Home » Mind & Soul » Frontier Theory » The Zero-Sum Syndrome

The Zero-Sum Syndrome

© Larry Winn

Your boss gets a budget for raises that represents a fixed percentage for everyone in the department. It's her call who gets what, and the increase is not uniformly distributed. If you knew about this in advance, would you feel cherished because of your higher-than-average raise? Would you grumble your resentment at a lower one? Perhaps you would fret that your bounty comes at the expense of another employee. That's why you may not know.

Your company has decreed that the department "head count" remain constant. Nevertheless, your boss needs to hire someone with a specific skill set. He figures he can get another employee to double up on what you do. Good bye.

The university you wish to attend has an affirmative action policy. There are only so many openings. Your qualifications are top-drawer, but you do not belong to a protected group. You get a skinny envelope of regrets in the mail.

As a director of marketing for a major widget manufacturing company, you know that you are looking at a market of fixed size. There are three other widget manufacturers in this country and a half-dozen overseas. You have tried to penetrate some of the foreign markets, but that turf is protected for native widget manufacturers. Your only option for future growth is to increase your market share. By definition, that means another company has to lose share.

Your income, your job security, your ability to secure an education for yourself and your children, your success in the marketplace are all profoundly affected by conditions which, in the absence of a frontier, have become brutally competitive.

What's wrong? Nothing. This is zero-sum economics. Enclosure brings it. (For a detailed explanation of enclosure, see First Principles.) In its strictest sense, the zero-sum game is defined by the sum of wins and losses. If you add them up, you get zero. There are no winners without losers.

Al Gore, in his 1991 book Earth in the Balance, proposes a global Marshall Plan that would have the developed countries pay for population control, deployment of environmentally benign technologies and enforcement of social justice, among other goals. Gore blames the world's current ecological predicament on what he calls our "addiction" to consumption, which amplifies the impact of industrialized populations on the environment. In a perfect example of zero-sum thinking, he wants to use the Marshall Plan mechanism to transfer wealth from the First World to the Third in an attempt to ease the burden on a finite resource.

The copyright of the article The Zero-Sum Syndrome in Frontier Theory is owned by . Permission to republish The Zero-Sum Syndrome in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.