↕ How zero-sum thinking undermines American progress
It's a worldview that can lead one to reject many pro-progress and pro-growth ideas and policies
Quote of the Issue
"200 years ago almost everywhere human beings were comparatively few, poor and at the mercy of the forces of nature, and 200 years from now, we expect, almost everywhere they will be numerous, rich and in control of the forces of nature." - Herman Kahn, The Next 200 Years
Some self promotion: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere. I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! 🆙↗⤴📈
The Essay
↕ How zero-sum thinking undermines American progress
To paraphrase (again) the British politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay: People always think that life has been improving — up until their own time, that is. Somehow they don't expect things to keep getting better in the future. And while it may always seem au courant and clever to think life won’t keep improving … spoiler … it always does. At least for the past quarter millennium or so.
Too many us have never fully digested the lesson of progress — which probably helps explain public opinion numbers like these:
52 percent of Americans say they feel “more concerned than excited” about the increased use of artificial intelligence versus a mere 10 percent who say they are “more excited than concerned,” according to an August survey from the Pew Research Center.
Nearly 70 percent of Americans are now “afraid” of self-driving cars, according to a AAA survey last March.
Just 42 percent of US adults think it is very (13 percent) or somewhat (29 percent) likely that today's youth "will have a better living standard, better homes, a better education and so on" compared to their parents, according to an October 2022 Gallup survey.
Why so glum?
What explains our seemingly inherent and persistent pessimism? A few things come to mind: First, we have a culture — driven by old-school environmentalism and Hollywood — that preaches dystopianism. The past wasn’t as good as you remember and the future will be even worse. Late capitalism and chaotic climate change all the way down. Terminator explains it all.
Second, our brains seem built for negativity. Behavioral economics suggests a variety of relevant cognitive quirks such as loss aversion (people tend to weigh losses more heavily than gains), negativity bias (people tend to give more attention to negative information than positive information), and temporal discounting (people tend to value rewards and punishments that are immediate more than those that are delayed). We’re always fighting our own downbeat nature.
The past isn’t even the past
Then there’s a third possible explanation, as least as it concerns Americans, put forward in a new NBER working paper, “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides” by economists Sahil Chinoy (Harvard University), Nathan Nunn (Vancouver School of Economics), Sandra Sequeira (London School of Economics), and Stefanie Stantcheva (Harvard University), or CNSS.
A prevalence of zero-sum thinking — the reflexive view that gains for some necessarily mean losses for others — is a key element of what I call Down Wing thinking. As I explain in my forthcoming book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, Down Wing thinking is typically marked by a pessimistic and nostalgic worldview that resists change and fears the future. (Up Wing thinking, by contrast, posits that we have it in our power to make tomorrow better than today. It’s very Macaulay-esque.)
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