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One
underlying belief I encounter quite often in one form or another
is the notion that life is a zero-sum game—more specifically,
that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world, and for one
person to gain, another must necessarily lose. This sounds
plausible at first hearing since, barring the odd hunk of rock
from outer space, there is indeed a fixed amount of stuff
on planet Earth. We can move it around and recombine it in
different ways, but we can't create any more of it ex nihilo.
Even the amount of energy coming in from the sun is largely
balanced out by the amount of energy being radiated back into
space. Of course, we worry that this balance has been
compromised by human activity, and that catastrophic warming
will be our punishment, but that's a different story.
The primary response to
the belief that life is a zero-sum game is to emphasize that
there is not a fixed quantity of wealth in the world—that
wealth is, in fact, created. We may only be moving stuff around
and recombining it, but that in itself constitutes wealth
creation. The black gunk that is buried beneath ground or sea is
worth nothing to us until it has been excavated and refined, and
until we have learned how to release its high energy content.
Iron ore is much more valuable once it has been melted down,
mixed with other metals, and shaped into girders, rails, trains,
coils, hammers, nails, pistons, internal combustion engines, and
a thousand other tools. Trees get transformed into houses and
books, and we are better off than we were before. And the sun's
energy, from the time it enters our atmosphere to the time it
leaves, actually does a lot of work, driving the hydrologic
cycle and turning carbon dioxide and water into sugar. With a
little added human ingenuity—the ultimate resource, according to
the late Julian Simon—we can harness the sun's energy to do a
whole lot more, too.
In its crudest form, the notion that life is a zero-sum game is
a literal superstition. We all know someone who actually
believes that if something good happens to him, something bad
will follow to balance it out. For one reason or another, some
people don't believe they deserve to be happy, and so actually
feel uncomfortable when something good happens to them. They may
therefore sabotage themselves in order to restore what they see
as the proper balance, undermining their chances at a promotion
or hobbling a new and promising relationship. Some people simply
fear the unknown, and take steps, consciously and not-so-consciously,
to keep everything just so.
It is hardly much more
realistic, however, to look at a voluntary market exchange and
think that one party is profiting while the other is being duped.
It does happen from time to time, sure, but swindlers are
typically done in by their own bad reputations and lose out to
more scrupulous competitors. If both parties do not expect to
gain from a transaction, why would they voluntarily take part in
it? If their expectations were not met most of the time, why
would they keep voluntarily transacting? And yet, many continue
to believe that in a (relatively) free and open marketplace, if
a company gets rich, it is surely because it has ripped off its
customers. The grain of truth that makes this flawed
interpretation seem plausible is that some companies
curry favour with governments, hence circumventing the need to
compete fairly for consumers' dollars.
Along a similar vein,
some people imagine that today's rich nations got rich at the
expense of those nations that remain poor to this day. Again,
there is a grain of truth that gives this argument its force.
The governments of some powerful nations and their cronies have
exploited and continue to exploit people in poorer, weaker
nations, and in the past, this was indeed the primary way some
predatory nations got rich. Still, it doesn't take a
libertarian to see the flaw in this line of thinking. No less an
advocate of redistribution on a planetary scale than Jeffrey
Sachs skewers the notion that today's rich got rich by stealing
from the poor. In The End of Poverty, he writes, "This
interpretation of events would be plausible if gross world
product had remained roughly constant, with a rising share going
to the powerful regions and a declining share going to the
poorer regions. However, this is not at all what happened."
Instead, Sachs tells us, in the last two hundred years, "Gross
world product rose nearly fiftyfold." If it were only, or even
primarily, a matter of exploitation, where would all of that
extra wealth have come from? Sachs concludes, "The key fact of
modern times is not the transfer of income from one
region to another, by force or otherwise, but rather the overall
increase in world income, but at a different rate in
different regions." (Emphasis in original.)
On a cosmic level, our
sun will eventually burn itself out, but in the intervening four
or five billion years, clearly, life on Earth is not a zero-sum
game. Some aspects of life, it is true, are zero- or even
negative-sum games. War, for instance, produces very few
winners, and total losses typically far outweigh total gains.
But other aspects of life, for example voluntary exchanges, are
positive-sum games, in which both parties benefit. The fact that
there are some cheaters out there should not be allowed to
obscure this important fact.
Come to think of it,
maybe the fear of catastrophic global warming is not so
different a story after all. Maybe it bears some relation to
that crudest form of zero-sum thinking: that if something good
happens, something bad is sure to follow. We will be punished,
think the doom mongers, not for our failures, but for our
successes, because they reveal our arrogance in thinking that we
can control nature—or should I say, Nature. Maybe global warming
is a real and serious problem. I personally think the jury is
still out on that one. But the idea that we are destroying Gaia
and that she will take her revenge on us is a primitivist,
superstitious, zero-sum fear that we would do well to jettison
to the junk pile of history where such intellectual landfill
belongs.
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