Positive-sum games are the optimal selfish choice

Most of your prosperity depends:

• in the short term, on zero-sum effects
• in the long term, on positive-sum effects

Think about a hairdresser. Today's income depends on whether today's customer enters their shop or their competitor's. But their quality of life mostly depends on society: how productive farmers are, how cheap building homes is, how safe the city is, etc.

After all, the median hairdresser of 2025 has a better quality of life than the hardest-working hairdresser of 1750, even though their job didn't change, because society around them did change.

The point is: positive-sum effects dwarf zero-sum ones over the long term. This is somewhat evident. What's less evident is that the same game can be played with zero-sum or positive-sum tactics.

Think about the competition between companies. Do they compete mostly by focusing on zero-sum tactics or positive-sum ones, such as technical innovation? Even customer acquisition in the absence of innovation can be zero-sum or positive-sum, depending on whether the tactics used increase trust in the product category or decrease it, for example, by lying to customers or breaking their trust.

Or think about how countries fight poverty: do they do it predominantly using zero-sum tactics, such as financial redistribution (which redistributes scarcity), or positive-sum ones, such as building the capacity to produce enough goods and services so that everyone can get some (creating abundance)?

Or think about higher education. Are degrees designed and attended predominantly for their zero-sum benefits (a piece of paper that gets you ahead in a zero-sum job search) or their positive-sum benefits (useful skills that increase the country's prosperity)?

But what determines if society will play a given game using zero-sum or positive-sum tactics? Plenty of factors and incentives matter, sure, but an underrated one is the belief of whether one's prosperity mostly depends on zero-sum or positive-sum effects. If people believe life is mostly zero-sum, they’ll default to zero-sum tactics. If they believe in positive-sum, they’ll invest, cooperate, and innovate. And, perhaps most importantly, treat societal trust, societal infrastructure, and societal productive capacity as a common good, worth building and never worth consuming.

The tricky part is that, indeed, using zero-sum tactics generally gets you ahead in the short term, but if you want your quality of life to grow beyond a certain level, you cannot do without society predominantly using positive-sum tactics.

This is, I believe, the key point we should hammer. It's paramount that people understand that playing positive-sum games is not only the optimal choice from a prosocial perspective but also from a selfish one.