view carried forward to the digital world. Russia specialized in mischievous actions that attempted to exploit the online seams of Western democracy. At the

Concentrated Investing

by Allen C. Benello · 7 Dec 2016

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

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

by Natasha Dow Schüll · 19 Aug 2012

control. She had learned that it was risky to depend on others, whose desires so often proved obscure and volatile. She narrated her relationships as zero-sum games in which there had to be a loser. She married a man because he beat her at a contest; when all he did was “sit

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least

by Antti Ilmanen · 24 Feb 2022

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

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, 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

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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

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higher costs and fees. Historically, this has been a tough challenge. Growing asset owner awareness of Sharpe's (1991) arithmetic of active management as a zero-sum game before fees, and of the industry's broad track record, has led to a gradual but persistent shift from active investing to passive. Yet, the

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin

by Eric Voskuil, James Chiang and Amir Taaki · 28 Feb 2020 · 365pp · 56,751 words

[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

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] 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

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

by Daniel Markovits · 14 Sep 2019 · 976pp · 235,576 words

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

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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

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman · 17 Jul 2023 · 329pp · 99,504 words

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

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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 Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

by M. Mitchell Waldrop · 14 Apr 2001

, 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

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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

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them

by Nouriel Roubini · 17 Oct 2022 · 328pp · 96,678 words

. 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

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 10 Jun 2012 · 580pp · 168,476 words

. At most, it led to the bankers’ well-being, with the rest of society bearing the cost. It wasn’t even what economists call a zero-sum game, where what one person gains exactly equals what the others lose. It was a negative-sum game, where the gains to winners are less than

Hard Landing

by Thomas Petzinger and Thomas Petzinger Jr. · 1 Jan 1995 · 726pp · 210,048 words

in asking, “was it of net social benefit or detriment?” The answer is neither. Deregulation was a massive exercise in the redistribution of wealth, a zero-sum game in which not billions but trillions of dollars in money, assets, time, convenience, service, and pure human toil shifted among many groups of people, from

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)

by Michael J. Mauboussin · 1 Jan 2006 · 348pp · 83,490 words

.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

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century

by George Gilder · 30 Apr 1981 · 590pp · 153,208 words

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

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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

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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

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a free economy is the total wealth of the other players: the wealth of the entire economy. If free enterprise were pure chance, and a zero-sum game like gambling (in which one man’s gain is necessarily another’s loss), very early ruin would be assured. Enterprise is only partly chance, so

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of the economy’s profits during the mid-2000s come not from the positive-sum benisons of productive investment and entrepreneurial risk, but from the zero-sum games of speculative investment and fiduciary risk shuffling? Why does public debt, under Parkinson’s Corollary, expand to absorb and stultify all other means of finance

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War I World War II Wright, David McCord Wright, Marian Wrigley, E.A. X X-efficiency Xenophobia Xerox Corporation Y Yale Yoruba Z Zabian, Michael “zero-sum game,” of income redistribution “zero-sum society,” Zinn, Howard Zuckerberg, Mark a This is a chapter on the theory of supply-side economics, which may be

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet

by Roger Scruton · 30 Apr 2014 · 426pp · 118,913 words

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

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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

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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. The big NGOs and

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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

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itself as resolving a conflict in favour of one or other of the parties. In normal circumstances, a case before a civil court is a zero-sum game, in which one party wins everything, and the other loses everything. There are no consolation prizes. Moreover, the doctrine of precedent ensures that the court

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism

by Hubert Joly · 14 Jun 2021 · 265pp · 75,202 words

, 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

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’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

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, 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

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be its competitors, has been a key ingredient of its resurgence and illustrates how such partnerships transcend a view of the business world as a zero-sum game. When I joined Best Buy, we were in a strange position with many of our vendors, from Apple and Microsoft to Sony. They were developing

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stores and using hybrid cars for Geek Squad agents. This helps the environment and helped us save money on our energy consumption. Again, not a zero-sum game. Making a significant difference will increasingly involve cooperating with other industry players. Collective action creates greater impact faster. If a critical mass within an industry

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everyone as a customer, as a human being with real needs. Quite the revolution! * * * Once we reject the view of the business world as a zero-sum game, there is no limit to the power of “and.” Business can do well by doing good. Best Buy is addressing the needs of aging Americans

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opportunity to realize how privileged we have been and to feel what so many others have felt in the past. At the same time, the zero-sum-game perspective misses the point that, without diversity, everyone eventually suffers. Just take a look at Lehman Brothers. If it had been Lehman Brothers & Sisters, I

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self-defeating approach to business. Your piece only grows when another’s shrinks. Companies seeking to be “the best” or “number one” play a constricted zero-sum game—and are likely one day to find themselves on the losing side. For Asheesh, the headwinds related to hardware being sold in stores were hardly

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World

by William D. Cohan · 11 Apr 2011 · 1,073pp · 302,361 words

Streeters are so well trained to do, even at Goldman Sachs, the champion of teamwork. “Great Day!” Mullen replied. Inevitably, though, since trading is a zero-sum game where for every winner there is a loser, at the same time that Goldman was raking in profits, some of its clients, or “counterparties” as

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge

by Faisal Islam · 28 Aug 2013 · 475pp · 155,554 words

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

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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

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market

by Leah McGrath Goodman · 15 Feb 2011 · 553pp · 168,111 words

in applying advanced calculus to their transactions either, it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. Because trading had always been—and always would be—a zero-sum game with a clear winner and a clear loser for every trade, to not understand the thinking of the other pit traders, however superior or flawed

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All

by Costas Lapavitsas · 14 Aug 2013 · 554pp · 158,687 words

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

All the Devils Are Here

by Bethany McLean · 19 Oct 2010 · 543pp · 157,991 words

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

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, 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

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together

by Bruce Schneier · 14 Feb 2012 · 503pp · 131,064 words

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

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-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

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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

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis

by James Rickards · 10 Nov 2011 · 381pp · 101,559 words

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

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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

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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

Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff

by Christine S. Richard · 26 Apr 2010 · 459pp · 118,959 words

.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

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

by Daniel J. Levitin · 18 Aug 2014 · 685pp · 203,949 words

attention is well-worn figurative language, and there is some useful meaning in this cliché. Attention has a cost. It is a this-or-that, zero-sum game. We pay attention to one thing, either through conscious decision or because our attentional filter deemed it important enough to push it to the forefront

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

by Michael Lewis · 1 Nov 2009 · 265pp · 93,231 words

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

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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

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly · 6 Jun 2016 · 371pp · 108,317 words

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

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

by Matt Ridley · 17 May 2010 · 462pp · 150,129 words

, another fallacy. In the film Wall Street, the fictional Gordon Gekko not only says that greed is good; he also adds that it’s a zero-sum game where somebody wins and somebody loses. He is not necessarily wrong about some speculative markets in capital and in assets, but he is about markets

Why We Can't Afford the Rich

by Andrew Sayer · 6 Nov 2014 · 504pp · 143,303 words

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

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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

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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

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market

by Scott Patterson · 11 Jun 2012 · 356pp · 105,533 words

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

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

by Brian Christian · 1 Mar 2011 · 370pp · 94,968 words

. 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

The Rise of the Network Society

by Manuel Castells · 31 Aug 1996 · 843pp · 223,858 words

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

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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

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman · 22 Nov 2016 · 602pp · 177,874 words

, the rule of law, regulations, Henry Ford’s factory, the U.N.: Social technologies are how we organize to capture the benefits of cooperation—non-zero-sum games. Physical technologies and social technologies coevolve. Physical technology innovations make new social technologies possible, like fossil fuel technologies made mass production possible, smartphones make the

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 · 17 Oct 2014 · 292pp · 85,151 words

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

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know

by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman · 3 Jan 2014 · 587pp · 117,894 words

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

Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier · 6 May 2013 · 510pp · 120,048 words

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

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, 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

Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns

by Michael W. Covel · 14 Jun 2011

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

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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

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win, someone else will lose, either through their hedging or their bad strategy. Does survival of the fittest make you uneasy? Stay out of the zero-sum game. Someone’s gotta lose for you to win.7 All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.1 Crash

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. At the beginning or end of a major trend, there may be volatility, but it will be an extremely superficial, temporary effect.2 • People play zero-sum games for many reasons. Not all play to win. Hedgers, for example, trade the market for certain reasons. It’s portfolio protection for them. Their insurance

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1. Larry Harris, Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 2. Larry Harris, “The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity.” Draft 0.911, May 7, 1993. 3. Ibid. 4. Dave Druz interview with Covel, 2011

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in predictions, 175-178 trend following versus, 194 hatred of trend following, 109-110 market price, importance of, 51-52 unexpected events, 91 market theories zero-sum game, 95 losses avoiding averaging, 79 271 fundamental analysis, 33-35 technical analysis, 35-36 markets drawdowns, 69-70 change in, 45 exit strategies, 75-76

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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

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment

by David F. Swensen · 8 Aug 2005 · 490pp · 117,629 words

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

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, 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

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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

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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

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

by William Poundstone · 18 Sep 2006 · 389pp · 109,207 words

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

Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond

by Bruce C. N. Greenwald, Judd Kahn, Paul D. Sonkin and Michael van Biema · 26 Jan 2004 · 306pp · 97,211 words

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

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

by Richard H. Thaler · 10 May 2015 · 500pp · 145,005 words

his life by a few weeks was not a tempting option. His sharp wit remained. He explained to his oncologist that cancer is not a zero-sum game. “What is bad for the tumor is not necessarily good for me.” One day on a phone call I asked him how he was feeling

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

by Tim Harford · 1 Jan 2008 · 250pp · 88,762 words

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

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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

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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

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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

Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV

by Peter Biskind · 6 Nov 2023 · 543pp · 143,084 words

together. The Americans at its darkest portrays the cat-and-mouse game between the two superpowers, the two ideologies, as a lose-lose proposition, a zero-sum game with no winners and no exit. Yes, doing the wrong thing is punished, but so is doing the right thing. In the last, melancholy shot

Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World

by J. Doyne Farmer · 24 Apr 2024 · 406pp · 114,438 words

opposed to non-competitive. In a competitive game, if one player wins, the other player is likely to lose; the extreme case is called a zero-sum game, meaning that the winning player’s gain is equal to the losing player’s loss. In a non-competitive game, by contrast, if one player

Hedgehogging

by Barton Biggs · 3 Jan 2005

: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

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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

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economist ccc_biggs_ch11_149-161.qxd 158 11/29/05 7:03 AM Page 158 HEDGEHOGGING PROFIT FROM OUR MISTAKES!! Investing money is a zero-sum game. For every winner, there is a loser.We’ve been losers! If you had sold what we bought, and if you had bought what we

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parts. ccc_biggs_ch18_247-258.qxd 11/29/05 7:18 AM Page 255 The Trouble with Being Big 255 ALPHA INVESTING IS A ZERO-SUM GAME I remember a talk I had in early 2004 with Joan, another old friend from a major investment-management company, who runs big Europe, Asia

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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

The Clash of the Cultures

by John C. Bogle · 30 Jun 2012 · 339pp · 109,331 words

, 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

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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

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funds’ excess returns are offset by the losing funds’ shortfalls. The obvious conclusion: We’re all indexers now. But, as noted earlier, this is no zero-sum game. The financial system—the traders, the brokers, the investment bankers, the money managers, the middlemen, “Wall Street,” as it were—takes a cut of all

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fact, fund managers buy their stocks from other managers, and sell their stocks to other managers—this trading, as I noted earlier, is obviously a zero-sum game before transaction costs and a loser’s game thereafter. 7 When I joined the small Wellington organization in 1951, the fund’s assets totaled $140

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Take The resemblance of the stock market to the casino is hardly far-fetched. Both beating the stock market and gambling in the casino are zero-sum games—but only before the costs of playing the game are deducted. After the heavy costs of financial intermediation (commissions, spreads, management fees, taxes, etc.) are

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

by Richard Beck · 2 Sep 2024 · 715pp · 212,449 words

companies and countries have still found success in this environment, but only at the expense of others; slow growth turns the global economy into a zero-sum game that produces at least one loser for every winner rather than growing the pie quickly enough for most people to do well. One of the

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and exploitative in their own right. In the previous chapter, I discussed how in an environment of slowing global growth, economic development turns into a zero-sum game. As capital circulates from place to place in search of the cheapest labor and lowest production costs, any benefits that accrue to one country almost

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance

by Eswar S. Prasad · 27 Sep 2021 · 661pp · 185,701 words

speak of. There would be no incentive to undertake (or possibility of undertaking) competitive currency devaluations to promote a country’s exports. This disruptive and zero-sum game of currency wars could no longer be used to stimulate economic recoveries. A single and stable currency serving all the functions of money would reduce

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street

by Peter L. Bernstein · 19 Jun 2005 · 425pp · 122,223 words

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

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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

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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

The End of Growth

by Jeff Rubin · 2 Sep 2013 · 262pp · 83,548 words

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

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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

Capital Ideas Evolving

by Peter L. Bernstein · 3 May 2007

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

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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

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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

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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

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efficiency. . . . As markets get more efficient, finding skill will become more difficult. And, since finding skill requires skill at the fund level and is a zero-sum game, we believe Boards and CIOs will have to heighten their focus on developing a sustainable skill advantage over their peers, or default to an indexing

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[intelligible or physical] content of quantum theoretical kinematics and mechanics”], Zeitschrift für Physik, Vol. 43, pp. 172–198. Hill, Joanne, 2006. “Alpha as a Net Zero-Sum Game,” The Journal of Portfolio Management, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Summer), pp. 24 –32. Homer, Sidney, and Martin Leibowitz, 1972. Inside the Yield Book: New Tools

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strategies for separating beta bets from, 177–178, 190 –192, 193–194, 238 synthetic bond strategy, 188–191 Yale portfolio use of, 169–170 as zero-sum game, 170 See also Beta (systematic risk); Risk; Valuation Alpha Tilts, 130 American Finance Association, 6 Amoco Oil ( BP-Amoco), 175, 182 Analytic Investors, 106 Anderson

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy

by Mervyn King · 3 Mar 2016 · 464pp · 139,088 words

and Italy, central banks and governments are becoming more and more strident in their determination to talk the exchange rate down. Competitive depreciation is a zero-sum game as countries try to ‘steal’ demand from each other. In the 1930s, the abandonment of the gold standard, and hence of fixed exchange rates between

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market

by Steven Drobny · 31 Mar 2006 · 385pp · 128,358 words

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

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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

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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

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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

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be uglier. One percent interest rates in the United States was such an anomaly, nobody really understands it to this day. Are macro markets a zero-sum game? Yes.There are a lot of smart people out there, but not all smart people can do the same thing at the same time. It

