Zero-sum thinking dominates the popular discourse, whether in debates about trade or in complaints about service providers. You just don’t hear people coming out of shops saying, ‘I got a great bargain, but don’t worry, I paid enough to be sure that the shopkeeper feeds his family, too.’ Michael Shermer thinks that is because most of the Stone Age transactions rarely benefited both sides: ‘during our evolutionary tenure, we lived in a zero-sum (win-lose world), in which one person’s gain meant another person’s loss’. This is a shame, because the zero-sum mistake was what made so many -isms of
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