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.

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.

-- Quoted from Luca Dellanna --

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