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–148, 151, 314–316, 318–319, 323, 331, 349 Yield spreads, 141–142 Yugoslavia, 51–52 Yukos, 286 YUM Brands, 304 Zero strike options, 46 Zero-sum game, 178, 205

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities

by John Cassidy · 10 Nov 2009 · 545pp · 137,789 words

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

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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. Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher were two mathematicians working at the RAND Corporation, which the Pentagon had founded in the aftermath

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,” 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

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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

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Fund Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wood, Christopher Woodford, Michael World Bank WorldCom World War I World War II Yale University School of Management Zandi, Mark Zeckhauser, Richard zero-sum games Zingales, Luigi ALSO BY JOHN CASSIDY Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

by Brad Feld · 8 Oct 2012 · 169pp · 56,250 words

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

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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

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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

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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. ENGAGE THE ENTIRE ENTREPRENEURIAL STACK Startup

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, encourage and support new things, people, and ideas, and recognize that other entrepreneurs’ leadership is additive to the system. Rather than view it as a zero-sum game, in which there’s a leader on top, they view it as a game with increasing returns, in which the larger the number of entrepreneurs

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COMMUNITY There are four key attributes to leadership in a startup community. The leaders must be inclusive. They must realize they are not playing a zero-sum game. They need to be mentorship driven and recognize the continual power of a mentor-mentee relationship. Finally, they must embrace porous boundaries. I’ll explore

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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

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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

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a strong local economy in cities such as Boulder that have a high entrepreneurial density. The best of these local startup communities aren’t playing zero-sum games. The leaders are embracing everyone who wants to engage in startups and are building long-term foundations for continued growth. When a startup fails (which

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at a country level, geographic borders matter a lot, but at a state and city level, they don’t matter much at all. PLAYING A ZERO-SUM GAME Once members of the startup community realize that geographic borders are artificial, they often fall into the trap of playing a

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zero-sum game, where they win at the expense of the neighboring startup community. “Our community is better than yours” starts popping up. Government initiatives to recruit startups

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. As a society, we are far from the saturation point in terms of entrepreneurship. Although there is not an infinite capacity for it, playing a zero-sum game, especially within neighboring geographies, simply stifles the growth of the startup ecosystem. Instead, take a network approach and connect your startup community with neighboring ones

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, bottom-up approach to getting people actively engaged in the startup community. The leaders in the Boulder startup community didn’t view things as a zero-sum game, and instead of telling entrepreneurs throughout the state to move to Boulder, they exported things that were working for them to the neighboring communities. HAVING

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highlighting. Once again, our friend Andrew Hyde appears in the creation of another powerful resource for the Boulder startup community. Andrew is playing a non-zero-sum game at its finest: Rather than trying to hang on to each new thing he creates, he happily hands them off to others to run with

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Silicon Flatirons platform to regularly bring amazing, interesting people to the CU campus to engage with the Boulder startup community. They refused to play a zero-sum game. They worked hard to spread their entrepreneurial activities across the CU Boulder campus. With the ATLAS Center, Brad Bernthal and I started an Entrepreneurs Unplugged

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shoulder about biotech.” So much of the discussion was negative about tech in an effort to justify biotech investing. In my mind, this was classic zero-sum game behavior. I then went on to say that I thought the idea of creating linkages between tech and biotech was awesome, but they should be

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, Paul L Lawton, Jenny Leadership, attributes of being inclusive being mentorship driven experimenting and failing fast giving people assignments having porous boundaries playing a non-zero-sum game The Lean Startup (Ries) Lefkoff, Kyle Lejeal, Jim Leonsis, Ted Levine, Seth Limmer, Ben Lorang, Bart M Makare, Brian Markets and Hierarchies (Williamson) Markiewicz, Tom

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capital, complaining about government, being too reliant on newcomers, having a bias against patriarch problem risk aversion, having a culture of short-term commitments, making zero-sum game, playing R Raindance Communications Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Saxenian) RegOnline Reich, Robert Renaud, Christian Rice University The Rise

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, in startup communities diversity, lack of integration parallel universes space Web 2.0 Weiser, Phil Williamson, Oliver Wyman, Bruce Y Young Entrepreneurs Organization (YEO) Z Zero-sum game, playing AN EXCERPT FROM STARTUP LIFE: SURVIVING AND THRIVING IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH AN ENTREPRENEUR by Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor (2013) FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought

by Andrew W. Lo · 3 Apr 2017 · 733pp · 179,391 words

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

Monte Carlo Simulation and Finance

by Don L. McLeish · 1 Apr 2005

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

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky · 1 May 2017 · 1,261pp · 294,715 words

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

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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

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, 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

Competition Demystified

by Bruce C. Greenwald · 31 Aug 2016 · 482pp · 125,973 words

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

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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

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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 Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

by Jeremy Rifkin · 31 Mar 2014 · 565pp · 151,129 words

much better suited to our biological instincts than the stark picture of an anonymous marketplace where an invisible hand mechanically rewards selfish behavior in a zero-sum game. Why, however, this sudden interest in retrieving the commons as a governance model for society? There is no easy answer, but let me suggest at

Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman · 31 Oct 2013 · 1,073pp · 314,528 words

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

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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

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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

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theories when it came to modeling behavior and expectations. “One cannot, without empirical evidence,” Schelling observed, “deduce whatever understandings can be perceived in a non-zero-sum game of maneuver any more than one can prove, by purely formal deduction, that a particular joke is bound to be funny.”8 Schelling, however, had

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this chapter opened. This was originally the name of a hypothesis used by evolutionary biologists to describe an arms race between predators and prey, a zero-sum game between species, none of which could ever win.30 In the business context, it tended to be used as more of a race between similar

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own

by Garett Jones · 15 Feb 2015 · 247pp · 64,986 words

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

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

by Robert Skidelsky · 13 Nov 2018

, 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

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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

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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

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University Press. Schlesinger Jr, A. (1986), The Cycles of American History. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin. Schomberg, W. (2016), Bank of England’s Carney warns of zero-sum game from negative rates. Reuters. Available at: http://uk.reuters.com/article/ uk-g20-china-carney-idUKKCN0VZ14A [Accessed 11 July 2017]. Schumpeter, J. A. (1954), History

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio

by William J. Bernstein · 26 Apr 2002 · 407pp · 114,478 words

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

Heads I Win, Tails I Win

by Spencer Jakab · 21 Jun 2016 · 303pp · 84,023 words

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

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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

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,” 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

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that they’re the ultimate game of skill. Millions of people, plus lots of computers these days, are trying to win in what is a zero-sum game that never ends. Even some fairly conservative investors I know, including professionals, maintain some “play money” on the side that they can afford to lose

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Michael Steinhardt aren’t the ones blocking it—you are. Yes, Steinhardt is your competition, but there can be lots of winners in this gigantic zero-sum game called investing. A billionaire investor like him can trounce the overall market only because lots of people with far smaller pots of money do worse

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, 224 important rules of, 41–42 “less is more,” 17 and long-term, 6, 8, 168 worst time for, 32–33, 38–41, 239, 257 zero-sum game, 3, 15, 160, 208, 254 investment banks, 4, 11, 25, 47, 99, 113, 130–32, 134–35, 180, 196, 209, 214, 247 Investment Company Institute

Smarter Investing

by Tim Hale · 2 Sep 2014 · 332pp · 81,289 words

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

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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

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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. For every winning

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position, there has to be a corresponding losing position, relative to the market. 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

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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. Only one of the seller or buyer of the bonds can win in the short term. In order to believe that you can

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. A study of 60,000 individual investors in the USA trading their own brokerage accounts, a group that is at most risk of being persistent zero-sum-game losers, found that the average gross return, i.e. returns before costs, was more or less in line with the market return (Barber and Odean

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back foot, with the probabilities favouring a passive (index) approach. Passive investors will beat the majority of active investors As we have discovered in the zero-sum game above, all investors are the market. So, the average investor will generate the market return before fees, transaction costs and taxes. In the real world

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is worthless. Transaction costs are significantly higher in smaller, less efficient, markets, negating much of the benefit. Remember that they are still playing in a zero-sum game, but with higher costs. What does the research tell us? The reality is that research suggests that few investors outperform the market portfolio consistently over

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costs (2% annual management fees and 20% performance, plus an additional 1% p.a. and 10% for funds of funds) in what is still a zero-sum game make their inclusion unjustifiable. Let us dig a little deeper. Scary insights into the hedge fund world Hedge fund returns that are published and bandied

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and investment philosophy, 2nd costs exceptional managers, 2nd, 3rd manager selection market timing, 2nd, 3rd, 4th opportunities research evidence security selection testing long-term performance zero-sum game, 2nd and market returns actively managed funds administration system DIY investors advisers, 2nd, 3rd attributes of credentials and product choices vs DIY approach Albion Strategic

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actively managed funds, 2nd venture capital, 2nd Vinik, Jeff Vodafone volatility bonds equity markets wealth creation ‘get rich, slow’ process wealth-destroying behaviour, 2nd, 3rd zero-sum game and hedge funds and investment philosophy, 2nd ‘A book of investment wisdom and common sense for the ages. Investors who follow his simple advice will

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing

by Michael J. Mauboussin · 14 Jul 2012 · 299pp · 92,782 words

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

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

by Frank Trentmann · 1 Dec 2015 · 1,213pp · 376,284 words

to switch from mercantilism to free trade. Instead of planting ‘Keep Out’ signs around its colonies, Britain threw the door wide open. Instead of a zero-sum game, trade was now believed to benefit all. The free-trade empire set itself the mission of creating one integrated world market. Liberal imperialism and globalization

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet

by David Kahn · 1 Feb 1963 · 1,799pp · 532,462 words

be thought of as a ‘game’ of a very simple structure; a zero-sum two-person game with complete information, and just two ‘moves.’ [A zero-sum game is one in which one contestant’s advances are made at the expense of the other.] The cipher designer chooses a system for his ‘move

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker · 14 Oct 2021 · 533pp · 125,495 words

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

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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

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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

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Dilemma, 238–42, 244 promises/statements of intent and, 234 Public Goods games, 242–44 randomness as strategy, 228, 230–31 win–win outcomes, 232 zero-sum games, 229–32 garden of forking paths, 145, 185, 348n60 Gardner, Martin, 143–44, 342n33 Gates, Bill, 283 GDP per capita, 247–50, 263–64, 270

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, 124 XKCD cartoon, 134, 135, 225, 281 xor. See exclusive or (xor) Yang, Andrew, 85–87, 90 Yanomanö people, 307 Zeno’s second paradox, 38 zero-sum games, 229–32 Ziman, John, 162 Zorba the Greek, 35 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P

On Thermonuclear War

by Herman Kahn · 16 Jul 2007 · 1,117pp · 270,127 words

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

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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

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

by George Gilder · 16 Jul 2018 · 332pp · 93,672 words

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

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. . . . 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

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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

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian · 5 Oct 2020 · 625pp · 167,349 words

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

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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

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

by Pedro Domingos · 21 Sep 2015 · 396pp · 117,149 words

, 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

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

by Bryan Caplan · 16 Jan 2018 · 636pp · 140,406 words

/2007480.pdf. Labaree, David. 1997. How to Succeed in School without Really Learning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2012. Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lacy, Sarah. 2011. “Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling

by Adam Kucharski · 23 Feb 2016 · 360pp · 85,321 words

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

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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

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–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

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, 43, 45–46, 57, 68 World Cup (soccer), 113, 205 World Series of Poker, 140–141, 144, 145 York University course, 215 Yorke, James, 13 zero-sum games, 145–147, 149, 161, 181 ADAM KUCHARSKI is a lecturer in mathematical modeling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and an award-winning

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker · 1 Jan 2002 · 901pp · 234,905 words

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

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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

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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

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Joneses (houses, cars, clothing, prestigious educations), rather than in ways that only they know about (health care, job safety, retirement savings). Unfortunately, status is a zero-sum game, so when everyone has more money to spend on cars and houses, the houses and cars get bigger but people are no happier than they

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio Garcia Martinez · 27 Jun 2016 · 559pp · 155,372 words

, 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

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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

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, 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

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, 124 Yahoo Finance, 448 Yahoo Shopping, 46 Yan, Rong, 321, 368 YouTube, 124 Zachary, George, 127–28 Zappos, 124, 324, 395, 462 Zeitgeist, 29–30 zero-sum game, 230, 319 Zoufonoun, Amin, 209–11, 213, 225–26, 254 Zuckerberg, Mark (“Zuck”) advertising knowledge, 393–94 on clown car, 428–29 company-wide Q

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths · 4 Apr 2016 · 523pp · 143,139 words

option; this clearly would not work for long in rock-paper-scissors. Mixed strategies appears as part of the equilibrium in many games, especially in “zero-sum” games, where the interests of the players are pitted directly against one another. every two-player game has at least one equilibrium: Nash, “Equilibrium Points in

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition)

by Burton G. Malkiel · 5 Jan 2015 · 482pp · 121,672 words

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

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer

by Nicholas Shaxson · 10 Oct 2018 · 482pp · 149,351 words

expensive and the service unreliable. It would be obvious that something strange was going on. The rise of finance and financialisation has not been a zero-sum game that transfers wealth from poorer majorities to a relatively small number of players in the financial sector. It is a long-term, negative-sum game

Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander · 10 Sep 2012 · 1,079pp · 321,718 words

, market forces, the subconscious, subliminal imagery, Freudian slip, (Edipus complex, defense mechanism, sour grapes, passive-aggressive behavior, peer pressure, racial profiling, ethnic stereotype, status symbol, zero-sum game, catch-22, gestalt, chemical bond, catalyst, photosynthesis, DNA, virus, genetic code, dominant and recessive genes, immune system, auto-immune disease, natural selection, food chain, endangered

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan

by Sebastian Mallaby · 10 Oct 2016 · 1,242pp · 317,903 words

invited to lay out a response to the new finance. Instead, he laid out the case for doing nothing. Derivatives, he explained firmly, were a zero-sum game. Unlike leverage, they did not magnify risk; they merely redistributed it. Of course, some zero-sum gamblers would be zeroed out. But in a healthy

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards

by Antti Ilmanen · 4 Apr 2011 · 1,088pp · 228,743 words

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

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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

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. 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

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. 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

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out. Even in the short run, no FX risk premium can compensate both counterparties in an FX trade for exchange rate uncertainty. FX is a zero-sum game in the sense that currency appreciation benefits one side of an FX trade and hurts the other. • However, academic theories imply that risk premia should

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shows that the sum of all active risk-taking positions—deviations from a passive market portfolio—must amount to zero. Thus, active management is a zero-sum game before costs and fees, and a negative-sum game after they are included. Any gains one active investor makes must come at the expense of

