win win or zero sum games

What is life?

I am a bit sceptical of the whole “Let’s just make the cake bigger” idea. Clearly the cake is getting bigger but the returns are going disproportionately to the 0.1 %.

see here

The world is a pie with fixed limits which we are trying to break with unknowable consequences.

It seems to me that if you had read Marx, you might want to divert the working class (or proletariat) away from class warfare (where the 50% with no money kill the rich- ie the 0.1%) towards some other pastime.

So you find a way to increase the population of a country and a way to restrict housebuilding to drive up the cost of houses and increase competition.

The population growth of the United Kingdom from 1990 to 2025 shows a steady increase, with varying rates of growth over different periods. In 1990, the population was 57,367,862. By 2025, the population is estimated to be 69,551,332. This represents an overall increase of approximately 12,183,470 people over the 35-year period.

UK graphs last 30 years- increase in population versus number of houses built.

The UK housing market has experienced significant growth from 1990 to 2025. The average UK house price has risen from £57,683.31 in 1990 to £270,867 in the first quarter of 2025.

212,570 new homes were built in 2022/23, and the government's target to build 300,000 new homes per year was not met.

This will also put pressure on health care and education, with the richer choosing in both case to go private.

Of course, it would be lovely if we could make public services as good as private services- but it’s a bit like making an aeroplane seat on Ryanair as comfortable as a private jet.

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And how many “good” jobs can a society create?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cooperative_game_theory

The game involves two players, boy and girl, deciding either going to a football game or going to an opera for their date, which respectively represent boy's and girl's preferred activity (i.e. boy prefers football game and girl prefers opera).^[14] This example is a two-person non-cooperative non-zero sum (TNNC) game with opposite payoffs or conflicting preferences.^[14] Because there are two Nash equilibria, this case is a pure coordination problem with no possibility of refinement or selection.^[12] Thus, the two players will try to maximise their own payoff or to sacrifice for the other and yet these strategies without coordination will lead to two outcomes with even worse payoffs for both if they disagree on what to do on their date.

Open closed mindset

Fixed growth mindset

Zero sum game theory John Nash a beautiful mind

Zero-sum game is a mathematical representation in game theory and economic theory of a situation that involves two competing entities, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other.^[1] In other words, player one's gain is equivalent to player two's loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero.^[2]

If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Thus, cutting a cake, where taking a more significant piece reduces the amount of cake available for others as much as it increases the amount available for that taker, is a zero-sum game if all participants value each unit of cake equally. Other examples of zero-sum games in daily life include games like poker, chess, sport and bridge where one person gains and another person loses, which results in a zero-net benefit for every player.^[3] In the markets and financial instruments, futures contracts and options are zero-sum games as well.^[4]

Ray Dalio

https://www.principles.com/principles/b42c827b-2a47-4a84-9a7c-c1f70ddea13b/

Here’s Stefanie Stancheva on zero- sum ways of seeing the world.

the pie

“one group’s progress need not come at the cost of another’s”

To learn more about people’s understanding, perceptions, and views of public policies, visit the Social Economics Lab website.

Here is an older (2021) Research Summary and a short focus piece about my research on “Taxation and Innovation.”

how people understand, perceive, and form their attitudes towards economic issues and policies. My recent work explores people’s attitudes towards taxation, trade, immigration, climate change, and social mobility using large-scale Social Economics Surveys and Experiments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefanie_Stantcheva

Stantcheva was born in Bulgaria in 1986, and lived in East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, before moving to France, where she grew up.^[8] Stantcheva became interested in economics had after witnessing the economic turmoil Bulgaria during its political and economic transition in the 1990s.^[1] She attended the Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, and read economics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2007.^[5] She then received a Master of Science degree in economics from the École Polytechnique in 2008, and a second MS in economics from the Paris School of Economics and the ENSAE in 2009.^[5] She received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014, where she was advised by James Poterba and Iván Werning.^[8]

From 2014 to 2016, Stantcheva was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.^[5] She became an assistant professor at Harvard University in 2016, and an associate professor at Harvard the following year.^[

from

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2025/07/07/to-understand-america-today-study-the-zero-sum-mindset-writes-stefanie-stantcheva

LOOK at the news or social media these days, and you might see a pattern. Stories are about groups in conflict, competing for limited resources, with the gains for some framed as losses for others. If China benefits from trade with America, America must lose. If foreign students enroll at American universities, that must mean fewer spots for Americans. If immigrants find work, they must be taking jobs from citizens. If a diversity initiative helps women or a racial minority, someone else must be left out. More and more, debates are shaped by a mindset that sees the world as a fixed pie—where one person’s or one group’s gain is another’s loss. That mindset is known as zero-sum thinking. And it is crucial to understanding the politics and economics of America today.

