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I see this most clearly in people who will not trade in a board game like Monopoly unless the deal is extremely slanted in their favor. They simply can't understand that people who trade will always beat people who don't, and the easiest way to trade is to trade fairly.

If four people are playing a game of Monopoly, and two trade with each other but the other two refuse, now two people are playing Monopoly and the other two are begging for it to end.

(Please don't reply by criticizing Monopoly, I know that many people don't like it, I suspect this is a major reason why.)

It's one of my all-time favorites. My favorite 'house rule' was invented by my nephew: He negotiated a % of rent I collected utilizing properties he traded to me.
This is my life-long frustration on monopoly and Catan. There isn't a better case for free trade than playing those games in my opinion, but people really are reluctant to understand that trades make their possition better at the expense of everyone else.

Allow me to boast about my single most fantastic monopoly play where nobody wanted to trade at all, so I initiated a series of trades where I gave each opponent a monopoly without getting myself one, except for the very last trade of all with a player that had all the cash in the game and no properties and I gave him a small monopoly and got a huge one + all the cash to build on it. They key is that each trade I made increased the opponents chances to win enormously, but the last one basically gave me the game in exchange for a small chance to someone that had none at all.

There's such an advantage to having a full color set, it's hard to imagine folks that don't want to trade to get one.
Monopoly is a zero sum game. So perceiving it as such shouldn't be the bias that leads to poor strategy.

(edit: it seems that it may be possible to play monopoly in a way that generates infinite money and with no win condition)

One of my favorites is the economy. People constantly talk about there only being a finite number of resources or money. While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations. It is easy to see when you take the historical perspective, that the vast majority of us are living much better off than those a hundred years ago and amazingly better than those of just a thousand years.
Money is a surprisingly poor way of measuring an economy. AC may be cheap as a percentage of GDP, but it can make a huge difference in quality of life. However, if you look at meat production as a share of GDP it significantly reduces the calculated economic growth over very long time periods.
Peak urban real-estate, regions with good weather, clean air and water, natural resources, biodiversity etc. might be counter points. Unless we achieve fundamental breakthroughs in natural and physical sciences as well as improve basic economic incentive structures that drive corporate behaviour, our current prosperity might be short-lived. It is difficult to confidently predict how any of these things will turn out though - our way of life has undergone massive change in the last five decades than it might have anytime before that, and that pace is only accelerating.
Absolutely. This is also a huge problem in trade. Trump, for example sees trade in zero-sum terms, where if China and Europe are doing well, that's proof that America is losing.
The economy does none of those things. What you are talking about is technological progress and money is just one of humanity's greatest inventions out of many.
Based on observations I have the opposite view. A lot of human behavior would not make sense if we only measured resources and not social competition over wealth and status. There is even biological aspects like stress which get effected by the relative status between members of a community.

Resources however increases each year with more people enjoying the benefits.

For humans, yes. For other species, sadly, the last hundred years were most likely devastating. Which make me think that in the end, it is a zero sum game as long as we remain on the same planet and don't recycle our waste.
> vast majority of us

Like 1% or 10%?

While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations.

This is a frustrating hand-wave that I've been subjected to for far too long. It's absolutely possible that there is a finite amount of wealth.

Moreover, even in an economy with positive growth, if a small fraction of individuals capture a large enough amount of the growth, wealth has effectively been capped for everyone else.

I see people interpret personal comfort as zero sum and it drives me nuts. Like somehow other people being safe and comfortable devalues ones own safety and comfort.
I suspect it is because many humans derive self-worth from seeing other people who are worse off than they are. If you have that mindset, personal comfort really can be a zero-sum game, sadly...
Could you give some examples?
Modern Life is so complex.

And in many situations , telling whether they're zero sum, is uncertain, and hard. Look at the debates here for example.

So people default to what they already generally know.

They know that society is very competitive. The job market is very competitive. The mating market is very competitive. Zero sum games are everywhere.

So it's no wonder they have this cognitive bias.

It's not just that.

Zero sum let's you shift blame for your own failures. You can say someone else took it from you (nefariously).