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an edge in activities that cannot be easily scaled up). Casual attempts to beat the market are likely to fail because active management is a zero-sum game even before costs and fees, and only players with well-above-average skill are likely to win. If an institution knows that it cannot be

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State

by Paul Tucker · 21 Apr 2018 · 920pp · 233,102 words

geopolitical change, the tensions between populist and technocratic government are real nonetheless, and could become worse if highly persistent low growth renders improving prosperity a zero-sum game between households, regions, and nations. Overreliance on insulated technocracy would risk inviting the Party or the Leader to come to the rescue. It does matter

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money

by Steven Drobny · 18 Mar 2010 · 537pp · 144,318 words

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

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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

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call Agricultural commodities, prices Agricultural futures (1977-2009) AIG, bailout Alchemy of Finance, The (Soros) Allocators, future adaptability Alpha beta, contrast central bank source extraction, zero-sum game generation policy change, impact providing, policy error (usage) risk-adjusted measure Alpha-seeking macro fund Alternative energy source, supply (increase) Annual cash demands, short-term

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) Margin-to-equity, limits Markets Bond Trader viewpoint change conditions, improvement environment, identification functioning, understanding fundamentals/psychology, impact outguessing positioning, importance psychological game psychology, understanding zero-sum game Markets to fundamentals Marshall Plan Maximum Sharpe Ratio (MSR) portfolio construction goal Medium-term bonds, usage Medium-term theme projects Merrill Lynch saving (Thundering Herd

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Committee long-term investment popularity/usage Yale Model Yale University, endowments annual long-term performance control (Swensen) decline equity returns portfolio composition Yield curves, impact Zero-sum game, alpha extraction (relationship) Zimbabwe hyperinflation inflation/equities (2005-2008) market

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

by Stuart Russell · 7 Oct 2019 · 416pp · 112,268 words

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

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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

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms

by Mark Spitznagel · 9 Aug 2021 · 231pp · 64,734 words

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

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change

by Bharat Anand · 17 Oct 2016 · 554pp · 149,489 words

always been around. Bombard users; fool them; irritate them; trick them—as long as you can sell your product. A product-centered mindset is a zero-sum game. Unsurprisingly, it’s the consumer who often loses. “ If you aren’t thinking about connecting with your audience, building trust when selling your products or

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice

by Pierre Vernimmen, Pascal Quiry, Maurizio Dallocchio, Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi · 16 Oct 2017 · 1,544pp · 391,691 words

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

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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

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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

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stocks young companies see start-ups Z-scores zero balance account (ZBA) zero cash zero-coupon bonds zero-coupon loans zero net debt zero NPV zero-sum game Zeta score WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.

Licence to be Bad

by Jonathan Aldred · 5 Jun 2019 · 453pp · 111,010 words

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

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/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

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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

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom

by Tony Robbins · 18 Nov 2014 · 825pp · 228,141 words

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

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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

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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

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors

by Spencer Jakab · 1 Feb 2022 · 420pp · 94,064 words

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

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

by Nick Bostrom · 26 Mar 2024 · 547pp · 173,909 words

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

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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

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-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. On

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

by Howard Rheingold · 24 Dec 2011

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

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a complementary way of looking at the same trait. Perhaps the transaction between danger and opportunity necessitated by our tool-making nature is not a zero-sum game but a balancing act. Certainly, we wouldn’t be using personal computers with graphic interfaces to explore a worldwide network if machines that entered the

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algorithms and metatechnologies like money and constitutions. 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

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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

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more subtle gradations of reward and punishment. 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

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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. Humans did not stop committing

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atoms DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Darwin, Charles "Dataveillance," Dawkins, Richard Dayton, Sky Deadlock game Defense Department Delarocas, Chrysanthos Democracy in Mongolia and non-zero-sum games and reputation systems and wireless networks Dense-packet radio networks Dery, Mark Digia Digital: cities passport technology Disciplinary methods See also Punishment Disk space: and

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Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Dery) Estrada, Joseph Ethernet Ethics Ethnography European Central Bank Evolutionary theory and Darwin and extinction and non-zero-sum games and reputation systems Evolution@home Evolution of Cooperation, The (Axelrod) ExpertCentral Web site Experts-Exchange Extinction, of species Extraterrestrial intelligence See also SETI(Search for

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zero-sum games Gartner Consulting Gates, Bill Gedye, David Gelernter, David General Motors "Generation Txt," Genetics Genome research GeoNote system Georgia Institute of Technology German National Research Center

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Wireless Network Project Nokia and Bluetooth and GSM networks and the Symbian Alliance wireless routers marketed by "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny" (Wright) Non-zero-sum games Northeastern University Norway "Notes on the 'Worm' Programs - Some Early Experience with a Distributed Computation" (Shoch and Hupp) Nowak, Martin A. NTT (Nippon Telephone and

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Research Center) Huberman at and threshold models Xinhua News Agency Xybernaut Yahoo! Web site Yale Law School Yale University Yttri, Birgette Zapatista movement Zeckenhauser, Richard Zero-sum games See also Non- zero-sum games Zillas Zimmerman, Tom

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words

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

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any more of those 2 × 2 matrices. In the “game” that we’re playing—Schelling won the Nobel Prize partly for extending game theory from zero-sum games to those where players may benefit from cooperation, such as in avoiding a nuclear war—we both win if we find somewhere to meet and

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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

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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

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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

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, 488 on Pascal’s Mugging, 22, 457n, 492 radicalism of, 533n rationalism and, 352–53, 355–56, 495 Shut Up and Multiply and, 496 Z zero-sum games, 56, 501 Zero to One (Thiel), 274, 330n Zhao, Changpeng, 338 Zhou, Wen, 259 Zollman, Kevin, 363–64 Zuckerberg, Mark, 252, 270, 294, 338, 344

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

by Satyajit Das · 14 Oct 2011 · 741pp · 179,454 words

Sheen) that in zero sum money games somebody wins and somebody loses but no money is ever made or lost. Private equity was always a zero sum game, with money simply being transferred between different perceptions. In each boom cycle and period of easy money, private equity firms used large amounts of cheap

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated

by Gautam Baid · 1 Jun 2020 · 1,239pp · 163,625 words

decide how much they are willing to pay to acquire that business’s future cash flows. Many entrepreneurs recognize that wealth creation is not a zero-sum game and that if they behave ethically, their businesses will enjoy a much higher valuation multiple than would be the case if they didn’t. A

The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management

by Alexander Elder · 28 Sep 2014 · 464pp · 117,495 words

of slaves. 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

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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

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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

Derivatives Markets

by David Goldenberg · 2 Mar 2016 · 819pp · 181,185 words

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

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins · 1 Jan 1976 · 365pp · 117,713 words

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

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?

by Steve Keen · 21 Sep 2011 · 823pp · 220,581 words

leisure is flawed; this analysis excludes one important class from consideration – bankers – and unnecessarily shows the income distribution game between workers and capitalists as a zero-sum game. In reality, there are (at least) three players in the social class game, and it’s possible for capitalists and workers to be on the

Alpha Trader

by Brent Donnelly · 11 May 2021

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

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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

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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

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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

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

by John Brockman · 14 Feb 2012 · 416pp · 106,582 words

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

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-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

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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

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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

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part of the world they live in. But by neglecting some of the options on the table, people may perceive that they are in a zero-sum game when in fact they are in a nonzero-sum game. Moreover, they can change the world to make their interaction nonzero-sum. For these reasons

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World War II, 270 World Wide Web, see Internet Worringer, William, 248 wrestling, 321–23 Wright, Robert, 97 writing skills, 287 Wurman, Richard Saul, 358 zero-sum games, 94–96 Zimmer, Carl, 359 Zweig, Jason, 101–2 About the Author The founder and publisher of the online science salon Edge.org, JOHN BROCKMAN

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners

by Larry Harris · 2 Jan 2003 · 1,164pp · 309,327 words

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

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explains how prices become volatile, and how regulators try to control volatility. If risk scares you, you must understand volatility. • Trading profits Trading is a zero-sum game in which some traders win and others lose. Traders who do not expect to win should refrain from trading. This book explains why some traders

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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

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mechanisms which ensure that traders will settle their trades. Attempts to solve trustworthiness and creditworthiness problems explain much of the structure of market institutions. The zero-sum game All trades involve two or more parties. The accounting gains made by one side must equal the accounting losses suffered by the other side. Understanding

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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

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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

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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. Profit-motivated traders therefore must understand why losers trade in order to know when

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advantages that would allow them to be profitable traders. Utilitarian traders and futile traders lose on average to profit-motivated traders because trading is a zero-sum game. Traders are either informed or uninformed. Informed traders can form reliable opinions about whether instruments are fundamentally undervalued or overvalued. The fundamental value of an

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order-driven markets because they make more money when they do not have to compete with public traders who offer liquidity. Since trading is a zero-sum game in trading profits, dealer profits are buy-side transaction costs. Some buy-side traders do not value the liquidity services that dealers provide as much

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allow them to trade when they want to trade. Speculators trade to profit from future price changes that they can predict. Since trading is a zero-sum game, speculators and dealers cannot profit on average if they trade only among themselves. They can profit only if utilitarian traders are willing to trade. Markets

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understand the origins of informative prices. First note that informed traders cannot trade profitably if they trade only with each other. Since trading is a zero-sum game, their aggregate profits would be zero. The better-informed among them would profit at the expense of the less well-informed. The losers eventually would

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is available to informed traders. If information is expensive, or the market is not liquid, prices will not be very informative. Since trading is a zero-sum game, informed traders can profit only if uninformed traders lose to them. Prices therefore will not be informative in markets with few uninformed traders. Informed traders

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are both low. • When prices fully reflect all available information, nobody can forecast future price changes. • Prices cannot always be completely informative. • Trading is a zero-sum game when performance is measured relative to the market return. • Informed traders profit only when other traders are willing to lose to them. Markets therefore require

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be less informative in the long run. 11.1.4 Front Runners and Liquidity Front runners generally make markets less liquid. Since trading is a zero-sum game, their profits are transaction costs for other traders. If the front runners do not provide liquidity in exchange for these transaction costs, all other traders

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only about their expected transaction costs, the equilibrium expected costs of using market and limit order strategies must be the same. Because trading is a zero-sum game, expected transaction costs to limit order traders are exactly equal to expected trading profits to market order traders and vice versa. To be equal, the

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expression if they and their clients were certain that they could beat the market by 2 percent per year on average. Since trading is a zero-sum game, unskilled managers must lose on average to skilled managers. Their losses will depend on the fraction of managers who are skilled. Assume that one-third

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portfolio that we assumed in our analyses. Unfortunately, it is unreasonable to assume much greater skill than 2 percent because trading is a highly competitive zero-sum game. Even if we assume greater skills, we would have to assume that fewer managers have them. Although the test then would discriminate better, the greater

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of comparative advantage consider both why their trading strategy should work, and why they expect other traders will lose to them. Since trading is a zero-sum game, the two issues are inseparable. Most traders, however, focus only on why they think they will profit and not also on why they think other

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the manager will be in comparison with other managers. To identify comparative advantage, however, you must compare managers. The point bears repeating: To win a zero-sum game, you must not just be good, you must be better. 22.8 SUMMARY People primarily examine past performance because they want to predict good future

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does not actively create adaptive strategies to defeat us. To survive, our ancestors merely had to be good at survival. In contrast, trading is a zero-sum game in which our competitors constantly try to adapt to defeat us. Good competitors win only if they are the best competitors. Our evolutionary history has

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Handicapping a horse race involves essentially the same processes as choosing an investment manager. Handicappers and investment sponsors both try to predict the outcomes of zero-sum games. They both consider three classes of factors when they estimate the odds that a horse will win the race, or a manager will outperform other

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advantage with comparative advantage. Successful managers should be able to clearly articulate the comparative advantages that they believe will allow them to profit in the zero-sum game. 22.9 SOME POINTS TO REMEMBER • Distinguishing skill from luck is very difficult. • The skills that produced superior performance in the past may not produce

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more basis points. Most active managers cannot beat the market because transaction costs—brokerage commissions and management fees—reduce performance in what is otherwise a zero-sum game. Without transaction costs, the value-weighted average return of all portfolios would be equal to the value-weighted market index return. Transaction costs ensure that

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portfolio return is always less than the market index return. Since active managers trade frequently, they tend to underperform the market. These implications of the zero-sum game are logical conclusions based on simple accounting principals. They are always true. Since these implications must be true, empirical results on the performance of active

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beat three-quarters of all active managers. Once again, note that this regularity is not simply an empirical fact. It is an implication of the zero-sum game. Although investors can save transaction costs by pursuing any buy and hold strategy, they generally choose to invest in broad-based market index funds because

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use them. 23.6 SUMMARY Interest in index markets has increased substantially since the early 1970s as investors have better understood the implications of the zero-sum game. On average, active managers cannot outperform the market. Transaction costs and high management fees ensure that they underperform the market on average. Investors who do

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to improve prices without trading when they could not trade profitably otherwise. 24.5.6.1 Whom Does the Stop Harm? Since trading is a zero-sum game, someone must lose if specialists profit from creating and exercising stopped stock options. Who loses is not immediately obvious, however. The only possibilities are the

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in the markets. This conclusion follows from our understanding of how adverse selection affects markets. It is also a trivial implication of accounting in a zero-sum game. When informed traders make more profits, uninformed traders must lose more. Since uninformed traders are on the wrong side of the market about as often

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Yahoo.com, 99 yen-euro, 357 yield curve spread, 358 zero-coupon bonds, 40, 206 zero downtick, 81 zero net supply, 41, 44, 225, 354 zero-sum game, 6, 8, 176, 205, 206, 458, 479, 488 zero tick, 81 Zip drive, 568

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb

by William Poundstone · 2 Jan 1993 · 323pp · 100,772 words

the World 3 GAME THEORY Kriegspiel Who Was First? Theory of Games and Economic Behavior Cake Division Rational Players Games as Trees Games as Tables Zero-Sum Games Minimax and Cake Mixed Strategies Curve Balls and Deadly Genes The Minimax Theorem N-Person Games 4 THE BOMB Von Neumann at Los Alamos Game

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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

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1 (in arbitrary “points”) and losing might be assigned a utility of −1 point. The sum of utilities is still zero, hence it is a zero-sum game. An important thing to remember about utility is that it corresponds to the actual preferences of the players. In the case of an adult playing

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does not necessarily correspond to money, or winning or losing, or any obvious external object. The simplest true game is a two-person, two-strategy, zero-sum game. The only way a game could be any simpler would be for a player to have just one strategy. But a “choice” of one option

