[mistermann]

> Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game

Is it not true that when the books are balanced at the end of a period, wealth resulting from economic activity within the period ends up distributed among the public such that not every person does not end up with an identical amount? If so, is it possible to state this without simultaneously believing that economics is a zero-sum game?

[wizzwizz4]

If I set fire to the fields, there is less wealth. Therefore, it's not zero-sum.

A zero-sum game is one in which no strategy changes the amount of wealth available. There are clearly strategies that create or destroy wealth. Therefore, it's not a zero-sum game.

(This does not imply that every player has ever-increasing wealth each turn.)

[mistermann]

I did not assert that wealth is a zero sum game, I was replying to this:

>> Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence,"

"economics is not zero sum game", "correlation != causation", etc - certain ideas seem to be kind of like catnip for humans.

[wizzwizz4]

Eliezer Yudkowsky calls these “semantic stop signs”: https://www.readthesequences.com/Semantic-Stopsigns

(The actual phrase comes from Jonathan Wallace, near as I can tell, but he was using it to talk about religion, not thinking in general.)

[jordan_curve]

If by catnip, you mean fundamental concepts that are routinely not understood, then yes.

[mistermann]

No, more like once the ideas are learned, they seem to excite the mind once a person is (or perceives to be) in the presence of an example. A loose variation of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon perhaps.

It was not that long ago (a year or so? Just when the trade war rhetoric with China was heating up) when "lolololll, economics is not a zero sum game!!!" seemed to be a satisfactory dismissal of Trump's issues with China's trade practices, both in the media and in forums. Shortly after, when the various media outlets seemed to all have a spontaneous change of heart on the matter and get onto the same page of noticing that there actually is a fair amount of complexity involved in international trade, and since then I've read very little "zero-sum" talk on the matter. Perhaps a media blitz on this issue might help illuminate more of the unseen complexity in this situation, although that scenario seems a bit less likely to me.