When the game is positive sum, the cause of failure must be internal. You just couldn't do it and there's nobody to blame but you. A lot of people can't handle this.

Entire philosophies and like outlooks are driven by this. The external locus of control.

None of those markets are really zero-sum. People value different things in all of those markets (jobs etc). Zero-sum is an edge case.
We sort of live in a finite universe in terms of matter and energy right? Conservation laws seem to imply that. So at a large enough scale life would have to be zero sum. I guess what people may actually be arguing about is at what scale the finite aspects of the universe actually matter?

On an anecdotal level, while thinking that everything is zero sum all the time probably isn't good, I find that the majority of the people I interact find it very difficult to imagine that anything is "zero sum." Since they associate "zero sum" with mean things like harsh competition. It seems like that's its own sort of "bias."

Isn't it strange though? One of the defining characteristics of the most dominant species on the planet is their capacity for sophisticated cooperation and planning.
> people tend to assume that if a product is superior in one dimension then it must be inferior in other dimensions.

Assuming price is one of the dimensions, this is generally a true statement. Otherwise we'd have a bunch of best-in-class products that are cheaper than inferior competitors.

This can occur for products sold at massive scale and with large tooling costs. This dynamic enables the producers of premium products to manufacture at lower cost than smaller-scale competitors. But usually they don't set their prices lower--they just enjoy higher profits.

In a way this is a restatement of the efficient-market hypothesis. If the market is efficient, then a product that is inferior in most or all dimensions will be forced out of the market by one that is superior. Therefore, if you believe in efficient markets and observe that both products are still offered for sale, it's a reasonable inference that the superior product must be inferior in some way that you haven't yet observed.

Usually where this heuristic fails is on the margins, when markets are not efficient and you're observing a change in technology or production techniques. In this case, the correct inference isn't that the product is inferior in some way you haven't observed, it's that the superior product will eventually end up winning and taking over the marketplace.

Doesn't open source software kind of throw a spanner in this idea? In quite a few fields, the best option could be released for free and made by a team of volunteers, and if so, it would logically be better than its paid alternatives in pretty much every possible way.
There are important exceptions, though. It's well demonstrated that wine price influence taste perception, for example [1], [2], [3]. And many of us have seen tech consultants charge prices all out of line with value delivered.

[1] https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/wine-study-shows-price-in... [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170814092949.h... [3] http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/expensive-wine-is-for-dup...

When it comes to products, marketing is also one of those dimensions, and can easily swamp the others. It's a good assumption that if you hold price steady, the more marketing, the worse the product. We don't see this because it is often canceled out by economies of scale, which of course are a result of size, and the larger the relative size, the higher amount of marketing as compared to other brands.

At the same production scale, you should expect the most marketed product to be the worst.

> Assuming price is one of the dimensions, this is generally a true statement. Otherwise we'd have a bunch of best-in-class products that are cheaper than inferior competitors.

You say this like it's an absurd condition but we can observe exactly this condition all the time, with new manufacturing techniques and labor practices creating better products for less resources all the time.

One place I love to observe this phenomenon is cars, where often even new inexpensive cars are superior in many dimensions to older luxury cars (including passenger amenities). But brand attachment and carefully seeded misleading advertising allows luxury vendors to keep their prices high despite a slower product development cycle.

Would this be dissimilar to undercutting a competitor? For example Ryzen 3rd gen chips seem to out perform, and undercut the price, of Intel chips with a similar feature set. Maybe brand is a dimension?
This will be controversial, but this is true everytime there is a pitchfork-inducing "the rich got richer in 20XX" thread. But it's not that the rich stole from the poor in order to become richer (though undoubtedly people will argue this).

If I stick a million dollars in an index fund and passively get richer, am I stealing from the poor? Wealth is not zero sum, yet we seem to treat it like it is (in order for poor people to become wealthy we need to take from the wealthy)

Not that I necessarily agree with them, but some people would say that your index fund is stealing from the poor in a sense, because corporate profits (distributed to you, the shareholder, as dividends) are derived from exploiting the working class, when they could be raising wages instead.

