Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country

I live in New York City, which fashions itself as many things: the financial capital of the world, the media capital of the world, and obviously, the bagel capital of the world. But I like to think of it as something else as well: the zero-sum capital of the world. Or at least, the US.

The essential fact of life here is that more people want to live in New York than there are homes that we allow to exist. New Yorkers talk about the competition for apartments — or for slots in decent schools or tables at decent restaurants or virtually anything save tickets to your friend’s improv show — as if it is a Hobbesian war of all against all.

It’s not just New York. Once you start looking for that intuition, you see it everywhere. In arguments about immigration (“they’re taking our jobs”), housing (“we’re full”), college admissions, culture war skirmishes over who gets “replaced” and who gets “canceled,” the underlying picture is the same: If some group advances, someone else has to lose.

Social scientists have a name for this: zero-sum thinking, which is the belief that when one individual or group gains, it’s usually coming at the expense of others. There’s growing evidence that this mindset is now one of the quiet engines of political conflict in the US.

That sounds like bad news. But there’s a more hopeful way to read this research: Zero-sum thinking is not a fixed feature of human nature. It responds to growth, to better institutions, and to the stories we tell about the economy.

And right now, our stories are more zero-sum than they should be.

We grew up in a zero-sum world. Then something weird happened

At some level, zero-sum thinking is understandable. For most of human history, it was basically correct, as the chart below demonstrates.

Anthropologist George Foster argued that many peasant communities were organized around an “image of limited good”: land, wealth, status, even good luck were assumed to exist in fixed amounts, so any gain for one person was understood as a loss for someone else. The last two centuries of industrialization and technological innovation broke that logic; for the first time in history, large societies could become much richer over time, and most people’s material standard of living could rise together.

In 2015, researcher Joanna Różycka-Tran and her colleagues developed a scale called “Belief in a Zero-Sum Game,” and administered it in 37 countries. They found big variation: Some societies strongly endorse the idea that social life is win-lose, others much less so. High zero-sum scores tend to show up in places like Angola or Mexico with histories of conflict, instability, and low growth — the kinds of conditions where the world really does feel like a fixed pie.

What zero-sum thinking feels like in America

But what about the US, the richest country to ever exist? A recent paper by economists Sahil Chinoy and his colleagues tries to measure zero-sum thinking in the US today and link it to politics. They surveyed more than 20,000 Americans, asking how strongly they agreed with statements like “In the economy, when some people become rich, it must be at the expense of others.”

A few key patterns jump out from their data. Zero-sum beliefs tend to stay consistent across different subjects: people who see race relations as zero-sum also tend to see economic competition and immigration that way, suggesting this is more of a general worldview than a narrow, considered opinion on any one issue. Respondents who score higher on zero-sum thinking are more supportive of redistribution and affirmative action and more skeptical of immigration, even after you account for where they fall on the usual left-right ideological spectrum.

When the authors look across countries, they find that people who experienced faster economic growth between ages 18 and 25 are significantly less zero-sum decades later — a hint that maturing in an era of abundance, or the lack of it, leaves a lasting mark on how we think politics and the economy work. And that share appears to be growing.

Psychologist Shai Davidai recently ran 10 studies with more than 3,600 participants and found that when people perceive economic inequality as high — when the gap between rich and poor feels large, like, I don’t know, in New York City — they become more likely to see success as zero-sum.

All this gets multiplied by living through a “vibecession”: years of headlines about economic crises layered on top of real problems in housing, childcare, and status competition for what feels like a fixed or shrinking number of elite slots. It’s not hard to see how you get a generation that experiences the economy less as “how do we grow the pie?” and more as “which group stole my slice?”

Why zero-sum thinking is bad for both the economy and fairness

Zero-sum thinking seems like it should go hand-in-hand with egalitarian politics. If you believe the rich got rich by taking from everyone else, you’re probably more open to taxes and redistribution. And the data suggests that’s broadly true: More zero-sum respondents are more supportive of economic and power redistribution.

At the same time, however, many of the same respondents are more skeptical of immigration and other policies that economists see as pro-growth, like free trade. That may be the biggest danger of a politics that leans too hard on zero-sum intuitions: it encourages us to fight over the division of the current pie at the expense of policies that would expand it.

If you’re convinced the pie is fixed, you’ll resist immigration, block new housing, and treat technological progress as a threat rather than a source of abundance — even when those are exactly the changes that would create more opportunity for everyone.

In a genuinely stagnant, low-growth world, this might be rational. But we are on the cusp of technologies — from AI to cheap clean energy — that could dramatically increase the size of the pie. Seeing that future through a zero-sum lens is like inheriting a pizza place and using it only to argue over the last slice of yesterday’s pie. You need more pie!

Right now — as you will read again and again and again — America is in the grip of an affordability crisis. Putting aside the fact that our idea of what we should be able to “afford” has inflated along with prices and wages over the years, there’s no doubt that the anger is very real, and that whichever party can best seize on the issue stands to win next November.

But what we think of as an affordability crisis is really a growth crisis. Not in the narrow sense that GDP isn’t ticking up — it is — but in the sense that the parts of life people most viscerally care about, like housing and childcare and health care and college, are the parts where we’ve done the least to increase supply and productivity. Of course people start to think in zero-sum terms if the things they need most are rationed rather than expanded.

That’s why growth matters so much more than a quarterly GDP number. When societies actually deliver sustained, broad-based gains in living standards, people learn, from experience, that it is possible for many groups to move forward at once. Generations that came of age in eras of strong growth really are less zero-sum decades late. Growth doesn’t magically erase inequality or status competition, but it gives politics room to breathe.

A country that builds more housing, that uses technology to make essentials cheaper instead of just shinier, that treats immigration and innovation as ways to enlarge the pie rather than carve it up differently, is a country where zero-sum thinking slowly loses its grip.

New York will probably always feel a little like the zero-sum capital of the world; that’s why if you make it here, you can make it anywhere. But if we can recognize how much of that scarcity is manmade, the easier it becomes to imagine a politics organized around adding slices to the pie, not just fighting over the last piece.

This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

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