Eli5 Can someone explain zero sum games and how they apply to our daily lives clearly?
In: Economics
A zero sum “game” is one where if you sum up the wins and loses of the “players” you end up with 0.
This has the consequence that 1 player can’t gain without the other player losing. And an example of that would be a fixed amount of stuff. Like idk paintings by a famous painter who’s dead. As he’s dead the amount of his pictures is limited and doesn’t increase, so the only way to get another painting is to get it from another person. So if you track the amount of paintings, they remain constant.
As a consequence of that zero-sum games tend to be more on the competitive ego-centristic side and depending on the resource in question that can lead to massive conflict. Though often things aren’t zero-sum games because you can produce more of a thing or find substitutes or whatnot.
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