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at all. A two-person, two-strategy game can be diagrammed in a two-row by two-column table. If the game is further a zero-sum game, the outcomes can be represented concisely. Fill each of the four cells with a number representing the first player’s win. We know that the

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can use the same diagram (the second player’s wins are the negatives of the numbers in the table). MINIMAX AND CAKE A two-person, zero-sum game is “total war.” One player can win only if the other loses. No cooperation is possible. Von Neumann settled on a simple and sensible plan

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games. It is called the minimax principle. Let’s reexamine the cake division problem from the perspective of game theory. The children are playing a zero-sum game. There is only so much cake to begin with, and nothing the children do will change the amount available. More cake for one means that

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player deviates from his best strategy to his own determent (and to his opponent’s benefit because it is a zero-sum game). The minimax principle helps make sense of more difficult two-person zero-sum games. We have shown that almost any common game is logically equivalent to a simultaneous choice of strategies by players

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the assistance of his adversary. But the opponent has no reason to help—it’s less cake for him. The saddle-point solution of a zero-sum game is self-enforcing. It’s something like Chinese finger cuffs. The harder you struggle to do any better, the worse off you are. MIXED STRATEGIES

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selection permits. We’ll hear more about biological interpretations of game theory later. THE MINIMAX THEOREM The minimax theorem proves that every finite, two-person, zero-sum game has a rational solution in the form of a pure or mixed strategy. Von Neumann’s position as founder of game theory rests mainly with

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Neumann hoped to use the minimax theorem to tackle games of ever more players. The minimax theorem gives a rational solution to any two-person zero-sum game. A three-person game can be dissected into sub-games between the potential coalitions. If players A and B team up against player C, then

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. I’m not getting into the actual math here because it’s not needed to understand social dilemmas. For “generalized matching pennies”—a two-person, zero-sum game with two strategies for each player—the correct mixed strategy is easy to calculate. Write the payoffs in a two by two grid as usual

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. In effect, this is the definition of a free-market, laissez-faire economy. The only kind of noncooperative games von Neumann treated were two-person, zero-sum games—which are necessarily noncooperative. When one player’s gain is another’s loss, there is no point in forming a coalition. That case, however, was

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already covered by von Neumann’s minimax theorem. Nash’s work was primarily concerned with non-zero-sum games and games of three or more players. With the minimax theorem, von Neumann struck a great blow for rationality. He demonstrated that any two rational

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interests completely opposed can settle on a rational course of action in confidence that the other will do the same. This rational solution of a zero-sum game is an equilibrium enforced by self-interest and mistrust—and the mistrust is reasonable in view of the antithetical aims of the players. Nash extended

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(s) played. If everybody is happy with the way they played, then that outcome is an equilibrium point. Here’s an example of a non-zero-sum game and its equilibrium point solution: Strategy 1 Strategy 2 Strategy 1 1, 100 0, 1 Strategy 2 2, 0 5, 2 We can use the

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same type of table we have been using for zero-sum games, with one difference. It’s necessary to put two numbers in each cell of the game table. The first gives the payoff to the “row

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least one equilibrium point. 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

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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. We will explore the consequences of this in the following chapters. 1. “The Rand Hymn

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strategy 1 (left column), then Alchian would be penalized a cent and Williams would win two cents (upper left cell). Since this is a non-zero-sum game, all winnings were paid from a bank. In no case does one player pay the other player anything. As in the diamond transaction, both players

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’s dilemma. 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

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a prisoner’s dilemma. If von Neumann did picture U.S.-Soviet relations as a game, it is more plausible that he saw it a zero-sum game. So it would be if the United States and Soviets are pictured as implacable enemies. One of the very few military leaders of the time

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seem Machiavellian, it is generally because the value systems of those who applied the game theory are Machiavellian. There is also a crucial difference between zero-sum games with a saddle point and those without. A saddle point exists even if the outcomes are merely ranked in order of preference. For other games

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proposals and listened to long discussions of how hot and cold wars can be “gamed.” Allowing for the moment that hot and cold wars are zero-sum games (which they are not!), the assignment of “utilities” to outcomes must be made on an interval scale. There is the problem. Of course this problem

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, it is to be expected that different people will rate the possible outcomes differently. Where one analyst sees a prisoner’s dilemma, another sees a zero-sum game with a saddle point, and still another sees a game requiring a mixed strategy. All may come to different conclusions, and all may be applying

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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

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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

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care about. The Ohio State subjects did not take the games seriously because of the meager rewards. Pennies practically are Monopoly money. A truer non-zero-sum game is a TV game show where, backed by network ad revenues, the payoffs are cars, vacations, or thousands of dollars in cash. Then players pay

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are in the public domain very much now, so that somebody can be influenced by them. I think everybody really does know what a non-zero-sum game is. You can use that term in Newsweek and not even explain it anymore. Just that is a major intellectual advance because we’re so

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as a Predictor of Cooperative Behavior.” In Journal of Conflict Resolution 4 (1960): 426–30. ______. “Sex Role, Cooperation and Competition in a Two-Person, Non-Zero-Sum Game.” In Journal of Conflict Resolution 5 (1961): 366–68. Marshall, George C. Quoted in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, III:281. Maynard-Smith

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.” In Nature 325 (January 29, 1987): 433–35. Minas, J. Sayer, Alvin Scodel, David Marlowe, and Harve Rawson. “Some Descriptive Aspects of Two-Person Non-Zero-Sum Games. II.” In Journal of Conflict Resolution, 4 (1960): 193–97. Moran, Charles. Churchill, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Morgenstern

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of Conflict. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960. Scodel, Alvin, J. Sayer Minas, Philburn Ratoosh, and Milton Lipetz. “Some Descriptive Aspects of Two-Person Non-Zero-Sum Games.” In Journal of Conflict Resolution 3 (1959): 114–19. Seckel, Al. “Russell and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” In Russell (Winter 1984–85): 253–61. Shepley

A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar · 11 Jun 1998 · 998pp · 211,235 words

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

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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

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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

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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

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as a radical departure. Von Neumann’s theorem was the cornerstone of his theory of games of pure opposition, so-called two-person zero-sum games. But two-person zero-sum games have virtually no relevance to the real world.34 Even in war there is almost always something to be gained from cooperation. Nash introduced

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Fourth and Broadway like a California brushfire.1 The biggest appeal of the Nash equilibrium concept was its promise of liberation from the two-person zero-sum game. The mathematicians, military strategists, and economists at RAND had focused almost exclusively on games of total conflict — my win is your loss or vice versa

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two person game.”2 That preoccupation was natural, given that these were games for which the von Neumann theory was both sound and reasonably complete. Zero-sum games also seemed to fit the problem — nuclear conflict between two superpowers — which absorbed most of RAND’s attention. Only it really didn’t. At least

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-life military and economic conflicts, one had to focus on games that allowed for cooperation as well as conflict. “Everybody was already bothered by the zero-sum game,” Arrow recalled. “You’re trying to decide whether to go to war or not. You couldn’t say that the losses to the losers were

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reach agreements. The key assumption is that there’s an umpire around to enforce the agreement. The mathematics of cooperative games, like the mathematics of zero-sum games, is rich and elegant. But most economists, like Arrow, were cool to the idea.17 It was like saying, they thought, that the only hope

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, introduction, John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, The New Pal-grave, op. cit. 34. “It so happens that the concept of the two-person zero-sum games has very few real life applications,” John C. Harsanyi, “Nobel Seminar,” Les Prix Nobel 1994, op. cit., p. 285. 35. Ibid. 36. Nobel citation. 37

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physics: 1943, 41 1963, 53 nonexpanding universe, 380, 382 nonlinear partial differential equations, 217–20, 223–24, 226, 231, 234, 243, 247, 300, 318 non-zero-sum games, 87 Norfolk & Western Railroad, 28, 104, 323 North, Douglass, 354, 363 North Carolina, University of, 148 NSF (National Science Foundation), 107, 236, 296, 313, 314

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, 62, 76 turbulence, 218–19 Turing, Alan, 56, 107, 188, 189 Tversky, Amos, 373 Twilight Zone, 301 “Two Person Cooperative Games” (Nash), 120 two-person zero-sum games, 14, 87, 95, 96, 115, 116, 119 “Ueber die Anzahl der primzahlen unter einergegebenen Grosse” (Riemann), 230 Uitti, Karl, 297–98, 310 Ulam, Stanislaw, 217

Rationality: From AI to Zombies

by Eliezer Yudkowsky · 11 Mar 2015 · 1,737pp · 491,616 words

“abnormal” observation, you can only do it by weakening the support of a “normal” observation, to a precisely equal and opposite degree. It is a zero-sum game. No matter how you connive, no matter how you argue, no matter how you strategize, you can’t possibly expect the resulting game plan to

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can’t even praise evolution for the solicitous concern it shows for genes; the battle between two alternative alleles at the same location is a zero-sum game for frequency. Fitness is not always your friend. * 136 The Tragedy of Group Selectionism Before 1966, it was not unusual to see serious biologists advocating

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be a useful motivator, despite my principles, and I’ll take all the useful motivation I can get. Maybe that kind of competition is a zero-sum game, but then so is Go; it doesn’t mean we should abolish that human activity, if people find it fun and it leads somewhere interesting

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

by Peter L. Bernstein · 23 Aug 1996 · 415pp · 125,089 words

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

Open: The Story of Human Progress

by Johan Norberg · 14 Sep 2020 · 505pp · 138,917 words

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

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, by recessions, foreigners or pandemics. Our tendency to divide the world into us and them is reinforced whenever we think that the world is a zero-sum game and that we can’t mutually benefit from production, mobility and trade. We are uncomfortable with a seemingly chaotic present and an uncertain future, creating

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politics and who would go on to become the founding father of classical liberalism. According to the emerging Whig ideology, the economy was not a zero-sum game. Wealth was not just taken from others, but created and therefore potentially infinite. Trade could make both parties richer at the same time. Exiled in

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– 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

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-sums make us groupish Muzafer Sherif ’s interpretation of his Robbers Cave experiment was that conflict and tribalism were unleashed because the boys were playing zero-sum games. When two groups believed they were fighting over the same, scarce resources, it triggered warfare between normally well-behaved boys at a summer camp. People

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more concerned with trying to make other countries less well off, even if it comes at their own expense. Ironically, they often turn a non-zero-sum game into a loss for both sides. In one study, after having been asked about ethnic identification and perceived group competition, a majority of white undergraduate

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breakdown of open institutions, which in turn reduces prosperity, which increases group warfare and so on.4 After all, the surest way to win a zero-sum game is to play it against a dead adversary. During ‘the long depression’ starting in the 1870s, a series of crises and panics in Europe and

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continents there has been a dramatic growth of population since then, by a total of more than five billion people. So if wealth is a zero-sum game, who did we take it all from? Had we shared all the wealth the world had then equally, the result would have been that we

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conclusion of economic scholars, and trade and immigration are among the worst. Whereas economists document enormous mutual gains, people in general think they are often zero-sum games. Caplan thinks this is related to a general anti-foreigner bias, since these myths become more powerful the further the other country is from us

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per cent of our species’ existence, individual human beings did not experience progress, innovations and mutual benefits with strangers. It was, in most cases, a zero-sum game for most individuals: someone’s gain was another one’s loss. More for you meant less for me. If our minds developed during such circumstances

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them. If another tribe got more skills and resources, it used to be dangerous because it meant they could more easily conquer us, winning the zero-sum game between us. Today, if a tribe on the other shore invents a photoelectric sensor or manages to harness power from the sun, it means we

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that trade hurt the US, the more he thought it benefited the trading partner.21 Those who have grown accustomed to interpreting trade as a zero-sum game find themselves unable to extend moral approval to trade even when their conscious mind entertains a scenario where trade is understood as a win–win

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tit-for-tat rivalry that we have seen far too many times in history. Schumpeterian profits Even though the economy is not in itself a zero-sum game, there is a common perception that the recent rise in inequality within most countries is turning it into one. There are certainly examples of this

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imitate or innovate around the Schumpeterian companies, and soon others come up with superior goods and services.25 Not only is creative destruction not a zero-sum game. It creates massive amounts of wealth, and the best thing is that all of us who took no part in the effort or the risk

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they would be awful unless they were constantly exposed to fierce competition that would force them to innovate and lower prices. We push people into zero-sum games whenever we create public systems that take from some to give to others. One example is Europe – a continent divided by a common currency. The

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we know – naturally in a humble, self-deprecating way (because that approach happens to accrue more status in our circles). Status is not really a zero-sum game, of course, because we don’t all measure status in the same way. In driving this point home, David Friedman asks us to think about

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enemies we are afraid of. And when we retreat from established trade relations it hurts the economy and makes it seem even more like a zero-sum game. If chaos and foes are all around us, we have to protect ourselves, we have to flee – or we have to man the barricades and

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the book: it reinforces our tribalism, our sense that the present is uniquely difficult and scary, and our tendency to see the world as a zero-sum game. It makes us afraid and it triggers our fight-or-flight instinct – we want to fight the scapegoats, whether they are foreign countries, Wall Street

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, and undermined the core assumption that each generation will be better off than the previous one. 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

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-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. Historically, economic

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Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. 37 M. Norton and S. Sommers, ‘Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(3), 2011. 38 S. Sales, ‘Threat as a factor in authoritarianism: An analysis of archival

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

by Joseph Henrich · 7 Sep 2020 · 796pp · 223,275 words

reduce a person’s assessment of the trustworthiness of strangers, probably through its effects on their social vigilance and perception of the world as a zero-sum game. In one study, participants were asked to judge the trustworthiness of 75 different strangers based on photographs of their faces. Each participant did this twice

The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions

by Victor Haghani and James White · 27 Aug 2023 · 314pp · 122,534 words

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

The Evolution of God

by Robert Wright · 8 Jun 2009

it—because economic interaction is “non-zero-sum”— two once-alien gods may find common ground. So too with military alliance or any other non-zero-sum game that one king wants to play with another: interfaith harmony can emerge from enlightened self-interest. This doesn’t mean such harmony is a result

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’s call this the law of religious tolerance: people are more likely to be open to foreign gods when they see themselves playing a non-zero-sum game with foreigners—see their fortunes as positively correlated with the foreigners’ fortunes, see themselves and the foreigners as, to some extent, in the same boat

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Israel from polytheism to monolatry. So the law of religious tolerance—or, strictly speaking, its flip side—stands vindicated: when people see themselves as playing zero-sum games with foreigners, they will be ill disposed to embrace, or perhaps even tolerate, foreign gods and religious practices. And this law stands vindicated regardless of

