Epistemica

Conservatives love to throw around the term “zero-sum game”. It sounds technical enough to impress the ignorant and severe enough to flatter the resentful. A pundit says immigration is zero-sum, welfare is zero-sum, civil rights are zero-sum, university admissions are zero-sum, trade is zero-sum, and cultural recognition is zero-sum. Zero-sum games have a very specific meaning but the right uses it as a rhetorical cudgel for people who want to treat every gain by someone else as if it were an injury to themselves.

In game theory, zero-sum mean that the payoffs in add up to zero. If one player or group receives +5, the other receives -5. If one receives +1, the other receives-1. The gains and losses are mathematically opposed within the payoff structure.

Those on the right who use “zero-sum” as a general description of society clearly don’t understand this. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’s office described Thomas Jefferson High School admissions as “the zero-sum game of school admissions,” arguing that pursuit of racial balance meant fewer Asian American students were admitted. But school admissions aren’t zero-sum games. With so many people applying to prestigious schools, it’s difficult to even construct a case where the sum of all applications and admissions is zero. If I apply to 20 schools and get into 5, I’m not somehow in the deep negative. But by using the zero-sum rhetoric, Republicans create a sense of deep loss for those students who don’t get into that specific school. It also implicitly negates any positive effect of broader policies that schools have decided should be incorporated into their admissions decisions given that the net outcome is zero anyway.

Zero-sum games are common in situations where resources are scarce, but they require a tangible harm. Otherwise, the sum isn’t zero. In most cases, if I apply for a grant and don’t get it, I’m only down the time and effort I spent to apply. But in rare cases, someone’s business may depend on such grants. And if there are two applicants and only one grant, the individual not getting the grant may have to shutter their business. This is more reflective of a zero-sum game than most school admissions cases.

Even Senate races are not zero-sum games. If we view the seat as the resource, one person wins that seat. The other person doesn’t have negative seats. The sum of Senate seats in this case is 1. This is a constant sum game, which Republicans seem to confuse with a zero-sum game. Cases of limited resources are very often constant sum games.

Not every game is a constant sum game. The prison’s dilemma, for example, pits two prisoners against each other. If they cooperate with one another (instead of snitching on one another), they will each receive less time than if they snitch. The sum of outcomes is variable in that it is dependent on their decisions.

Zero-sum games are recognized as being much more severe in their consequences than non-zero constant sum games, given the requirement for a negative outcome. So any framing by the right of a specific issue as a “zero-sum game” immediately signals that harm is at stake, often when such harm is not apparent or is clearly exaggerated.

In a Washington Examiner article, Rainer Zitelmann argues that “the Left must quit its zero-sum thinking.” He focuses on income inequality and cites a poll showing that liberals were more likely to agree with the statement, “People can only get rich at the expense of others.” But that is not the same as zero-sum thinking. The wealth gap in the United States has widened sharply over the past few decades: the top 1% now holds a much larger share of wealth, while median earners spend a greater portion of their income on essentials such as housing and groceries than they did a decade ago. For this to be a true zero-sum case, policies such as higher taxes on the wealthy and stronger social safety-net programs would have to produce the same overall benefits while only changing how those benefits are distributed. That is obviously false.

Zitelmann also demonstrates an ignorance of the diminishing marginal utility of income. The Walton family received over $3 billion annually in dividends. Their wealth increases by tens of billions annually from stock appreciation. If every worker split half of that, it would be an average increase of nearly $10k annually, which would have a much greater effect on the wellbeing of the millions of workers and their families than those extra billions would have for the Walton family. Different tax structures and social safety net policies have vastly different impacts on the overall well-being of the country. That’s not zero-sum, and the left is constantly advocating for public policies that would improve the well-being of society, especially when considering the diminishing marginal utility of income. It’s not obvious that  Zitelmann knows what a zero-sum game even is.

The actual zero-sum rhetoric from the right trains people to experience other people’s advancement as dispossession. It turns immigrants into thieves of opportunity, minorities into thieves of recognition, workers into thieves of profit, women into thieves of status, the poor into thieves of tax dollars, and foreign countries into thieves of national greatness. It is a machine for converting ordinary complexity into grievance, and attempting to turn every additional opportunity for an immigrant or minority as an opportunity taken from a white American.

Thomas Hobbes understood conflict, fear, rivalry, and insecurity, but even Hobbes did not reduce political order to a permanent subtraction table. The whole point of the commonwealth is that institutions can transform unregulated conflict into a more stable form of life. Rousseau saw how inequality and social comparison corrupt human relations, but he did not treat every common undertaking as a fixed-pie contest.

In ordinary political rhetoric, “zero-sum” usually means nothing more rigorous than “I think someone else’s gain threatens people like me.” Bounded contests can be exclusive without society being zero-sum. The erroneous assumption on the right is that social life is a closed pot of value in which every improvement for one person must be purchased through an equal injury to someone else.

The world is full of conflict, tradeoffs, losses, rivalries, and tragic constraints. It is also full of invention, cooperation, compounding gains, institutional redesign, and shared goods. Anyone who sees only the first half and calls that realism is either ignorant or disingenuous.