Who's Really Zero-Sum?

One criticism you can count on hearing any time a leftist or progressive suggests any even slightly ambitious economic agenda is that the left is mired in “zero-sum thinking.” The left simply doesn’t understand, at a fundamental level, that economic activity is positive-sum—the poor benefit from economic growth and innovation, even if the rich reap more. Either that or leftists are so driven by envy of the wealthy that they knowingly prefer a poorer world to one that allows a “filthy rich” class.

You can find this discourse every day on Al Gore’s Internet, but it swelled most recently with the stunning upset campaign for New York City mayor by socialist Zohran Mamdani. Before that there was the discourse surrounding the wealth taxes proposed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (And let’s not forget Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Tax the Rich” fashion sense.) But this criticism is always lurking under the surface of rhetoric about “tax and spend Democrats” and the specter of socialism peeking from behind the neoliberal visage of Barack Obama and the Clintons.

Most recently we have seen Reihan Salam, president of the hard-right Manhattan Institute and boss of Chris “MAGA Goebbels” Rufo, take to the Wall Street Journal to assert the “zero-sum radicalism” of Mamdani. I say “assert” because he presents no argument for how Mamdani’s politics manifest zerosumness. Salam mentions only two policies—free buses and government-owned apartments—neither of which is self-evidently zero-sum, and gestures to Mamdani’s “billionaire-bashing.”

Michael Strain, the Director of Economic Policy Studies at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute, took issue with Mamdani’s statement that “we should not have billionaires.” He cited this in an argument in the Financial Times as evidence of Mamdani’s “zero-sum thinking.” To Strain, billionaires make everyone wealthier with their innovations, and if you don’t understand that, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.

Even MAGA skeptics trot out this logic. Jonah Goldberg, editor of the anti-Trump conservative The Dispatch, recently invited co-founder of the center-left Center for New Liberalism (and Liberal Currents contributor) Jeremiah Johnson to bemoan the fate of New York City falling victim to Mamdani’s democratic socialism. Here is Goldberg,

Inherent in the term ‘wealth distribution’ is the word ‘distribution,’ which assumes a static pie kind of thing, right? It says … we only have so many Twix bars and these guys are getting too many of them and these people are getting too few of them. And that’s not actually how wealth works. Progressives would do themselves a lot of favors if they started talking about wealth creation rather than wealth redistribution.

But what if I told you that it isn’t the political left that is held captive by a zero-sum mentality, but the political right.

Zerosumness, nonzerosumness

How about a quick refresher on just what “zero-sum” means. An interaction or “game” is zero-sum when the spoils at stake are finite and static, like cutting slices of a pie. Or if you’re stranded on a lifeboat with another person: there’s only so much water and food. What you gain necessarily comes at the expense of the other parties involved. In zero-sum situations, the interests of the parties are misaligned.

A positive-sum game, interaction, or exchange, is one in which the spoils are not static, but can at least potentially grow. Economists talk about gains from trade because in an ordinary market interaction where both parties are willing and happy to trade what they have for what the other has, both parties become better off. Innovation offers another positive-sum dynamic: when we can create more with less than we needed before, then we gain at nobody else’s expense. In a positive-sum game, the interests of the parties are aligned.

Negative-sum games are also possible, and they can be cheerier than they sound. Here the spoils are guaranteed to be lower at the end than what we start with. There will be pain. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to stall and reverse climate change is a real world example. Everyone has to cut back on pollution. While this can lead to a scramble for advantage in a world of depleting value, it’s also possible to be equitable about the sacrifices and to coordinate to limit overall losses. In negative-sum games, the interests of the parties can be aligned or misaligned.

One last tricky bit. Even in non-zero sum interactions, there are domains of zerosumness. You and the homeowner both benefit (interests aligned, positive-sum) when they sell you a house. But there is some significant margin of price where you’re both willing to close the deal. Within this margin, the homeowner wants to extract as much profit from you as possible, and you want to pay as little as possible, and the haggle ensues (interests diverged, zero-sum). 

Is the zero sum in the room with us right now?

What about free buses, publicly funded owned apartment complexes, or a handful of public option grocery stores is zero-sum? We need buses, apartments, and grocery stores, and someone has to own and operate these, so in that sense there is, if you squint, some zero-sum exclusion going on. But this is no different from the zerosumness of property rights generally, and we tend to think property rights secure a broader economic positive sum. But there is no sense in which free buses and public option apartments or grocery stores imply restricting the number of buses (and other modes of transit), restricting the housing supply (indeed Mamdani advocates expanding the housing supply), or monopolizing the grocery market so that mom-and-pop grocers and private chain stores are forbidden.

Nor are liberal social policies typically zero-sum. We all pay taxes in order to receive the security of assistance in time of need, whether that is welfare or healthcare. Public education means every child is afforded the skills and socialization to thrive in society. Subsidized childcare makes it possible for parents to participate more productively in the labor market. Carbon taxes and public investments in renewable energy and green infrastructure help us coordinate our economic activities against the negative-sum threats of climate change.

In all these cases, there are some winners and some losers. Not everyone will need the same amount of healthcare or income assistance. Not everyone has a child to benefit from public education or childcare. On the other hand, childfree individuals still benefit from a more educated populace and from social reproduction. These are merely the little pockets of zerosumness in overall non-zero sum arrangements. Also known as living in a society.

But what about taxing billionaires? Surely taxing billionaires—taking from some people to pay for services for others—must be zero-sum? And Mamdani says billionaires shouldn’t even exist. There’s nothing more zero-sum than an existential threat. Right?