This is obviously not the entire story, because the economy certainly has grown historically and continues to grow, and that growth comes from somewhere. But it is plausible that some amount of wealth accumulation does come at the detriment of the poor.

It’s a common fallacy to believe that wealth is zero sum. It’s also a common fallacy to believe that, since it’s not zero sum, gains by one group are uncorrelated to losses by another.

If the rich got richer, does that mean they took from the poor? No. But it also doesn’t mean they didn’t. As usual, you have to look at the specifics.

The world does have limited resources and capacity for economic growth. In your index fund example, a substantial chunk of those are being allocated to someone who already has plenty, and it would be a lot more useful if it went to someone who had less. That’s not exactly taking from the poor, but it’s not exactly not.

Say the top 1% increase their proportion of wealth from 20% to 40% of the money supply. Since there's only a finite amount of stuff to buy (productivity), this means the rich can also buy a proportionally bigger amount of stuff. Now, yes, this money gets in the hands of whoever is selling but in our current world this is increasingly also the rich. They're slowly buying up all real estate, companies, securities etc. capturing an ever increasing slice of economic surplus. This capture is exactly how the proportion of their wealth gets bigger and bigger, while wages are under pressure and haven't increased at all.

It's not entirely zero sum, some investments increase productivity and thus create actual wealth. Unfortunately investment in stocks and real estate don't increase productivity at all while rent-seeking only directs an ever increasing proportion of available wealth towards rich people.

The question is not whether someone steals or doesn't steal from the poor. The crucial questions are whether the divide between rich and poor increases or not and whether the actual buying power of the poor decreases or not. If the lower income classes have less and less, then something has gone wrong and needs to be fixed. That's currently the case in most Western industrialized nations.

One way to fix the problem, in one way or another, is by some form of resource distribution. If someone has got other recipes that could reasonably be expected to work, then they should put them on the table. So far, the "trickle down to the masses" methods favored by the ultra rich have not proven to be very successful and people cannot be bullshitted forever (or who knows, maybe they can, we'll see in the future).

I don't that is neccesarily a zero-sum mentality. It's an observation on how policy and the economy as a whole did NOT benefit the poorer class as much as it did the rich class. The rich making more money should not translate to the poor making less money but increase in economic quality of life should more proportional between rich and poor.

The rich making a trillion dollars does not translate into the poor losing a trillion dollars (zero sum). But the wealth of the rich increasing by 300% and the wealth of the poor remaining the same indicates the economic policies and conditions are not benefiting the poor as much as they benefit the rich.

Often,the argument is that policies are not fairly applied to allow the poor to maintain an increasingly better economic living conditions.

The subtext of most "rich got richer" articles, is that there's a missed opportunity to make everyone richer by raising taxes on the wealthy, and lowering taxes on everyone else. The rich would still get richer, but at least everyone else will get to share in the spoils as well.
It's not that clear that the rich in general don't play a zero sum game.

But anyways, that's not how people build their model of fairness.

They look at their boss, making much money,often of their good work, while giving them the bare minimum he could get away with.

They look at bezos treating employees like cattle, and not paying taxes.

They look at their landlord, "killing them" with rent. And let's not talk about buying a house.

They look at rich guys, getting many women easily. While they struggle.

Should they really feel the rich don't play a zero sum game?

> Wealth is not zero sum

But what relative wealth buys - a safer, more comfortable position in society - definitely is.

"People sometimes view gender hierarchies in the workplace as being zero-sum, which can cause them to be more opposed to gender-fair policies."

Can someone explain why this isnt zero sum? If the hierarchy moves from being women at the bottom, men at the top to a fair mix, the 'gains' that women make are balanced out by 'losses' for the men. There isn't extra power/prestige/influence introduced to the system by being gender fair.

To clarify, I'm pro equal opportunities, this isn't a sexist rant.

Men making games for men doesn't prevent women from making games for women, but somehow people always assume that the incumbents must adapt to serve the entire market. Why don't people see this as a great opportunity for women to carve out their own place in the industry? Literature already works like this, we have erotic romance novels with explicit descriptions of men's bodies catering to women and we have action novels with explicit description of women's bodies catering to men.
Every single example of zero sum thinking the author used was of whites and men trying to protect their own interests though zero-sum thinking which I found interesting. The author also seems to ignore that altruistic policies which could garner majority groups indirect benefits are themselves based on zero-sum thinking.

