I live in New York City, which fashions itself as many things: the financial capital of the world, the media capital of the world, and obviously, the bagel capital of the world. But I like to think of it as something else as well: the zero-sum capital of the world. Or at least, the US.

The essential fact of life here is that more people want to live in New York than there are homes that we allow to exist. New Yorkers talk about the competition for apartments — or for slots in decent schools or tables at decent restaurants or virtually anything save tickets to your friend’s improv show — as if it is a Hobbesian war of all against all.

It’s not just New York. Once you start looking for that intuition, you see it everywhere. In arguments about immigration (“they’re taking our jobs”), housing (“we’re full”), college admissions, culture war skirmishes over who gets “replaced” and who gets “canceled,” the underlying picture is the same: If some group advances, someone else has to lose.

Social scientists have a name for this: zero-sum thinking, which is the belief that when one individual or group gains, it’s usually coming at the expense of others. There’s growing evidence that this mindset is now one of the quiet engines of political conflict in the US.

That sounds like bad news. But there’s a more hopeful way to read this research: Zero-sum thinking is not a fixed feature of human nature. It responds to growth, to better institutions, and to the stories we tell about the economy.

And right now, our stories are more zero-sum than they should be.

We grew up in a zero-sum world. Then something weird happened

At some level, zero-sum thinking is understandable. For most of human history, it was basically correct, as the chart below demonstrates.

Anthropologist George Foster argued that many peasant communities were organized around an “image of limited good”: land, wealth, status, even good luck were assumed to exist in fixed amounts, so any gain for one person was understood as a loss for someone else. The last two centuries of industrialization and technological innovation broke that logic; for the first time in history, large societies could become much richer........

© Vox