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“win-win” outcomes, people sometimes think of them as orgies of amiability. They can be, but they usually aren’t. Almost always, within a non-zero-sum game, there is a dimension of zero-sumness—a conflict of interest. When you buy a new car, there is a range of prices that make

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,” as laid out in chapter 6, is incomplete. It said that people are more open to foreign gods when they see themselves playing a non-zero-sum game with foreigners—see their fortunes as positively correlated with the foreigners’ fortunes. Strictly speaking, the case for tolerating other people’s gods doesn’t always

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and groom alike plan to gain from the relationship. 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

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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

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, 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

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yet to be made. Still, God had proven his flexibility once again. He had shown that when different groups, including different ethnic groups, play non-zero-sum games, he can adapt, growing along the moral dimension to facilitate the playing of the games. Given that technological evolution had evinced a tendency to expand

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, 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

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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

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part of the world can be contagious. So nations broadly have a shared interest in keeping the global economy humming; they’re playing a non-zero-sum game. This is just the natural culmination of the expansion of social organization. Villages merged to form chiefdoms, tribes merged to form states, states merged into

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, Japanese companies had the political wisdom to locate some of their auto manufacturing plants in the United States. That meant they were playing a non-zero-sum game not just with American consumers, but with American workers. Rising Sun turned out not to be a harbinger. On balance, between the end of World

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-zero-sum potential from translating into the feelings that will realize that potential. First is the problem of recognizing that you’re in a non-zero-sum game. How many car buyers are aware of how many workers in how many countries helped build their car? Second is the problem of trust. Palestinians

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and Israelis are playing a non-zero-sum game, because neither is going to expel the other from the area; given the inevitability of coexistence, lasting peace would be good for both sides and

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their supporters but at Muslims in general, look not at radical Islam but at Islam—the “Muslim world” and the “West” are playing a non-zero-sum game; their fortunes are positively correlated. And the reason is that what’s good for Muslims broadly is bad for radical Muslims. If Muslims get less

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, is designed to steer us through the successful playing of games—to realize the gains of non-zero-sum games when those gains are to be had, and to get the better of the other party in zero-sum games. Indeed, the moral imagination is one of the main drivers of the pattern we’ve seen

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are worth dealing with. We’ve already seen one reason for this malfunction. Technology is warping our perception of the other player in this non-zero-sum game. The other player is a vast population of Muslims who, though perhaps not enamored of the West, don’t spend their time burning flags and

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takes us back to our starting point: if grass-roots hatred is indeed public enemy number one, then the West is definitely playing a non-zero-sum game with the great bulk of the world’s Muslims. Things will be better for the West if things are better for the world’s Muslims

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profit came to either faith? And how many religions that we’ve never heard of went extinct out of a failure to skillfully play non-zero-sum games?) What’s more, many of the successes haven’t resulted from the moral imagination working on autopilot. Ever since social organization evolved from hunter-gatherer

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as the failure of the religious enterprise. But Is It Truth? At the outset of this chapter I said that successfully playing the great non-zero-sum games of our time would require a closer approximation of moral truth. In what sense would the expansion of the moral imagination—the thing that, I

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Abrahamic faiths is to keep doing what he has often managed to do before—evolve in a way that fosters positive-sum outcomes of non-zero-sum games—he has some growing to do. His character has to develop in a way that permits, for starters, Muslims, Christians, and Jews to get along

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imperial test in the ancient world; when put in the multinational context of empire, he summoned enough broad-mindedness to facilitate the playing of non-zero-sum games. God’s character may not seem to be growing at the moment, but he has it in him. Of course, God’s character is a

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, is a manifestation of non-zero-sumness, of the fact that cultural (and in particular technological) evolution leads more and more people to play non-zero-sum games at greater and greater distances. And natural selection’s invention of love, it turns out, was itself a manifestation of non-zero-sumness. Love was

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invented because, from the point of view of genetic proliferation—the point of view from which natural selection works—close kin are playing a non-zero-sum game; they share so many genes that they have a common Darwinian “interest” in getting each other’s genes into subsequent generations. Of course, the organisms

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I’ll be more inclined to keep her alive and healthy until reproductive age, so through my love my genes will be playing a non-zero-sum game with the copies of them that reside in her.” Indeed, the whole Darwinian point of love is to be a proxy for this logic; love

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann

by Ananyo Bhattacharya · 6 Oct 2021 · 476pp · 121,460 words

possible payoff, assuming her opponent will not willingly lose any more than he absolutely must. Von Neumann set out to prove that every two-player zero-sum game similarly has a ‘solution’. That is, a strategy for each player that guarantees the best outcome given they are up against a rational player who

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the highest point reached by the path cutting through the range and the lowest point of the valley rising to either side. Most two-person, zero-sum games are far more complex than cake-cutting, and many do not have saddle points. What von Neumann was proposing to prove was far from self

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as the founding work of game theory. The key to that proof are ‘mixed strategies’, a concept he later illustrated with another simple two-person zero-sum game called ‘Matching Pennies’. Two players each with a penny secretly turn the coin to show either heads or tails. One player wins both pennies if

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’s minimax proof is in this vein; he bulldozes his way through six pages of dense algebra to reach his conclusion that every two-person zero-sum game has a solution that is either a pure or mixed strategy. Many familiar games require a player to use a mixed strategy to win. As

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more) functions at once.’ The correct approach, of course, is that of game theory. Von Neumann explains that he will first thoroughly explore two-player zero-sum games, then generalize the theory to cover games with any number of players in which the payoffs do not necessarily sum to zero. First, however, any

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and tic-tac-toe games of ‘perfect information’ – all the moves in the game are visible to both players. He showed that all two-player, zero-sum games of perfect information have a ‘solution’ – as long as the game does not go on for ever.51 Tic-tac-toe obviously fulfils the criterion

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player who wins when both pennies match. Other games which at first glance look nothing like Matching Pennies may on closer inspection be two-player zero-sum games. To demonstrate this, von Neumann solves Morgenstern’s ‘impossible’ problem from Conan Doyle. He finds optimal strategies for Holmes and Moriarty, and the chance of

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Neumann considers a two-player poker game to keep things simple. A third of the way into his book, he has only discussed two-player zero-sum games. There are 2,598,960 combinations of the five-card hand each player starts out with, so von Neumann abstracts away that complication by saying

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after von Neumann and Morgenstern’s monumental book would be forged by those rushing to fill the void. The approach to multi-player and non-zero sum games set out in Theory of Games entails finding tricks to reduce them to the zero-sum two-person case. Since von Neumann’s minimax theorem

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and the two others. If, on the other hand, a coalition forms, von Neumann showed that the situation can be treated as a two-person zero-sum game, with the accomplices treated as a single ‘player’ versus the remaining participant. So far, so good. There are, however, some cracks appearing in the analysis

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already. Games between two pairs of players or a triplet versus a (losing) singleton, for instance, can be treated as if they were two-person zero-sum games. A ‘core’ coalition of two players trying to attract a third to form a winning team can be modelled as a three-player game. Von

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-sum: the world is a more prosperous place now than it was 200 years ago. Often a situation really is win-win. 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

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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

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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

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whatever the other players win or winning what they lose. An n-person non-zero-sum game is transformed with the addition of this phantom into a zero-sum affair played by n+1 participants, which can be solved by applying the

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axioms sufficed. The actual discussion of the economic applications of game theory in the book itself is brief and revolves around the results for non-zero-sum games of one, two and three players. For the one-person ‘Robinson Crusoe’ case, the result is, as expected, a simple maximization of an individual’s

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Lucas would find a ten-person game which had no stable sets at all.69 Many also balked at von Neumann’s approach to non-zero-sum games. The use of a fictitious player, notes mathematician Gerald Thompson, ‘helped but did not suffice for a completely adequate treatment of the non-zero-sum

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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

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. 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

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have developed for games.’22 Von Neumann had instantly recognized that Dantzig’s optimization problem was mathematically related to his minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games. The insight helped determine the conditions under which logistical problems of the type Dantzig was interested in could or could not be solved. Linear programming

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closing in for combat, for instance, or a bomber versus a battleship. For analysts, the duel allowed the relatively complete maths of the two-person zero-sum game to be brought to bear on real combat data from the Second World War. In the duels RAND considered, each player wanted to get the

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generalize von Neumann’s min-max theorem,’ he told Gale. ‘And it works with any number of people and doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.’ Gale urged him to rush the result into print, and he helped draft a paper based on Nash’s proof.39 ‘I certainly knew right

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if they both do not. So much for the ‘rational’ choice. Flood and Dresher wondered what real players would choose to do in this non-zero-sum game. We conducted one brief experiment with a two-person positive-sum non-cooperative game in order to find whether or not the subjects tended to

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economist Armen Alchian (player ‘A’). Both were reasonably familiar with zero-sum two-person games but knew nothing of Nash’s proposed solution for non-zero sum games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game progressed for a hundred rounds, and the players were asked to jot down their reactions and reasoning during

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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

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-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

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Water?’, Nature, 458 (2009), pp. 282–3. 61. Von Neumann calls these ‘imputations’, a term still used in game theory today. 62. Michael Bacharach, 1989, ‘Zero-sum Games’, in John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (eds.), Game Theory, The New Palgrave, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 253–7. 63. Von Neumann knew Walras

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–3 monopolies 173–5 Morgenstern’s disillusionment with 157, 158–9 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and 151, 15872–779 utility theory 160–2 zero-sum games 145–148, 160, 163–169, 172, 176, 192, 194 Edgeworth, Francis 153 EDVAC report see First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (von Neumann

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Prize 8, 60, 61, 63, 177, 178, 197 Noether, Emmy 51, 63–4 non-cooperative game theory 176, 177–8, 201, 203, 204–8 non-zero-sum games 172–5, 176–7, 204–8 Nordheim, Lothar 36, 41 Notestein, Frank W. 132 nuclear deterrence 183, 212–16, 218–21, 223–4 nuclear disarmament

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(von Neumam and Morgenstern) 57, 151–2, 157–77, 188 accomplishment 162 analysis of multi-player (n-person) games 169–75, 176 analysis of non-zero-sum games 172, 176–7 analysis of poker 148, 164–8, 168166–8, 168 analysis of two-player games 145–8, 162–9, 163, 164, 165, 168

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247 Wolfram Research 245, 253 world riddles 20 Wrinch, Dorothy 227 Yale University 14 Silliman Memorial Lectures 274, 275 Young, Dorothy 156 Zermelo, Ernst 313n51 zero-sum games 145–6, 160, 163–169, 172, 176, 192, 194 Zürich, University of 30, 33 THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING Find us online and join the

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets

by Michael W. Covel · 19 Mar 2007 · 467pp · 154,960 words

why so few investors were oblivious to even the existence of trend following trading. Other questions quickly appeared: • How do trend followers win in the zero-sum game of trading? • Why has trend following been the most profitable style of trading? • What is the philosophical framework of trend followers’ success? • What are the

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the great trends of our generation. By all available evidence, Henry was on the other side of the Barings Bank blowout in 1995. In the zero-sum game, he won what Barings Bank lost. More recently, in 2002, Henry was up 40 percent while the NASDAQ was spiraling downwards. He, like Dunn, doesn

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accounts, so you are in good company when it comes to the up and down nature of making money. 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.12 104 Trend Following (Updated

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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

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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

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for those against whom you have bet. There are always losers in this kind of a game?” George Soros: “No. See, it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s very important to realize…” Ted Koppel: “Well, it’s not zero sum in terms of investors. But, for example, when you bet against

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from the market? Of course you do, just like Soros. Others, such as Lawrence Parks, a union activist, correctly states that Soros is in a zero-sum game, but gets sidetracked by declaring zero sum unfair and harsh for the “working man”: 117 What objectivity and the study of philosophy requires is not

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, Altegris Investments, 2nd Quarter 2004 Commentary Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets “Since currency and derivative trading are zero-sum games, every dollar ‘won’ requires that a dollar was ‘lost.’ Haven’t they realized what a losing proposition this has been? What’s more, why do

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.”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

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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

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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. Soros is not always a zero-sum winner either. Soros was

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on the losing side of the zero-sum game during the Long Term Capital Management fiasco in 1998. He lost $2 billion. (I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 4.) He also had

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will accept lower returns because we will cut the risk profile.”40 I don’t see evidence that the market has changed. Nor has the zero-sum game of the markets changed. However, something might have changed within George Soros. Dot-Com Meets Zero Sum Judge Milton Pollack’s ruling a few years

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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

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. • 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

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Chapter 3 • Performance Data different goals. George Crapple, a trend follower with 25+ years in experience, makes the point: “So while it may be a zero-sum game, a lot of people don’t care. It’s not that they’re stupid; it’s not speculative frenzy; they’re just using these markets

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biggest trading events, bubbles, and crashes of the last 30 years. This chapter outlines high profile times where trend followers won huge profits in the zero-sum game. An investment in DUNN acts as a hedge against unpredictable market crises. Dunn Capital Management Wall Street is famous for corporate collapses or mutual and

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Down Markets Prominent academics in finance searching for winners also come up short, as Christopher Culp of the University of Chicago laments: “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.”3 When the big trading events

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Barings Bank is probably the most often cited derivatives disaster. While the futures market had been the instrument used by Nick Leeson to play the zero-sum game [and] someone made a lot of money being short the Nikkei futures Mr. Leeson was buying.”4 It often seems that trends create events more

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who purposefully ignored the manipulations to the state of California’s inept attempts to play the energy markets, everyone was accountable. That said, in the zero-sum game, everyone is responsible, whether each person admits it or not. The Enron debacle is stunning when you consider the losers. The number of investors who

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01 02 03 CHART 4.23: Enron Stock Chart Source: Barchart.com Not only were there massive winners and losers in Enron stock, but the zero-sum game sprang into full force during the California energy crisis in late 2000 and during 2001. Enron was a primary supplier of natural gas to California

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in motion long before the unexpected event of September 11 happened. Although Enron, the California energy crisis, and September 11 are vivid illustrations of the zero-sum game with trend followers as the winners, the story of Long-Term Capital Management in the summer of 1998 may be the best trend following case

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a hedge fund that went bust in 1998. The story of who lost has been told repeatedly over the years; however, because trading is a zero-sum game, 151 152 Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets exploring the winners was the real story. LTCM is a

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classic saga of the zero-sum game played out on a grand scale with trend followers as winners. “Trillion Dollar Bet,” a PBS special, described how LTCM came to be. In 1973

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that ultimately would cause the lightning bolts of August and September 1998. When lightning struck LTCM, trend followers were assessing the same markets—playing the zero-sum game at the same time. In hindsight, the old-guard Chicago professors were clearly aware of the problem as Nobel Laureate Professor Merton Miller pondered: “Models