When I hear people justify affirmative action policies and racial and gender quotas some of the most frequent stats I heard bring up is relative income levels, relative employment levels, relative everything. Essentially the argument is based around the idea that "majorities' succeeding must have come at the expense of other groups. Even in say... a field like computing in America which is an economic juggernaut that popped up from nowhere which funnels money into the country... the very fact that more White/Asian/Indian men have gotten more jobs than other groups is framed as a crime against those other groups when this is not obvious. Specific needless discrimination and bias is brought up to bring home an argument that majority groups have been playing a nepotistic zero-sum game to their benefit and others and the greater good of societies detriment by keeping talented people with diverse perspectives down. Which isn't an obviously wrong argument yet the solutions on how to fight against this issue like affirmative action are fundamentally couched in zero-sum thinking. People who oppose it do not have zero-sum bias although they are arguably bias towards selfishness. Those are not the same thing.

I don't believe the author made his argument very well. He's confusing zero-sum bias with other types of bias. Singling out white men in all his examples also makes him come off as acting as if it's one group which has the problem which is unlikely to persuade anybody that it's personally wrong for them to engage in zero-sum bias.

P.S. Is zero-sum thinking truly irrational with the future repercussions of population growth and global warming? Time will tell.

This article just kicked me off into a one hour tangent thinking about voting reform activism and my frustration with staunch ordinal voting advocates.

I've found that a lot of ordinal voting system advocates seem to feel that in order for a voting system to work well, it must impose a total order on peoples' preferences. Although they might say that people's preferences are naturally totally ordered, and that it wouldn't be an imposition at all. For me, ordinal systems are destroying information about equal openness to multiple choices. They are filtering the nuances of my preferences through a strict and destructive hierarchy. All just to distill these hypothetical "favorites" that I don't actually have, but which ordinal voting system advocates seem to feel are real anyway.

But I just don't believe that. It's like a whole different worldview. I believe that this sort of bias is at play in that broken, age old gap between ordinal and cardinal voting system advocates.

I wish some funny people would get together and do skits exposing the quirks of different voting systems by playing them out in an everyday, relatable situations e.g. a group of people choosing what restaurant to go to.

I can just imagine a Rob Richie character enforcing that everyone must have a strictly ranked preference between pizza and Thai food. No you are not allowed to be open to both. You must declare which is your ultimate favorite of the two. Even if it means alienating our lactose intolerant friend. They'll be fine since there's salad at the pizza place.

The textbook example of zero-sum thinking is how most people (specially those involved in politics) talk about imports and exports.
I would say it's a natural thing: our biases are mainly a creation of our subconscious, multigenerational experience starting from prehistoric times, our instincts. And before industrial era and before long-range maritime trade started, world has been pretty much a zero-sum place, so perceiving everything as zero-sum is "natural" to us.

Come to think about it, there must be a class of businesses based on this bias, it must be one of the hardest for people to overcome (just as it is hard to overcome lure of sexualized ads: that too, is an instinct, requiring too much conscious power to reject, especially when seeing it casually).

People are also dumb.
One thing that grinds my gears is how the article is shoehorning all these examples of zero-sum bias into a precisely zero-sum situation. It doesn't actually have to be zero-sum for that "bias" to become rational. For example, prisoner's dilemma (which would actually better describe most of the situations put forth in the article).
A common one on HN is cryptocurrency energy use. If crypto didn't exist that energy would have been "wasted" on something else.
It seems that the authors do not understand the 'zero-sum' definition and apply it to various situations where it simply does not apply.

To pick for example the first article, the only one linking to the full article and not just an extract:

Australians probably do not believe that there's a fixed sum of humans in the world and every new Iraqi means one less Australian. The demand to pick a nationality might be a bias (though plenty of states do not allow dual-citizenship), but it's not a 'zero sum' bias as commonly understood - nobody believes that there's an 'Australia-Iraq' game where only one side may win.