Where does this mindset come from, who holds it and what does it mean for policy? These were the questions we addressed in a large study at the Social Economics Lab at Harvard, where we focus on how people think about economic issues and policies.

Some groups are more likely than others to see the world in zero-sum terms. People in cities, for example, tend to think this way more than those in rural areas, perhaps because urban life involves intense competition for housing and jobs. People with more formal education are less likely to see the world as zero-sum but the pattern flips among the highly educated: those with PhDs often show the strongest zero-sum beliefs. This could be because competitive graduate programmes attract people who already think this way or because they encourage this mindset through intense competition. Perhaps the most striking finding is that younger generations today are much more zero-sum than older ones.

What does this mindset mean for politics and policies? Unlike many other beliefs today, zero-sum thinking doesn’t fall neatly along party lines and is not a clearly left-wing or right-wing mindset. Instead, it can lead people to support policies from both ends of the political spectrum.

At its core, zero-sum thinking involves a belief that one group is being taken advantage of, and that government action is needed to help them. If you believe, for example, that rich people gained their wealth at the expense of poorer people—and reject the idea that prosperity “trickles down” or lifts all boats—you are more likely to support higher taxes on the rich and more redistribution to help the poor. If you think some groups are systematically held back by others, you may be more likely to support affirmative action. But zero-sum thinkers are also more likely to favour stricter immigration rules to protect domestic interests from what they see as direct competition.

To understand the zero-sum mindset—and why it varies across groups—it is necessary to look at where it comes from. This way of thinking doesn’t just appear out of nowhere; it stems from people’s economic environment and experiences—not only their own, but also those of their families and even earlier generations. Economic mobility and growth play a big role. People who have done better than their parents, or whose families have experienced upward mobility over time, are less likely to think in zero-sum terms. This also explains why younger generations in America are more zero-sum: they have grown up during times of slower economic growth and lower mobility. Other rich countries exhibit a similar generational pattern. In contrast, in many poorer countries where younger generations have experienced more growth than earlier ones, the pattern flips.

Another important positive-sum experience is immigration; immigrants in America have historically done well economically and contributed to their communities. Those with immigrant ancestry are less likely to think in zero-sum terms. But even indirect exposure matters: people who grew up in places that historically had more immigrants also tend to hold more positive-sum views.

On the other side of the coin, the experience of a deeply zero-sum system pushes people towards a more zero-sum outlook. For instance, people whose ancestors were subjected to slavery, persecuted during the Holocaust or forced onto reservations are more likely to hold zero-sum beliefs today.

But the effect goes beyond direct family history. People living in parts of America where slavery was widespread also tend to be more zero-sum, even if not descended from enslaved people. And this mindset has not stayed confined to those areas. Places that never had slavery themselves but took in many migrants from the American South—who brought with them a worldview shaped by that system—also show higher levels of zero-sum thinking today.

Thus, zero-sum thinking shouldn’t be dismissed as just a bias—it is shaped by the experiences and economic conditions people live through. For many, zero-sumness reflects the reality they’ve faced. And, indeed, some situations truly are zero-sum, especially in the short run—when jobs are scarce, resources limited or competition intense. But policy helps shape these conditions. It can make the world more zero-sum or more positive-sum.

Some policies are especially likely to create win-win outcomes, particularly over the long run. These include policies that expand opportunity, such as strong public education, access to health care and support for poorer families; investments in innovation to expand the overall economic pie; and policies to mitigate climate change, protect the environment and conserve natural resources to reduce the sense of scarcity that fuels zero-sum thinking. Policies like these can help create the conditions for a more positive-sum economy—and make it easier for people to believe that one group’s progress need not come at the cost of another’s.■

Stefanie Stantcheva is an economics professor at Harvard and founder and director of the Social Economics Lab. She was awarded the 2025 John Bates Clark Medal.