Zero Sum Quotes & Sayings

The income effects in an economy always sum to zero. — Arthur Laffer

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. — Michael Pollan

True partisans draft legislation that gives themselves everything and their enemies nothing. They love bills that repulse and even disgust the other side. Today's politics have become an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, zero-sum game - it's not a contact sport but a blood sport. — Jim Cooper

It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it's always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner. — Peter Thiel

The move from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking, from zero-sum competition to one-hundred-sum collaboration, is not just a "nice" or "moral" idea. In the twenty-first century, it's plain good sense. Scarcity says, "I'm going to keep all my ideas to myself and sell more than anyone else." Abundance says, "By mentoring, coaching, and sharing all our best ideas, we're going to create a powerful tide that raises all our ships-and we'll all sell more as a result. — Daniel Burrus

It is not a zero sum game. The simple idea of the gains from trade lies at the heart of the modern and the ancient economy, not the power of capital. There is nothing else to it. — Matt Ridley

THE ZERO SUM GAME: I have found that people whose hair is teased do not like brainteasers. By the same token, people who like brainteasers do not have teased hair. It's clear that the human cranium cannot sustain both. — Demetri Martin

I look forward to the promising upside of the long-term that lingers ahead for me after such abysmal days. Things always just seem to balance out in the long run. In fact, I'm almost there. The zero line is within inches of my trembling outstretched grasp. — David B. Lentz

In a zero-sum game, the problem is entirely one of distribution, not at all one of production. — Kenneth Waltz

When you are in a relationship, you are aware that it might end. You might grow apart, find someone else, simply fall out of love. But a friendship isn't a zero-sum game, and as such, you assume that it will last forever, especially an old friendship. You take its permanence for grandted, whuch might be the very thing so dear about it. — Emily Giffin

Many guys see relationships with women as a zero-sum game: If she wins, he loses. Marriage is the ultimate contest: Her job is to get him to capitulate to marriage. So many men see marriage as the "end of freedom," the end of boyhood. That's why bachelor parties are supposed to revel in that boyish irresponsibility "one last time." So many guys figure, "Why rush into something that means basically that you'll be a prisoner forever?" — Michael Kimmel

As we think of power in the 21st century, we want to get away from the idea that power's always zero sum - my gain is your loss and vice versa. Power can also be positive sum, where your gain can be my gain. — Joseph Nye

For almost a minute the two of us were locked in a battle of wills that had no possible winner, only a different order of losing. — Mira Grant

One problem with politics is that it is a zero sum game, i.e. politicians argue how to cut the pie smaller and smaller, by reshuffling pieces of the pie. I think this is destructive. Instead, we should be creating a bigger pie, i.e. funding the science that is the source of all our prosperity. Science is not a zero sum game. — Michio Kaku

Active management is a zero-sum game before cost, and the winners have to win at the expense of the losers. — Eugene Fama

In Newark, we see a problem and want to seize it, but we run up against the wall of state government, the wall of federal government that does not have the flexibility or doesn't see problems, even. At the federal level, it's often a zero-sum game: If you win, I lose. At the local level, it's just not local that. It's win-win-win. — Cory Booker

For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception. — Stacy Schiff

The zero-sum world [the movie The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood. — Peter Thiel

This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other's struggles as part of our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.) — Audre Lorde

In a world where global politics is no longer a zero-sum game, it is - or should be - counterintuitive to pursue one's interests without considering the interests of others. — Hassan Rouhani

So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? — Sebastian Junger

Trade is not a zero sum game where one country's gain is another country's loss. It is a positive sum game where all countries and thus the world benefit. — Javier A. Reyes

Being negative is not how we make progress, and the most important things are not zero sum, — Larry Page

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General Electric defaulted on its debt any time in the next ten years and bondholders recovered nothing. It was a zero-sum bet: If you made $100 million, the guy who had sold you the credit default swap lost $100 million. It was also an asymmetric bet, like laying down money on a number in roulette. The most you could lose were the chips you put on the table; but if your number came up you made thirty, forty, even fifty times your money. — Michael Lewis

To grow up, a man must stand apart not only from his mother but from his fellows. Human achievement, according to this perspective, is always to be measured in difference, who is the fastest, the most handsome, the richest. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon highlights this way of looking at human achievement. Not only do the two men compete for the most honor, symbolized by possessions, but they see their contest as a zero-sum game. That is, they - and all the other warriors - assume that there is a finite amount of honor available, so that if one man gets more, then someone else gets less.

