The Zero-Sum Delusion
The most dangerous idea in the world today isn't a virus or a weapon; it’s a math error. Specifically, it’s the belief that for me to win, you must lose. This "zero-sum" mindset is currently liquidating decades of compounding progress in global health, trade, and social trust. This week, we look at why we are wired to think this way, why "Us First" usually leads to "Nobody Wins," and why even a selfish prig should be a humanitarian.
Research Roundup
We Are Thinking Like Children
Here's a finding that should be pinned to every policy briefing room in Washington: zero-sum thinking is not a sign of tough-minded realism. It's a cognitive bias and we're getting worse at it.
A study of over 200,000 people across multiple datasets found 2 things worth considering. First, “older people hold fewer zero-sum beliefs than younger” people. Second—the uncomfortable one—”today's young generation” is more zero-sum than previous generations were at the same age. This isn't just an age effect. It's a generational regression.
Zero-sum beliefs correlate with “perceiving resources as more scarce” than they actually are, and with lower "positive thinking", not in the self-help sense but in the technical sense of the capacity to model growth, surplus, and mutual gain. When you view the world through a zero-sum lens, you stop looking for positive-sum moves and start looking for someone from whom to take. The pie feels fixed, so you stop baking, and eventually the pie actually does shrink. The belief manufactures the reality.
We've mistaken a failure of imagination for strategic sophistication. That's not realism. That's adolescence.
The Prosocial Muscle
Politicians love framing global generosity as a resource trade-off: every dollar spent on "them" is a dollar not spent on "us." It's rhetorically tidy. It's also empirically false.
Across “743,402 individuals in 121 societies”, playing diverse economic games—”prisoner’s dilemmas, public good dilemmas, dictator games”—and survey measures of trust and tolerance reveals a “robust positive relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality”. People who are kind to their own group tend to be the same people who are kind to outsiders. The relationship holds across every society studied, every group definition tested, every measure used.
Prosociality isn't a finite bucket. It's a muscle. The more a society exercises it—toward neighbors, toward strangers, toward the abstractions of "other countries"—the more of it there is. The communities that give most generously to the world are, systematically, the same communities that take the best care of each other.
The Asshole’s Guide to Altruism
Let's say, for the sake of argument, you don't care about other people. You’d sacrifice a 1000 lives to save your own. You are, in the technical sense, a selfish asshole. Does the math still say you should fund global health? Yes. Emphatically yes.
A game-theoretic model of epidemic behavior asked a precise question: how much do you have to value other people's lives for self-protective collective action — social distancing, vaccination, stopping an outbreak at the source — to be individually rational? The answer is almost nothing. Even individuals who value their own life at the equivalent of “100,000 others” will rationally choose to self-isolate or invest in stopping an infection, because the expected cost of a chain of infections that eventually circles back to them exceeds the cost of early intervention.
This is the ultimate selfish case for altruism. You don't have to be a saint to care about a child dying every 40 seconds from a preventable disease. You just have to be able to count. Her death is a data point in a system that doesn't respect borders. Whether it surfaces as an emergent pathogen, a collapsed supply chain, or a fragile state that becomes a failed one, the "outgroup" has a reliable tendency to send you the invoice eventually. The only question is whether you paid the cheap rate upfront or the catastrophic rate later.
The math is not subtle. We just refuse to do it.
Media Mentions
I had 2 separate articles go #1 last week: one @CNBC and one @Fast Company
But many readers didn’t seem to know, both were excerpts from different chapters in my new book 𝑹𝒐𝒃𝒐𝒕-𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒐𝒇: “When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People.”
I’m thrilled you loved the articles—go read the book!
CNBC Make It: “I’m a neuroscientist. Stop teaching kids skills that will be obsolete in a few years—how I’m raising kids AI can’t replace.”
Fast Company, “The Reskillig Delution”
There’s also been love for the much more niche @Private Company Directors: "AI, Boards, and the Efficiency Trap"
SciFi, Fantasy, & Me
𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆: The Expanse. If you want to understand what zero-sum thinking does to a civilization at scale, The Expanse is the most rigorous tutorial available.
Set in a future where humanity has colonized the solar system, the show depicts 3 factions—Earth, Mars, and the Belters who mine the asteroid belt—locked in a hyper-violent struggle over air and water. Every faction pursues tactically rational moves. Every faction accelerates toward collective extinction. Martian separatists are willing to destroy the very terraforming technology that could make their planet habitable, just to deny Earth a strategic advantage. That's not a cartoon villain's logic. That's the precise, predictable outcome of zero-sum framing applied to a complex dynamical system.
The Expanse is brilliant because it doesn't moralize. It models. It shows, in meticulous narrative detail, how "rational" short-term defection produces "irrational" long-term catastrophe — and how the only characters who manage to stabilize the system are the ones who grasp, usually too late, that "them" is just "us" we haven't met yet.
It's science fiction. It's also a case study in exactly what the three papers above are warning us about.
Stage & Screen
- April 14, Remote: How is AI changing business in Australia?
- April 14, Seattle: I'll be keynoting at the AACSB Business School Conference.
- April 16, NYC: A private event in Brooklyn. The topic is AI, but I'll make it about us.
- April 29, Paraguay: Singularity University is going to Asuncion!
- May 12, Online: I'll be reading from Robot-Proof for the The Library Speakers Consortium.
- May 12, SF: We'll talk about collective intelligence, the neuroscience of trust, and how dumb I have to be to be launching my 13th company.
- May 14, Miami: TEDxMiami
- June 9-10, London: London Tech Week!
- June 11, Luxembourg: How Europe (and even some of it smallest states) compete and grow in a trade environment dominated by zero-sum leaders
- June 12, Denver: GlobalMindEd
- June 18, Stockholm: The Smartest Thing on the Planet: Hybrid Intelligence
- October, Toronto: The Future of Work...in the Future