Zero-sum game

A social or economic situation where someone's gain is at the expense of another person.

A zero-sum game is one where someone gains only at the expense of another. Someone’s larger slice of cake means another person gets a smaller slice. A stagnant economy is a classic example of a zero-sum game. Someone’s pay rise has to come at someone else’s expense – usually their employer’s profits and investable funds.

A positive-sum game is where enough surplus is being produced for everyone to gain. A growing economy can create win-win possibilities. All at the same time a taxpayer can see his disposable income rise, the government can spend more money on public services and corporate profits can increase.

Quotations from Bill Clinton and Edward Heath

“Martin Luther King said the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. [It's] sort of a reverse social Darwinism: The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win-win solutions instead of win-lose solutions.... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well - so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other.”

- Bill Clinton, Wired magazine, December 2000

Conservativehome.com won’t make a habit of quoting America’s disgraced 42nd President but this fiscal conservative understood the importance of economic expansion. Another person who won’t feature much on this site is Edward Heath but he understood the danger of zero-sum games, too. In 1973, when history’s latest wave of ‘green fascists’ were seeking an economic standstill, Britain’s former Prime Minister warned:

"The alternative to expansion is not, as some occasionally seem to suppose, an England of quiet market towns linked only by steam trains puffing slowly and peacefully through green meadows. The alternative is slums, dangerous roads, old factories, cramped schools, stunted lives.”

'Bigger cake economics' stands at the heart of progressive economic thinking.

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