Achilles, with his semidivine nature and abundant physical gifts, would seem to be an example of a man fully equipped for success in this system. And yet, Achilles does not prosper in the world of the poem. As he pursues honor and status among his fellows, he becomes more and more isolated, the price of distinction in a competitive society. — Thomas Van Nortwick

Differentiation is a zero-sum, advertising-based game. — Seth Godin

We act like a zero-sum society, when in reality there is a lot of non zero-sum fat to be skimmed off to everyone's mutual advantage. — Howard Raiffa

It was too late, though: I was already too smart for the therapist. Or maybe I was never amenable to therapy. Either way, I wasn't going to change. I had already chosen to view the world as a set of opportunities at winning or losing in a zero-sum game, and I used every encounter to gain information to my advantage. — M.E. Thomas

My guiding principle is that prosperity can be shared. We can create wealth together. The global economy is not a zero-sum game. — Julia Gillard

Don't let anyone tell you, ever, that this is a zero-sum game. Your genius does not threaten me. It delights and inspires me. — Seanan McGuire

Women's liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. — Rebecca Solnit

Death is a zero sum game for which there is no cure. — S. Jay Olshansky

Life is a zero sum game. — George Carlin

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. — Sam Harris

If you service low-impact activities, therefore, you're taking away time you could be spending on higher-impact activities. It's a zero-sum game. — Cal Newport

The person that is buying a share of stock is convinced he knows something that the other person who's selling it to him does not know. There's no zero sum game in Wall Street. — Bernard Madoff

Happiness is not a zero-sum game. It's the only case in which the resources are limitless, and in which the rich can get richer at no expense to anyone else. That day in the park, I found it remarkably easy to own my happiness and celebrate Kate's as well.
It's a strange thing, though, how rare, maybe impossible, it is to have everyone you care about thriving at the same time. For a short spell, life seems certain and stable, until something shifts and redistributes, randomly, unpredictably, and when you look around at the new landscape, you see that it's someone else's turn now. You redirect your attention to focus on the friend in need. You hope - you know - they will do the same for you, when your turn comes. — Amy Poeppel

Life is not a sport. Life is not math. There is no final end goal and there is no right answer. Just because your truth does not match someone else's truth does not make either of you wrong. Life is not a zero sum game. If I am right, that does not make you wrong. If you are right, that does not make me wrong either. A jar of vinegar can sit in a cupboard beside a box of baking soda peacefully, and we can allow those who disagree with us to exist alongside us without reacting to them. There is nothing to prove. There is enough room in the world for all of us. — Vironika Tugaleva

At least half of the popular fallacies about economics come from assuming that economic activity is a zero-sum game, in which what is gained by someone is lost by someone else. But transactions would not continue unless both sides gained, whether in international trade, employment, or renting an apartment. — Thomas Sowell

As to the latter point - that by having a child in America you are somehow starving a child in Bangladesh - remember that agricultural economics is not a zero-sum game. Farmers want to make a living, so as demand increases, so does production. Not only that, but agricultural productivity has increased so rapidly that in some countries the government pays farmers not to plant crops in an effort to keep food prices from dropping. — J. Budziszewski

Zero-sum thinking is a name for envy. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, gives an apt description of the "House of Envy" (as a poet in that most zero-sum of political systems, the Roman empire, might): "Envy within, busy at the meal of snake's flesh... her tongue dripped venom. Only the sight of suffering could bring a smile to her lips. She never knew the comfort of sleep, but... looked with dismay on men's good fortune... She could hardly refrain from weeping when she saw no cause for tears." I didn't know Hillary Clinton's involvement in politics dated back to the reign of Augustus. Then — P. J. O'Rourke

Being rich is a good thing. Not just in the obvious sense of benefitting you and your family, but in the broader sense. Profits are not a zero sum game. The more you make, the more of a financial impact you can have. — Mark Cuban

The cumulative results of the brain's chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a depression score is equivalent to the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (a compound found in the urine of all people and not apparently affected by depression); minus the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus the level of norepinephrine; minus the level of normetanephrine plus the level of metanepherine, the sum of those divided by the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus an unspecified conversion variable; or, as CTP puts it: "D-type score = C1 (MHPG) - C2 (VMA) + C3 (NE) - C4 (NMN + MN)/VMA + C0." The score should come out between one for unipolar and zero for bipolar patients, so if you come up with something else - you're doing it wrong. — Andrew Solomon

