Stefanie Stantcheva: To understand America today, study the zero-sum mindset

6 PaulHoule 4 7/15/2025, 1:30:28 AM economist.com ↗

Comments (4)

PaulHoule · 11h ago
Saw this in the latest Economist, archived: https://archive.ph/fW8sW
082349872349872 · 4h ago
Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me: when zero-sum believers are in power, they tend to make the world less positive-sum, and when positive-sum believers are in power, they tend to make the world more positive-sum. (Thankfully, I don't live in a polity with an electorate attracted even to negative-sum believers.)

aside: speaking of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44369612 , what do you think of the syntax-as-data in https://rhombus-lang.org ? (end of aside)

gsf_emergency_2 · 2h ago
As summarized below (by a west for a west), local instability(polarization) can avert global conflict :)

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/taiwans-polarised-politics...

>believers

To patch Nietzsche: negative sum [actions] are exceedingly rare from individuals, but from [corporations] they are de rigueur

It's great that sama believes in positive sum, but even better(?) that he mostly works alone-- AFAIUI he hasn't even explained the Utopic vision to his uh compadres.. Maybe not enough (guided) psilocybe sessions.. (sorry about the inadvertent reference to Silicon Valley

https://youtu.be/2GgHaFvmY3s )

gsf_emergency_2 · 11h ago
Center left like sama can hijack this concept using the argument " billionaires provide value"

I don't know how to counter that. Maybe help swing-voters see some of the immediate and/or community benefits from legal immigration?