Perhaps we are locked in a zero-sum, existential struggle with the billionaire class. But in this struggle between zero-sum and non-zero-sum worldviews, it is the billionaires who are on the side of zerosumness and the closed society. 

Fewer billionaires, more millionaires

Goldberg’s comment is instructive. To him, paying attention to the distribution of wealth in society at all points to a zero-sum mindset. Only wealth creation matters. There is also an apparent baked-in assumption in Goldberg, Johnson, and Strain’s comments that inequality and wealth are joined at the hip, both the necessary product of positive-sum economics. 

Yet in the ancien régime, landowning aristocrats owned virtually all the wealth in society, while the peasants and the urban poor languished. Or in the American antebellum south, slaves were forced to work in bondage for no pay at all. Wealth was produced in both cases, but it was hoarded by the powerful. Do we really want to say only creation matters and not distribution?

The point is that the existence of great wealth concentrated in a few hands is perfectly consistent with a zero-sum society in which wealth is produced by some and extracted by the powerful for their own benefit. These are the “extractive institutions” that Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue are Why Nations Fail.

In America, we’ve seen the ultrawealthy reap disproportionate gains from economic growth, all while enjoying a rigged tax structure in which they pay a lower effective tax rate than their employees. The sums are staggering. There is something of an inevitability to this, a tendency of human nature to jealously guard the powers and privileges we have against attack, whether this comes in the form of NIMBYism or landed nobility or wages of whiteness. It’s far from obvious that the resulting inequality is positive-sum. Indeed, some economic evidence suggests that stark inequality hobbles economic growth. This should surprise no one. An economy of rigid rents and privileges prevents many minds from fully developing and exercising their creative powers. Just as power tends to corrupt, extreme advantage tends to harden into zero-sum aristocracy. 

This tendency to pull up the ladder behind you and hobble social mobility is a zero-sum impulse arising from the fact that status and power are themselves zero-sum, even if they were attained by positive-sum means. This can be non-ideological, as when Jamie Dimon and other basic billionaire bankers throw in with Trump for the sake of tax cuts, or when Mark Zuckerberg aligns with Trump after having made progressive noises in the past because he simply has no political principles and wants to follow which way the political winds are blowing. 

But in many cases these billionaires have taken overtly ideological turns to profoundly zero-sum politics. Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel have both endorsed the neofeudal, neomonarchical ideas of Curtis Yarvin. Again, feudalism is a closed society with zerosumness at its heart. Andreessen implicitly objects to gains of the Civil Rights Movement, and wants to stopper the public funding of science that so benefited him. Thiel has expressed skepticism that democracy is compatible with freedom, and suggested that women vote against liberty. He has also bankrolled MAGA candidates. 

The zerosumness of Elon Musk hardly needs elaboration. His pet DOGE has been a wrecking ball of public institutions, almost certainly primarily for the benefit of his own companies. Before DOGE, he used his massive wealth to seize Twitter, a valuable Internet public space, to turn it into a virtual nazi bar. His is the zerosumness of the arsonist. And if his Hitlergrüße and “Mecha Hitler” pet AI are any indication, he’s something very close to a literal Nazi. Nazism, some would argue, is a particularly zero-sum Weltanschauung.

The hijacking of “zero-sum”

It’s worth stepping back to look at the political right and left from the lenses of zerosumness and nonzerosumness. In America, the political right has been completely dominated by MAGA, a movement characterized by personalist authoritarianism (political authority resides not the constitution or representative government, but the whims of a the great leader, Trump); patriarchy and misogyny (witness the glorification of rapists and pedophiles and the “your body, my choice” glee with which MAGA assaults women’s reproductive freedom); anti-queer bigotry (see the cruelty of the campaign to remove trans people from public life); racism (everything from the bad faith assaults on DEI to remove blacks and other racial minorities from public universities and high profile positions to the race-based kidnapping and deportation of potentially millions of human beings from their lives and homes); and a return to imperialistic military foreign policy and beggar-thy-neighbor tariff policies.

Everything about the MAGA worldview revolves around the ideas that white men deserve dominion over women and racialized groups (especially blacks), immigrants and foreigners generally are a threat, and gender-sexual minorities are a poison to society that must be removed. These people blind themselves even to the positive-sum benefits of public health. There is no better example out of any textbook of ideological zerosumness.

By contrast, the alleged zerosumness of the socialist is that they don’t understand the positive sums of economic exchange, but these aren’t anti-market central planners. All politically relevant socialists in America are liberal socialists who in effect (if not always in rhetoric) want to improve markets so as to ensure their benefits are shared by all. “We can all benefit” is positive-sum!

The alleged zerosumness of the woke is that they dare to suggest white men still enjoy unjust advantages. Intersectionality is often demonized as a zero-sum mentality, but the whole point of intersectionality is that the best way to ensure that all of us prosper in freedom is by making sure the most disadvantaged among us are free and happy. Freedom effervesces from the bottom up—again, non-zero!

The contrast with liberals, the left, and the woke is stark. The vision is of a pluralistic society in which people of all different races, faiths, creeds, sexualities, and places of origin can live together and prosper in peace. We can even all get rich—the lines can keep going up. The zero-sum dangers of concentrated wealth have no bearing on broad-based enrichment. Millions for the many, not billions for the few. Public institutions, public infrastructure, and public investment in science, education, and health all aim to secure the blessings of freedom and prosperity for everyone. Every. Single. Person. 

As is so often the case with insults hurled at liberals, the charge of zerosumness is one of rightwing projection.