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source of profits for trend followers. Amazingly, years later, Scholes still seemed to have a problem with accepting personal responsibility for his action in the zero-sum game: “In August of 1998, after the Russian default, you know, all the relations that tended to exist in a recent past seemed to disappear.”39

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of us have suffered some very large losses.49 Niederhoffer seems unable to acknowledge that he, alone, was to blame for his losses in the zero-sum game. He did it. No one else did it for him and he can’t use the unexpected as his excuse. 165 We make a lot

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allows us to capitalize on the errors or mistakes of other market participants. Because, after all, we’re involved in a zero-sum game.”64 Henry and Leeson were involved in a zero-sum game. They both ponied up to the table. However, there was one big difference—Henry had a strategy. What Leeson had nobody

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most of 1993. During that time period, MG lost, depending on the estimate or source, $1.3 to $2.1 billion. Because trading is a zero-sum game, those traders in short crude oil futures made the money MG lost. They were the winners, and they were trend followers. During the course of

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aggressively short, reinvesting their profits back into additional short crude oil positions as the market decreased more and more. On the losing side of this zero-sum game, MG had no apparent strategy. They refused to take a loss early on. In fact, the whole MG affair would have been a footnote in

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interesting aspect of the Barings Bank blowout was who won. Everyone knew the Queen’s bank lost, but the winners were trend followers in the zero-sum game. 179 The success of options valuation is the story of a simple, asymptotically correct idea, taken more seriously than it deserved, and then used extravagantly

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that exhibit a normal distribution. They never produce consistent average returns that hit benchmarks quarter after quarter. When trend followers hit home runs in the zero-sum game and win huge profits from the likes of Barings Bank, Long-Term Capital Management, and the 2008 market crash, they are targeting the edges or

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(Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets Answering these questions in advance helps when you are in the middle of the zero-sum game and the adrenaline and sweat are flowing. What Market Do You Buy or Sell at Any Time? One of the first decisions any trader makes

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. Trend followers don’t generate trends. In Chapter 3, “Performance Data,” recall professor Larry Harris’ point: Traders play zero-sum games for many reasons. Not all play to win. However, trend followers do play the zero-sum game to win. And let’s face it, this attitude can cause people to feel intimidated or defensive. At

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and they have not found anything.” • He acknowledged that his billion dollar plus fund was on the other side of LTCM’s losses in the zero-sum game: “We were the If you have the good fortune to make some money in this world, you will always have detractors. John W. Henry, the

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). 31. Larry Harris, Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practioners. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 32. Larry Harris, The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity. Draft 0.911, May 7, 1993. 33. Larry Harris, The Winners and Losers of the

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Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity. Draft 0.911, May 7, 1993. 34. Larry Harris, The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity. Draft 0.911, May 7, 1993. 35. Danny Hakim, Huge Losses Move Soros to Revamp

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. The Graziadio Business Report (Fall 1999). Harris, Larry. Trading and Exchanges. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Harris, Lawrence. The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity. University of Southern California (1993) Haun, Bruce. Rebalancing Portfolios Lowers Volatility and Stabilizes Returns. B

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of Occam, 213 Williams, Ted, 261 winners Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) collapse, 156-164 losers versus, 123-125 “The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity” (white paper) (Harris), 115 winning investment philosophies, 4-6 winning positions, when to exit, 263

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World

by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg · 15 Nov 2010 · 1,535pp · 337,071 words

a large class of interesting games with the property that the payoffs of the players sum to zero in every outcome. Such games are called zero-sum games, and many attack-defense games — and more generally, games where the players’ interests are in direct conflict — have this structure. Games like Matching Pennies have

Stigum's Money Market, 4E

by Marcia Stigum and Anthony Crescenzi · 9 Feb 2007 · 1,202pp · 424,886 words

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

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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

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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

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), thrifts, insurance companies, real estate developers, and so on. One reason for the popularity of swaps with end users is that swaps are a non-zero-sum game and, as such, can have inherent value to all parties. Another attraction of swaps is that they are a no-brainer. An entity condemned by

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asset prices put-call parity put options replication rho risk-free-rate speculation strike price theta time to maturity trading uses value valuing vega volatility zero-sum game options trading volume, Treasury futures out trades brokers’ market risk over-the-counter derivatives markets, global turnover over-the-counter foreign exchange derivatives markets, swaps

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money funds MTNs municipal securities (munis) real yields zero-coupon approach, hedging zero-coupon bonds duration immunizing a portfolio zero interest-rate policy (ZIRP), Japan zero-sum game, options zero value basis, Treasury futures zeros, 3-year zeros, barriers ZIRP (see zero interest-rate policy)

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig · 14 Jul 2019 · 2,466pp · 668,761 words

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

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, 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

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, vC〉 is associated with each node. For terminal states, this vector gives the utility of the state from each player’s viewpoint. (In two-player, zero-sum games, the two-element vector can be reduced to a single value because the values are always opposite.) The simplest way to implement this is to

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a utility function that applies to terminal states to say who won and what the final score is. •In two-player, discrete, deterministic, turn-taking zero-sum games with perfect information, the minimax algorithm can select optimal moves by a depth-first enumeration of the game tree. •The alpha–beta search algorithm computes

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game” to mean one like starCraft ii where each player can see the nearby environment, but not the environment far away. 2Chess is considered a “zero-sum” game, even though the sum of the outcomes for the two players is +1 for each game, not zero. “Constant-sum” would have been a more

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, which they each will pursue to the best of their abilities. It could be that the preferences are diametrically opposed, as is the case in zero-sum games such as chess (see Chapter 6). But most multiagent encounters are more complicated than that, with more complex preferences. When there are multiple decision makers

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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

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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

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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

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that one has made such a unilateral decision does affect the expected payoff, because then the opponent can adjust strategy accordingly. Finding equilibria in non-zero-sum games is somewhat more complicated. The general approach has two steps: (1) Enumerate all possible subsets of actions that might form mixed strategies. For example, first

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for games, albeit an incorrect one). Emile Borel (1921) introduced the notion of a mixed strategy. John von Neumann (1928) proved that every two-person, zero-sum game has a maximin equilibrium in mixed strategies and a well-defined value. Von Neumann’s collaboration with the economist Oskar Morgenstern led to the publication

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of the Rockefeller family personally subsidized its publication. In 1950, at the age of 21, John Nash published his ideas concerning equilibria in general (non-zero-sum) games. His definition of an equilibrium solution, although anticipated in the work of Cournot (1838), became known as Nash equilibrium. After a long delay because of

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. R. and Wild, P. P. (1992). Adaptive rejection sampling for Gibbs sampling. Applied Statistics, 41, 337–348. Gillies, D. B. (1959). Solutions to general non-zero-sum games. In Tucker, A. W. and Luce, L. D. (Eds.), Contributions to the Theory of Games, volume IV. Princeton University Press. Gilmore, P C. (1960). A

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Zemel, R., 1046, 1060, 1094, 1117 Zemelman, B. V., 29, 1118 Zen, H., 830, 838, 900, 1115 Zeng, H., 296, 1106 Zermelo, E., 637, 1118 zero-sum game, 193, 590, 600 Zettlemoyer, L., 668, 896, 905, 927, 930, 1104, 1106, 1109, 1118 Zeuthen strategy, 634 Zhai, X., 837, 1093 Zhang, B., 46, 1097

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life

by Robert Wright · 1 Jan 1994 · 604pp · 161,455 words

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

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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. (It was equally good.) Back in the real world,

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win-win or lose-lose, depending on how they play the game. (For elaboration on non-zero-sum logic, and discussion of the classic non-zero-sum game “the prisoner’s dilemma,” see appendix 1.) Sometimes political scientists or economists break human interaction down into zero-sum and non-zero-sum components. Occasionally

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refer to elaborative notes that can be found in the Notes section at the end of the book. This isn’t to say that non-zero-sum games always have win-win outcomes and never have lose-lose outcomes. (Badly governed societies are littered with losses, and history is littered with the

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powerful and the treacherous never exploit the weak and the naïve; exploitation—ranging from clear-cut parasitism to subtler inequity—is often possible in non-zero-sum games, and history offer plenty of examples. Still, on balance, over the long run, non-zero-sum situations produce more positive sums than negative sums,

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they say, is organic history. In short, both organic and human history involve the playing of evermore-numerous, ever-larger, and ever-more-elaborate non-zero-sum games. It is the accumulation of these games—game upon game upon game—that constitutes the growth in biological and social complexity that people like Bergson

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human nature. That arrow, a I’ve noted, points toward larger quantities of non-zero-sumness. As history progresses, human beings find themselves playing non-zero-sum games with more and more other human beings. Interdependence expands, and social complexity grow in cope and depth. One way to start seeing this link between

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and social complexity grew. To say that reaping non-zero-sum benefits elevates social complexity borders on the redundant. The successful playing of a non-zero-sum game typically amounts to a growth of social complexity. The players must coordinate their behavior, so people who might otherwise be off in their own orbits

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genes. According to evolutionary psychologists, it is part of the emotional equipment designed by natural selection to govern reciprocal altruism, to help us play non-zero-sum games profitably. THE TROUBLE WITH NON-ZERO-SUMNESS Why would this sort of vigilance have been so crucial to our ancestors’ prospects that genes conducive to

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it would flourish? There are two properties of non-zero-sum games—two kinds of pitfalls—that make instinctive wariness vital. One is the problem of cheating, or parasitism. People may accept your generosity and never repay

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—via cultural, not genetic, evolution.† The other principle of game theory that makes wariness adaptive is subtler than cheating. 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,

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into a team. Presto!—fifty rabbits instead of twenty! It is the question of how to divvy up this magical thirty-rabbit surplus that the zero-sum game, the bargaining, is about. Of course, you could just divide the rabbits equally. But haven’t some people worked harder than others, or brought

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of exchange. One hand washes the other, and both are better off than they would be alone—the very definition of a well-played non-zero-sum game. The difference between the two economies lies in the number of hands involved and the intricacy of their interdependence, two quantities that cultural evolution

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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. For now I’ll just say that, though

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“altruism” among the !Kung, generosity is a veneer; future reciprocation is de rigueur. Like insurance policyholders, the region’s boat owners are playing a non-zero-sum game, finding in large numbers security against misfortune. Long before economists were drawing graphs showing how diversified stock portfolios could serve the human aversion to risk

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exported to various Northwest Coast Indians whose aspiration was to someday be buried in an attractive robe. Much of this technology involved that classic non-zero-sum game, division of labor—through which, as Adam Smith noted, a group of people can expand overall output. Though all Northwest Coast Indian families would

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and gather, many also had a sideline craft—carpentry, say—that was handed down through the family. These native Americans also played the non-zero-sum game played by the Tareumiut and the Shoshone: collective hunting, as reflected in their whaling fleets and the huge fish traps they affixed to the river

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bond market. The Northwest Coast Indians didn’t have a capitalist economy, or even a currency, yet they managed to play the same basic non-zero-sum games capitalists play. How? Through the great enemy of Adam Smith aficionados: centralized planning. THE BIG MAN GOES TO MARKET The chief planner was the political

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millennia, the worldwide trend has been toward consolidation, toward higher and higher levels of political organization. And one reason is war—intense, essentially zero-sum games that generate non-zero-sum games. In past chapters, listing technologies that elevate non-zero-sumness, I cited such contraptions as rabbit nets and huge salmon traps. The fact

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their enemies a means of escape.) Hence the incentive to “wage peace.” Of course, societies have a stubborn tendency to think of war a a zero-sum game. They heedlessly launch it even though their own men will surely die.† What’s more, once the war is launched, it is full of

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when opposing soldier are in pitched battle, their fortunes are inversely correlated. For these and other reasons, I will continue to treat war a mainly zero-sum games, and add nuance as necessary. Nonetheless, Service has a point. Even if individual wars are often essentially zero-sum, featuring a clear winner and a

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And then there were great, taxpayer-financed feasts. Through this “redistributive” ritual the commoners ate delicacies that they themselves didn’t grow, playing a non-zero-sum game that people in a market economy take for granted.† Sound like paradise? Not so fast. Especially in the large, highly stratified chiefdoms, the division of

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a phrase for chiefs who “eat the power of the government too much.” The upshot is that certain kinds of theoretically possible outcomes of non-zero-sum games are not much seen in the real world. Consider the following “payoff matrix” for a game we can call the utter-exploitation-of-the-

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offer of less than that is probably doomed. Imagine: college students turning down real money for no work! Apparently there are some kinds of non-zero-sum games that people just won’t play.† And this pride is found cross culturally; experiments in Japan, Slovenia, the United States, and Israel yield the

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the Nobel Prize for, among other things, rigorously exploring how various circumstances could weaken one’s bargaining position, so that “logical” outcomes of non-zero-sum games may not be what most of us would call fair. Thus, when people of different income levels bargain over how to divide the benefits of

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bit further, we can see how new ways of storing and sending these symbols expanded and enriched the social fabric. Consider again the textbook non-zero-sum game, the prisoner’s dilemma. Two partners in crime are being separately interrogated. Each will be better off if neither rats on the other than

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its people? Not very. When a society keeps people in chains, and confiscates the fruits of their labor, it is trying to play a non-zero-sum game in utterly parasitic fashion—a strategy that, I’ve argued, has its pitfalls. First, oppression takes time and energy; Rome more than once had

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of these technologies crystallized in the form of capitalism, they would allow the entire populace—including descendants of slaves and serfs—to play complex non-zero-sum games with people they would never meet. The bounty would not fall evenly across the populace, but it would fall more evenly than bounty in

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technologies is the printing press. It created tons of potential synergy, but set strict rules for realizing it: people could play their new non-zero-sum games well only if fairly free. PLURALISM AND PARASITISM Lest we lapse into sunny optimism, a few words on the pitfalls of political pluralism are in

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by financiers and currency traders, are the result of zillions of non-zero-sum interactions each day. But perhaps more interesting are the larger non-zero-sum games that result from the disruptive effects of this commerce. With economic downturn more contagious than ever, nations see common cause in forestalling regional collapse, and

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the European Coal and Steel Community morph into the European Community and then into the European Union? Actually, the transition is surprisingly logical: one non-zero-sum game leads to another, which leads to another, and so on. The logic is worth fleshing out, in part because the World Trade Organization shows signs

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of following in some of the EU’s footsteps. First, nations trade with one another (non-zero-sum game number one). Then they see further gains in mutually lowering tariffs (game number two). Then they decide all would benefit by dampening quarrels over what

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was growing interstate commerce that carried such regulatory functions from the state to the federal level.) As Europe has already shown, the chain of non-zero-sum games needn’t end with regulatory and judicial power. With transnational commerce growing, all those national currencies became a bother. There was the cost of currency

