These posts make more sense when read in order.
Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.
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| Down for the count in a zero-sum contest. © John Richard Stephens, 2024. |
Now let’s take a quick look at game theory. In general there are two types of games—zero-sum games and variable-sum games. In zero-sum games, when you win, someone else loses. These are games like chess, tennis, polo, basketball, and demolition derbies. The problem is that many people make the error of applying this to other areas of their lives. Actually, zero-sum games were created to be the way they are and you will rarely find them in other areas of your life.
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| In real life, sometimes everyone wins since it's a variable-sum situation. © John Richard Stephens, 2024. |
Variable-sum games are much more common and considerably more complex. Here players can have opposing interests, but they can also have common interests. In certain circumstances, all players can win to some degree, although usually a player will win in some ways and lose in others. Countries usually try to design treaties to be win-win for each other, although one might gain more than the other. An increase in trade should benefit everyone, yet the people who benefit often see it as negative, thinking that since the other country benefits, that means their country will suffer. That’s not so in general. Both countries can benefit, such as when their GDPs get larger, but on an individual level it can be a zero-sum game if they close down your factory so they can open one in another country. While a treaty can benefit most of the people, there are some who might be hurt.[1]
A more insidious way people mistakenly apply zero-sum ideas to a variable-sum game is when it comes to immigration. People tend to think immigrants are taking away from them, often saying “they are taking our jobs”. That’s zero-sum thinking. First off, most immigrants do jobs that no one else wants to do or help fill labor shortages.[2]
Have you ever tried harvesting grapes? I did for a couple of hours and it wiped me out. Not only were my back and legs killing me, in spite of wearing gloves, my hands had blisters that took a couple of days to heal. I also recall encountering many spiders. It gave me a great appreciation for those who do that work. Most people couldn’t do it even if they wanted to.
What also happens is that immigrants expand the local economy, creating new jobs where there were none before. These people don’t just take. They are going to spend money on food and clothes and all the other things we need to live. Some of them are also going to start businesses, from landscaping to nail salons to corner shops. This benefits not just their community, but those around it. While this can place a greater demand on services, those services are normally able to expand or adjust to meet the demand. People assume they are getting free services and government benefits. Surprise! It’s the large companies and corporations who are getting literally billions of dollars in corporate welfare from taxpayer money, and in spite of their huge profits, most of them don’t pay taxes. I have a large file on this. While it is regularly reported, people don’t seem to notice. What immigrants get is less than a drop in a bucket compared to that.
Even though the government takes money from immigrant’s pay checks for these services, immigrants are much less likely to apply for them—particularly illegal immigrants.
Overall, the evidence shows that immigrants take out much less than they put into the economy.[3] In places where the economy is shrinking, immigrants are needed in order to maintain that area’s level of services and to maintain the quality of life the community is used to. Otherwise, businesses close and the residents are forced to move away to greener pastures.
This has been happening in Japan since the 1990s. As the population continues to shrink, the value of yen keeps falling, but now the U.S. population is also beginning to shrink. One way to expand the economy is to accept more immigrants. Japan currently is resisting doing this and their people are suffering because just about everything costs a lot more. The bottom line is that immigrants are good for the economy.
Then there’s the criminal immigrants myth. Statistics show that between 1980 and 2016 the immigrant population increased while crime stayed the same or dropped in 136 American cities, including the 10 areas with the largest increase in immigrants, such as New York City and Miami which had large decreases in crime. While immigrant populations increased everywhere between those years, only 54 cities had an increase in crime.[4] The two things are clearly unrelated.
Out of any sizable population, there are going some people who commit crimes. If you focus on those, you are emphasizing exceptions, which provides a distorted view.
Sports and games condition people to think in zero-sum terms, making it very difficult to distinguish conditions that are variable sum.
Finally there’s our negativity bias. This is very apparent in the news media where the focus is on the negative news, not the positive. The positive just doesn’t grab our attention like the negative does. We focus on atrocities, disasters, corruption, crime, and what outrages us. That’s what brings in and holds viewers, so that’s what the media gives us. And it’s not just the news and social media, you also find it in fiction and movies. The downside is that it distorts our views of the world. We end up seeing things with a negative distortion and fail to notice the positive. We start to believe the negative aspects are much more widely distributed than they are. This also distorts our perception of risks.
At the extremes of negativity bias are those who are convinced we’re on the verge of an apocalypse. In the 1950s and 1960s people were building backyard fallout shelters far away from likely nuclear targets. In the 1980s they began building survivalist retreats in remote areas to avoid society’s collapse. This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s been going on for more than three thousand years. You can find instances of people claiming the world was coming to an end at least that far back. Negativity bias appears to have a hand in all of this. Those who aren’t at the extremes can still become very cynical or depressed, or both.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t real threats. The threat of nuclear war is very real. And there’s overwhelming objective scientific evidence that our destruction of the environment is increasing extinctions and altering the climate, both of which could very well lead to our own extinction.
As I mentioned, negativity bias also affects our ability to assess risk. We do face many threats, but most of them are unlikely to affect you. People still fear Islamic terrorists, while ignoring the greater threat from other extremist groups. In the United States in 2017, Islamic terrorists killed nine people, while white supremacists killed twice that and anti-government extremists murdered an additional seven. In other words, almost three times as many people in the United States were killed by American terrorists.
Annually in the United States, sharks, bears, and alligators kill about one person each, while around 22 are killed by cows, or by toddlers with guns. You have a 1 in 46,044 chance of dying in a cataclysmic storm, a 1 in 148,756 chance that you’ll be killed in an earthquake or earth movement, and a 1 in 175,803 chance that a flood will get you, but your chance that heart disease will kill you is 1 in 6.
Because we’re bad at assessing risk, we tend to focus on sharks and terrorists, instead of the threats of nuclear war, climate change, and heart disease.
[1] Graham Lawton, “Zero Sum”, New Scientist, no. 3156, December 16, 2017, pp. 28-30, and as “Effortless thinking: Why life is more than a zero-sum game”, December 13, 2017, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631560-400-effortless-thinking-why-life-is-more-than-a-zero-sum-game/.
[2] Krystal D’Costa, “What Are the Jobs That Immigrants Do?”, Scientific American, August 9, 2018, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/what-are-the-jobs-that-immigrants-do/.
But they don’t all stay in low-paying jobs. Christopher Brito, “She came to the U.S. with only $300 and worked housekeeping jobs to pay for school. Now she’s a flight director for NASA’s Mars Perseverance”, CBS News, March 1, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/diana-trujillo-nasa-mars-rover-perseverance/.
[3] Amy Maxmen, “Migrants and refugees are good for economies”, Nature, June 20, 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05507-0, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05507-0.
And Debora Mackenzie, “The truth about migration: How it will reshape our world”, New Scientist, April 6, 2016, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23030680-700-the-truth-about-migration-how-it-will-reshape-our-world/.
[4] Anna Flagg, “The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant”, The New York Times, March 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/30/upshot/crime-immigration-myth.html.
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