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to ensue; there is also the “trust” barrier to overcome; the threat of “cheating” must be dampened. At least, that’s the case in non-zero-sum games among human beings. But presumably “trust” isn’t a big problem among cells. Right? Wrong—in a certain sense, at least. Biological evolution, like

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The coalition then abducts a female dolphin from a competing coalition, forcibly detaining her and taking turns having sex with her. Coalitions even play non-zero-sum games with other coalitions. Coalition A helps coalition B steal a female from coalition C today, and coalition B returns the favor tomorrow. This is quite

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in both biological and cultural evolution, zero-sumness stimulated non-zero-sumness. Why did the trilobite’s genes for legs come to play a non-zero-sum game with subsequently added genes for eyes—and with genes for processing and applying visual data? Because it’s a jungle out there. LEARNING BY DOING

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politicians, soccer teams compete with soccer teams. What’s more, some of the new sources of common peril—terrorists and international criminals—are playing emphatically zero-sum games: they have interests quite opposed to those of society at large, and will accordingly inspire their share of antipathy. Still, as non-zero-sumness has

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to the terminology of game theory? Does it really add anything to more familiar words? Can’t we just say, for example, that zero-sum games are competitive and non-zero-sum games are cooperative? There are several reasons that I think the answer is no—that there’s no substitute for game theory as a

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about two nuclear powers signing an arms control treaty in order to find synergy, even though the treaty is the successful outcome of a non-zero-sum game. In the long run—maybe decades down the road—I expect that the strongest validation for using game-theoretical terminology to describe biological evolution

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seminal exercise in computer-simulated evolution is described in Robert Axelrod’s classic book The Evolution of Cooperation. It involved that most famous of non-zero-sum games, the prisoner’s dilemma. Actually, the fame is in some ways unfortunate, because the prisoner’s dilemma has a couple of quirks that impede

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day—as in a small hunter-gatherer society—trust could develop even with little explicit commitment. Of course, through cultural evolution, the settings for non-zero-sum games have gotten much less intimate than a hunter-gatherer society. Chances are you’ve never met the person who made your shoes. In fact,

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all the other people who had a hand in it. A key feature of cultural evolution has been to make it possible for such non-zero-sum games to get played over great distances, among a large number of players. And in these kinds of situations, typically, there does need to be

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will begin to see a lot more computer simulations of cultural evolution (not involving the prisoner’s dilemma necessarily, but involving zero-sum and non-zero-sum games). In fact, it would surprise me if such efforts aren’t already under way. If these efforts prove fruitful, that will be a kind

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85. “pointless” universe: Weinberg (1979). “outside Time and Space”: quoted in Wright (1988), p. 271. “secret of life”: Watson (1969). † New technologies permitting new non-zero-sum games:This general expectation is consistent with a solid body of economic theory and data relating to the “Pareto optimum.” By definition, the Pareto optimum has

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that all the gains from exchange have been exhausted. (Technically speaking, this isn’t the same as saying that all possible non-zero-sum games have been played, since not all non-zero-sum games are simple win-win games. Still, for present purposes we can think of the Pareto optimum as being, loosely speaking, the

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Lee (1979), p. 372. †anti-cheating technologies via both cultural and biological evolution: See Ridley (1996) for an excellent discussion. zero-sum dimensions within non-zero-sum games: See Rapaport (1960), chapter 11, for an exercise in extricating the zero-sum from the non-zero-sum dynamic and then addressing the two problems

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positive-sum” distinction. The reason is that they frown on the “zero-sum/non-zero-sum” terminology to begin with. What is commonly called a “zero-sum” game they would rather call a “fixed-sum” game. After all, if the winner of a tennis match gets $100 and the loser $50, that

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t—but that the sum of the benefits is “fixed,” in this case at $150. By the same token, what is commonly called a “non-zero-sum” game Schelling would rather call a “variable-sum” game (to describe, say, the dynamic between two teammates in a doubles match that pays $100 to

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

by Steven Pinker · 24 Sep 2012 · 1,351pp · 385,579 words

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

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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

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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

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game; Pacifist’s Dilemma; positive-sum games; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Public Goods game; Tragedy of the Commons; Trust game; Ultimatum game; War of Attrition game; zero-sum games Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Rajmohan Gangs of New York (film) Garrard, Graeme Garrison, William Lloyd Garton Ash, Timothy Garwin, Richard Gat, Azar gay

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gangs and dominance and drug culture homicides by in prison socialization of terrorists tribal elders defied by Yugoslavia Zacher, Mark Zambia Zebrowitz, Leslie Zelizer, Viviana zero-sum games Zimbardo, Philip Zimring, Franklin Zipf, G. K. Źiźek, Slavoj Zola, Émile ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language

Principles of Corporate Finance

by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers and Franklin Allen · 15 Feb 2014

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

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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

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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

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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

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

by Scott E. Page · 27 Nov 2018 · 543pp · 153,550 words

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

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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

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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

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game, the Minimize Risk Game shown in figure 21.2 each player can take a risky action or a safe action. This is an asymmetric zero-sum game. The payoffs depend not just on the actions but also on which player takes which action. In this game, the row player has a dominant

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, paradoxically, produce lower-quality winners because in the larger contests, participants have less incentive to put in effort. Summary We began this chapter by covering zero-sum games. These games assume no mutually beneficial combinations of actions. Any action that proves good for one player necessarily hurts another player. In a zero-sum

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, 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. If the students rank

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. Those who lose the lottery will go to worse schools, who remain in operation because of a lack of excess supply. Students are playing a zero-sum game. If new schools open, or if existing schools improve, the game is no longer zero-sum. Everyone can win. Both the market and the zero

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us a correct answer, but each produces useful insights. School choice will create competition. It also creates a massive sorting problem with features of a zero-sum game. Whether the positive aspects of competition will outweigh the negative sorting costs depends on the context. We must array our lattice of models on the

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methods, 65–66 with standard deviation, 61 (fig.) structure in, 60–61 symmetry of, 61 variance in, 60–61 normal random walk, 156 normal-form zero-sum games, 244–245 objects, 332 Ocala, 241–242 Ockham, William, 15 Ockham’s Razor, 15 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 27 Olympics, 88 omitted variables, 84–85 Omnibus

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, 196 (fig.) power-law distributions and, 71 (fig.) WORLD3 model, 208–210 proponents of, 210 zero intelligence agents, 56 zero property, 111 of entropy, 146 zero-sum games, normal-form, 244–245 Zimbabwe, 96 Zipf’s law, defining, 72 Zuckerberg, Mark, 198 Zurcher, Harold, 50

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

by Robert Wright · 28 Dec 2010

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

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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. (It was equally good.) Back in the real world,

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win-win or lose-lose, depending on how they play the game. (For elaboration on non-zero-sum logic, and discussion of the classic non-zero-sum game “the prisoner’s dilemma,” see appendix 1.) Sometimes political scientists or economists break human interaction down into zero-sum and non-zero-sum components. Occasionally

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refer to elaborative notes that can be found in the Notes section at the end of the book. This isn’t to say that non-zero-sum games always have win-win outcomes and never have lose-lose outcomes. (Badly governed societies are littered with losses, and history is littered with the

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powerful and the treacherous never exploit the weak and the naïve; exploitation—ranging from clear-cut parasitism to subtler inequity—is often possible in non-zero-sum games, and history offer plenty of examples. Still, on balance, over the long run, non-zero-sum situations produce more positive sums than negative sums,

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they say, is organic history. In short, both organic and human history involve the playing of evermore-numerous, ever-larger, and ever-more-elaborate non-zero-sum games. It is the accumulation of these games—game upon game upon game—that constitutes the growth in biological and social complexity that people like Bergson

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human nature. That arrow, a I’ve noted, points toward larger quantities of non-zero-sumness. As history progresses, human beings find themselves playing non-zero-sum games with more and more other human beings. Interdependence expands, and social complexity grow in cope and depth. One way to start seeing this link between

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and social complexity grew. To say that reaping non-zero-sum benefits elevates social complexity borders on the redundant. The successful playing of a non-zero-sum game typically amounts to a growth of social complexity. The players must coordinate their behavior, so people who might otherwise be off in their own orbits

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genes. According to evolutionary psychologists, it is part of the emotional equipment designed by natural selection to govern reciprocal altruism, to help us play non-zero-sum games profitably. THE TROUBLE WITH NON-ZERO-SUMNESS Why would this sort of vigilance have been so crucial to our ancestors’ prospects that genes conducive to

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it would flourish? There are two properties of non-zero-sum games—two kinds of pitfalls—that make instinctive wariness vital. One is the problem of cheating, or parasitism. People may accept your generosity and never repay

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—via cultural, not genetic, evolution.† The other principle of game theory that makes wariness adaptive is subtler than cheating. 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,

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into a team. Presto!—fifty rabbits instead of twenty! It is the question of how to divvy up this magical thirty-rabbit surplus that the zero-sum game, the bargaining, is about. Of course, you could just divide the rabbits equally. But haven’t some people worked harder than others, or brought

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of exchange. One hand washes the other, and both are better off than they would be alone—the very definition of a well-played non-zero-sum game. The difference between the two economies lies in the number of hands involved and the intricacy of their interdependence, two quantities that cultural evolution

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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. For now I’ll just say that, though

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“altruism” among the !Kung, generosity is a veneer; future reciprocation is de rigueur. Like insurance policyholders, the region’s boat owners are playing a non-zero-sum game, finding in large numbers security against misfortune. Long before economists were drawing graphs showing how diversified stock portfolios could serve the human aversion to risk

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exported to various Northwest Coast Indians whose aspiration was to someday be buried in an attractive robe. Much of this technology involved that classic non-zero-sum game, division of labor—through which, as Adam Smith noted, a group of people can expand overall output. Though all Northwest Coast Indian families would

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and gather, many also had a sideline craft—carpentry, say—that was handed down through the family. These native Americans also played the non-zero-sum game played by the Tareumiut and the Shoshone: collective hunting, as reflected in their whaling fleets and the huge fish traps they affixed to the river

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bond market. The Northwest Coast Indians didn’t have a capitalist economy, or even a currency, yet they managed to play the same basic non-zero-sum games capitalists play. How? Through the great enemy of Adam Smith aficionados: centralized planning. THE BIG MAN GOES TO MARKET The chief planner was the political

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millennia, the worldwide trend has been toward consolidation, toward higher and higher levels of political organization. And one reason is war—intense, essentially zero-sum games that generate non-zero-sum games. In past chapters, listing technologies that elevate non-zero-sumness, I cited such contraptions as rabbit nets and huge salmon traps. The fact

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their enemies a means of escape.) Hence the incentive to “wage peace.” Of course, societies have a stubborn tendency to think of war a a zero-sum game. They heedlessly launch it even though their own men will surely die.† What’s more, once the war is launched, it is full of

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when opposing soldier are in pitched battle, their fortunes are inversely correlated. For these and other reasons, I will continue to treat war a mainly zero-sum games, and add nuance as necessary. Nonetheless, Service has a point. Even if individual wars are often essentially zero-sum, featuring a clear winner and a

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And then there were great, taxpayer-financed feasts. Through this “redistributive” ritual the commoners ate delicacies that they themselves didn’t grow, playing a non-zero-sum game that people in a market economy take for granted.† Sound like paradise? Not so fast. Especially in the large, highly stratified chiefdoms, the division of

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a phrase for chiefs who “eat the power of the government too much.” The upshot is that certain kinds of theoretically possible outcomes of non-zero-sum games are not much seen in the real world. Consider the following “payoff matrix” for a game we can call the utter-exploitation-of-the-

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offer of less than that is probably doomed. Imagine: college students turning down real money for no work! Apparently there are some kinds of non-zero-sum games that people just won’t play.† And this pride is found cross culturally; experiments in Japan, Slovenia, the United States, and Israel yield the

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the Nobel Prize for, among other things, rigorously exploring how various circumstances could weaken one’s bargaining position, so that “logical” outcomes of non-zero-sum games may not be what most of us would call fair. Thus, when people of different income levels bargain over how to divide the benefits of

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bit further, we can see how new ways of storing and sending these symbols expanded and enriched the social fabric. Consider again the textbook non-zero-sum game, the prisoner’s dilemma. Two partners in crime are being separately interrogated. Each will be better off if neither rats on the other than

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its people? Not very. When a society keeps people in chains, and confiscates the fruits of their labor, it is trying to play a non-zero-sum game in utterly parasitic fashion—a strategy that, I’ve argued, has its pitfalls. First, oppression takes time and energy; Rome more than once had

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of these technologies crystallized in the form of capitalism, they would allow the entire populace—including descendants of slaves and serfs—to play complex non-zero-sum games with people they would never meet. The bounty would not fall evenly across the populace, but it would fall more evenly than bounty in

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technologies is the printing press. It created tons of potential synergy, but set strict rules for realizing it: people could play their new non-zero-sum games well only if fairly free. PLURALISM AND PARASITISM Lest we lapse into sunny optimism, a few words on the pitfalls of political pluralism are in

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by financiers and currency traders, are the result of zillions of non-zero-sum interactions each day. But perhaps more interesting are the larger non-zero-sum games that result from the disruptive effects of this commerce. With economic downturn more contagious than ever, nations see common cause in forestalling regional collapse, and

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the European Coal and Steel Community morph into the European Community and then into the European Union? Actually, the transition is surprisingly logical: one non-zero-sum game leads to another, which leads to another, and so on. The logic is worth fleshing out, in part because the World Trade Organization shows signs

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of following in some of the EU’s footsteps. First, nations trade with one another (non-zero-sum game number one). Then they see further gains in mutually lowering tariffs (game number two). Then they decide all would benefit by dampening quarrels over what

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was growing interstate commerce that carried such regulatory functions from the state to the federal level.) As Europe has already shown, the chain of non-zero-sum games needn’t end with regulatory and judicial power. With transnational commerce growing, all those national currencies became a bother. There was the cost of currency

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to ensue; there is also the “trust” barrier to overcome; the threat of “cheating” must be dampened. At least, that’s the case in non-zero-sum games among human beings. But presumably “trust” isn’t a big problem among cells. Right? Wrong—in a certain sense, at least. Biological evolution, like

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The coalition then abducts a female dolphin from a competing coalition, forcibly detaining her and taking turns having sex with her. Coalitions even play non-zero-sum games with other coalitions. Coalition A helps coalition B steal a female from coalition C today, and coalition B returns the favor tomorrow. This is quite

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in both biological and cultural evolution, zero-sumness stimulated non-zero-sumness. Why did the trilobite’s genes for legs come to play a non-zero-sum game with subsequently added genes for eyes—and with genes for processing and applying visual data? Because it’s a jungle out there. LEARNING BY DOING

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politicians, soccer teams compete with soccer teams. What’s more, some of the new sources of common peril—terrorists and international criminals—are playing emphatically zero-sum games: they have interests quite opposed to those of society at large, and will accordingly inspire their share of antipathy. Still, as non-zero-sumness has

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to the terminology of game theory? Does it really add anything to more familiar words? Can’t we just say, for example, that zero-sum games are competitive and non-zero-sum games are cooperative? There are several reasons that I think the answer is no—that there’s no substitute for game theory as a

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about two nuclear powers signing an arms control treaty in order to find synergy, even though the treaty is the successful outcome of a non-zero-sum game. In the long run—maybe decades down the road—I expect that the strongest validation for using game-theoretical terminology to describe biological evolution

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seminal exercise in computer-simulated evolution is described in Robert Axelrod’s classic book The Evolution of Cooperation. It involved that most famous of non-zero-sum games, the prisoner’s dilemma. Actually, the fame is in some ways unfortunate, because the prisoner’s dilemma has a couple of quirks that impede

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day—as in a small hunter-gatherer society—trust could develop even with little explicit commitment. Of course, through cultural evolution, the settings for non-zero-sum games have gotten much less intimate than a hunter-gatherer society. Chances are you’ve never met the person who made your shoes. In fact,

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all the other people who had a hand in it. A key feature of cultural evolution has been to make it possible for such non-zero-sum games to get played over great distances, among a large number of players. And in these kinds of situations, typically, there does need to be

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will begin to see a lot more computer simulations of cultural evolution (not involving the prisoner’s dilemma necessarily, but involving zero-sum and non-zero-sum games). In fact, it would surprise me if such efforts aren’t already under way. If these efforts prove fruitful, that will be a kind

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85. “pointless” universe: Weinberg (1979). “outside Time and Space”: quoted in Wright (1988), p. 271. “secret of life”: Watson (1969). † New technologies permitting new non-zero-sum games:This general expectation is consistent with a solid body of economic theory and data relating to the “Pareto optimum.” By definition, the Pareto optimum has

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that all the gains from exchange have been exhausted. (Technically speaking, this isn’t the same as saying that all possible non-zero-sum games have been played, since not all non-zero-sum games are simple win-win games. Still, for present purposes we can think of the Pareto optimum as being, loosely speaking, the

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Lee (1979), p. 372. †anti-cheating technologies via both cultural and biological evolution: See Ridley (1996) for an excellent discussion. zero-sum dimensions within non-zero-sum games: See Rapaport (1960), chapter 11, for an exercise in extricating the zero-sum from the non-zero-sum dynamic and then addressing the two problems

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positive-sum” distinction. The reason is that they frown on the “zero-sum/non-zero-sum” terminology to begin with. What is commonly called a “zero-sum” game they would rather call a “fixed-sum” game. After all, if the winner of a tennis match gets $100 and the loser $50, that

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t—but that the sum of the benefits is “fixed,” in this case at $150. By the same token, what is commonly called a “non-zero-sum” game Schelling would rather call a “variable-sum” game (to describe, say, the dynamic between two teammates in a doubles match that pays $100 to

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Princeton Classic Editions)

by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern · 19 Mar 2007

is based on the foundation laid by von Neumann and Morgenstern in this book. References 1. Waldegrave, J. (1713) Minimax solution of a 2-person, zero-sum game, reported in a letter from P. de Montmort to N. Bernouilli, transl, and with comments by H. W. Kuhn in W. J. Baumol and

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of V′ *55.10. Disposal of Case (II″) *55.11. Reformulation of the complete result *55.12. Interpretation of the result CHAPTER XI GENERAL NON-ZERO-SUM GAMES 56. EXTENSION OF THE THEORY 56.1. Formulation of the problem 56.2. The fictitious player. The zero sum extension Γ 56.3. Questions concerning

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4.2.1., particularly in footnote 2, p. 34. We shall call games of the first-mentioned type zero-sum games, and those of the latter type non-zero-sum games. We shall primarily construct a theory of the zero-sum games, but it will be found possible to dispose, with its help, of all games, without restriction. Precisely

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-person game is closely related to the zero-sum n + 1-person game. 2 The following seems worth noting: coalitions occur first in a zero-sum game when the number of participants in the game reaches three. In a two-person game there are not enough players to go around: a coalition

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three-person games—with results which are rather surprising, but, as we shall see, not unreasonable. 30.4.2. These two items exhaust actually all zero-sum games with n 3. We observed in the first remark of 27.5.2. that for n = 1,2, these games are inessential; so this,

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) (or (30:5:c)) in 30.1.1. These conditions involve only domination, which we settled. We restate these results: (31:Q) If two zero-sum games Γ and Γ′ are strategically equivalent, then there exists an isomorphism between their imputations—i.e. a one-to-one mapping of those of Γ

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we shall also see that it is precisely the investigation of the discriminatory “inobjective” solutions which leads to a proper understanding of the general non-zero-sum games—and thence to application to economics. 33.2. Statics and Dynamics 33.2. At this point it may be advantageous to recall the discussions of

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terminology of 27.1.1.: . The condition there which we have infringed is (27:1): . This is necessary since we started with a non-zero-sum game. Even could be safeguarded if we included player 4 in our considerations, putting . This would leave him just as isolated as before, but the necessary

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) = 0 is not true (and it was from this condition that we derived (41:8)). In other words: the constituents of Γ are not zero-sum games. This point, of course, was perfectly clear in 35.2.2., where it received due consideration. Consequently we must endeavor to get rid of the

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condition (41:8), recognizing that this may force us to consider other than zero-sum games. 42. Modification of the Theory 42.1. No Complete Abandoning of the Zero-sum Condition 42.1. Complete abandonment of the zero-sum condition for

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the auxiliary considerations contained in 42.2.1., 42.2.2. below. 42.2. Strategic Equivalence. Constant-sum Games 42.2.1. Consider a zero-sum game Γ which may or may not fulfill conditions (41:6) and (41:8). Pass from Γ to a strategically equivalent game Γ′ in the sense

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in 25.3.1. and (25:4) in 25.4.1. This result can be interpreted as follows: If we refrain from considering other than zero-sum games,2 then condition (41:6) expresses that while the game Γ may not be decomposable itself, it is strategically equivalent to some decomposable game Γ

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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

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former one by strategic equivalence. This forces us to define inessentiality for a constant-sum game by strategic equivalence to an inessential zero-sum game. We may state therefore: (42:F) A zero-sum game is inessential if and only if it is strategically equivalent to the game with (S) ≡ 0. (Cf. 23.1.3.

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e0)] which are undominated by any element of V. It will be noted that E(0) takes us back to the original 30.1.1. (zero-sum game) and 42.4.1. (constant-sum game). 44.7.4. The concepts of composition, decomposition and constituents of extended imputations can again be defined

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3. 1 We use as in the second remark S* = to symbolize the case (I), the discussion preceding (55:O′) notwithstanding. CHAPTER XI GENERAL NON-ZERO-SUM GAMES 56. Extension of the Theory 56.1. Formulation of the Problem 56.1.1. Our considerations have reached the stage at which it is possible

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good maximum problem in the non-zero-sum case (cf. 12.2.1.). Accordingly our present program of extending the theory to all non-zero-sum games must be expected to bring us into closer contact with questions of the familiar economic type. In the discussions which follow, the reader will soon

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2., 42.2.3. or 42.3.1.) So we must find some other procedure to link the theory of the non-zero-sum games to the established theory of the zero-sum games. 56.2. The Fictitious Player. The Zero-sum Extension 56.2.1. Before going further we have to clarify a point of

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function v(S), S (1,2,3). According to what we said above Obviously and by the general properties of the characteristic function (of a zero-sum game) Summing up: This formula (56:3) is precisely the (29:1) of 29.1.2.; i.e. is the essential zero-sum three-person

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served only to show that an uncompromising application of our original theory to brings us into such a conflict. Hence we must conclude that the zero-sum game cannot be considered an unqualified equivalent of the general game Γ. What are we then to do? In order to answer this question, it

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. First: Abandonment of the characteristic function v(S) in favor of the underlying would deprive us of all means to handle the problem. For zero-sum games we possess no general theory other than that of 30.1.1., based on v(S) exclusively. Thus the adoption of this program would make

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our passage from the general game Γ to the zero-sum game entirely useless, since it would render us just as incapable of handling zero-sum games as, originally, general games. Hence this sacrifice of our entire existing theory would be reasonable only if it were

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1. Let us stop for a moment to interpret these restrictions. (56:9) is not new. It expresses again what we had already for the zero-sum games, namely that nobody would accept in any case less than he can get for himself in opposition to all others. (56:10), however, appears

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misunderstand the meaning of this operation. Obviously the operations of 56.2.2. and 56.8.2. are entirely unnecessary if Γ itself is a zero-sum game; we possess a theory which disposes of this case. But if a more general theory, valid for all games, is to be constructed on

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systematic use of the theory of composition and decomposition of Chapter IX, in order to analyze the influence of our contemplated new procedure on the zero-sum games Γ. This procedure consisted mainly in the passage from Γ to , which as we saw amounted to the addition of a dummy to Γ.

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its original domain, embracing all S (1, . . . , n, n + 1) is the extended characteristic function. From this we conclude in the special case of a zero-sum game: Here the characteristic function of the old theory is the restricted characteristic function of the new one.1 Returning to the general games, we see

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that the merger of two distinct coalitions S and T produces no further profit if together they contain all players. For the v(S) of zero-sum games the further requirement v(I) = 0 must be added. To conclude, we emphasize that the extra conditions (57:19) or (57:20) do not

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deserve particular attention in this connection: First: Inflicting losses on the adversary may not be directly profitable in a general (i.e. not necessarily zero-sum) game, but it is the way to exert pressure on him. He may be induced by such threats to pay a compensation, to adjust his strategy

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in the way of analyzing games with n 4 this time. We can afford to be considerably briefer now than we were in discussing the zero-sum games: The detailed discussion there was necessary in order to reassure ourselves of the propriety of our procedure, and of the general ideas and methodical

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v′(S)—to be denoted by (S)—which fulfills the n − 1 conditions (27:3): Yet, the characteristic functions considered at that time belonged to zero-sum games; hence we had automatically In imposing this as a normalizing requirement, we now have n conditions: (59:2) and (59:3). So we obtain

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in 59.1.1. Furthermore, the interpretative value of the results would not differ materially from what was already obtained in Chapter IX, when considering zero-sum games. 60. The Solutions of All General Games with n 3 60.1. The Case n = 1 60.1. We proceed to the systematic discussion

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a1 = a2 = a3 = 1. In other words: The domain (60:9) represents all general games, while its upper boundary point (60:10) represents the (unique) zero-sum game of our case. 60.3.2. Let us now determine the solutions of this (essential) general three-person game. The general imputation is given in

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and footnote 4 on p. 553), those depicted in Figure 86. Figure 92. Figure 93. Figure 94. Figure 95. 60.4. Comparison with the Zero-sum Games 60.4.1. We have determined all solutions of the general n-person games with n = 3 in a rigorous way, but we have not

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a rather formal nature. We have seen that the smallest n for which a general game can be essential is n = 2, while for the zero-sum games the corresponding number was n = 3. We have also seen that there exists (assuming reduction and normalization γ = 1) precisely one essential general game

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for n = 2, whereas for the zero-sum games the same thing was true for n = 3. Again the essential general games for n = 3 (under the same assumptions as above) form a three

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parameter manifold, while for the zero-sum games this was true for n = 4. All this indicates an analogy between general n-person games and zero-sum n + 1-person games. Of course

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inspection shows, however, that in our present setup these details do not become decisive. The situation is altogether different from Poker which is a zero-sum game and where any loss of one player is a gain for the other one.1 Specifically, the reader may discuss any more complicated market (but

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of the monopolistic (or monopsonistic) situations.2 It will play a role of some importance in 65.9.1. 1 It should be noted that zero-sum games not only cover the type of games played for entertainment (cf. 5.2.1.), but also that many of them describe quite adequately relationships

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which we have made in numerous cases will be fully aware of the validity of this statement. Thus the distinction between zero-sum and non-zero-sum games reflects to a certain extent the distinction between purely social and social-economic questions. (The next sentence in the text expresses the same idea.)

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., particularly footnote 3 on p. 513. 2 Our entire attitude towards coalitions and compensations was based on this, already in the theory of the zero-sum games. 3 We do not propose to determine here the amount of the compensation—i.e. the nature of the compromise. This is the task of

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fundamental triangle and its opposite vertex. Our Figures 92–95 exhaust all possibilities within this restriction. 3 The only ones which can occur in a zero-sum game, i.e. for a1 = a2 = a3 = 1, are those which can be symmetric: Figures 92, 95. Of these, Figure 92 corresponds to Figure 84,

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us therefore consider a general n-person game. Since we possess the theory of Chapter XI, we may forget its origin in the theory of zero-sum games and try to extend it directly to the case of more general (non-numerical, non-transferable) utilities. The imputations will still he vectors, but

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be judged by its usefulness? Game theory is responsible for some new terms in our language. For example, the wide use of the term “zero-sum game” is attributed to the influence of game theory, although it is often used by speakers simply to demonstrate their level of sophistication (or lack thereof

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work. If we leave Robinson Crusoe playing solitaire on his island, the simplest of the remaining games is the zero-sum two-person game. Zero-sum games are an important classification of all possible games. As the name implies the sum of all payments involved, by all players at the end of

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sometimes found convenient to use one, and sometimes the other in the problems which follow. 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

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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

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coalitions may arise, and the relationships between two players may be manifold. The game can be reduced to three two-person zero-sum games. The theory now advances to the n-person zero-sum games. Little penetration below the surface has been made, however, and the theory comes back to a discussion of the case n

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W. Ladies’ garment industry Laisser faire Large numbers, problem of “Lausanne” Theory Lefshetz, Solomon Leonard, Robert J. Lester, Richard Linear interpolation Linear programming. See also Zero-sum games, two-person Linear transformation Linearity Lippmann, Walter Lipschitz Lipschitz condition Liquor-distilling industry Logic Logistic interpretation Loomis, L. H. Los Alamos Losing Losses Luce, R

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(Morgenstern) Withdrawal Wittgenstein, Ludwig Young, J. W. Zabel, Ed Zermelo, E. Zero-reduced form of characteristic function Zero-sum condition Zero-sum extension of Γ Zero-sum games: definition of four-person n-person three-person three-person, solution of essential two-person use of term Zero-sum restriction Zipf, George K. “Zur