Much of our national debate proceeds as if China and America were locked in a zero-sum game in which one's loss is precisely the other's gain. — Eric Liu

In the zero-sum budget game, every dollar spent on this problem [illegal immigration] must be taken from somewhere else ... No, we should not tolerate people immigrating illegally. But we need to treat this issue honestly and fairly. — Leon Panetta

International politics is no longer a zero-sum game but a multi-dimensional arena where cooperation and competition often occur simultaneously. Gone is the age of blood feuds. World leaders are expected to lead in turning threats into opportunities. — Hassan Rouhani

In the great non zero sum games of history, if you're part of the problem, then you'll likely be a victim of the solution. — Robert Wright

There's a false notion that success is a zero sum game. To win in our careers we have to give up family. To work hard we have to sacrifice sleep. To accomplish we must take (or borrow or steal) from somewhere else in our lives. It's just not the case. — Maynard Webb

The sum total of all scientifically valid proof supporting the existence of all of world's gods, combined, is zero. — David Silverman

There comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero. — Max Brooks

A lot of people, including business leaders, think the future belongs to China. Globalization is not a zero-sum game, but we need to hone our skills to stay in play. — Jon Meacham

Collective impact (fig. 3.8) operates on the premise that much of conservation and donor funding has fallen short of meeting its goals of significant societal transformation because decision and implementation programs are too fractured and diffuse, generating competition among players rather than collaboration in what is often a zero-sum game. — Charles G. Curtin

The discussion of derivatives in the political world has become a zero sum game. — Jim Himes

Zero-sum games deal with resources that neither increase nor decrease in amount - they only shift from one player to the other. Given your present frame of mind, were you to speak now, I'm afraid you might say something rash. I would feel it incumbent to offer a rejoinder. As a result of this exchange, you would be mortified and humiliated, which - as dictated by the rules of game theory - would increase my influence and status at your expense. — Douglas Preston

The America of opportunity is under assault. We once ran this country to benefit hardworking people who didn't have much, to grow a middle class, to create opportunities for our kids. We once held up the ideal that poor kids would get the same chances in life as everyone else. We once believed that opportunity was not a zero-sum game; more for me didn't have to mean less for you. We once believed that the greatest country on earth could bend our future toward more opportunity for more of our people. — Elizabeth Warren

All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what I just ran upstairs for. — Barbara Kingsolver

Legal ethics is a misnomer ... lawyers conducting themselves legally are not necessarily conducting themselves morally ." ... and ... "The zero sum nature of the legal system, combined with the universal adoption of zealotry as the marching orders of practioners and prosecutors, transforms the moral mission of the legal system from one of truth-seeking, storytelling, and justice, to one of fabrication, distortion, and manipulation in pursuit of victory. These victories, however, make us all losers. — Thane Rosenbaum

world is not a zero-sum struggle in which one country's gain is another's loss. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

Building a startup community is not a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers: if everyone engages, they and the entire community can all be winners. — Brad Feld

[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources. — George Gilder

There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed. — Jonathan Haidt

From senior management that my customer would not get scalped, then everyone could win. Salomon would make a lot of money. My customer would make a little money (which, for a customer, was grand). And I would be a hero. If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar — Michael Lewis

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game. — Matt Ridley

Perhaps it's a cultural problem: a capitalistic society that encourages people to see negotiations as a zero-sum game - my loss is your gain, my gain is your loss - will encourage an inevitably adversarial exchange. — Anonymous

Power works by division, influence by multiplication. Power, in other words, is a zero-sum game: the more you share, the less you have. Influence is a non-zero-sum game: the more you share, the more you have. — Jonathan Sacks

Competition for status is a zero sum game — Richard Layard, Baron Layard

Commerce is considered by classical economists to be a positive-sum
game. The act of selling and buying always benefits both the seller
and the buyer. It is unfortunate that popular culture has propagated
the Marxist myth that one person gains in business at the expense of
another, that capitalism is evil because it is a zero-sum game - somebody
wins while someone else loses. When liberals make the argument
that capitalism is the cause of all of our problems, they are either
speaking out of abject ignorance or being totally disingenuous to
protect their interests. We have not had true free-market capitalism
in this country on any wide scale. Where we have had economic
successes in this nation's history, it has been those times when people
have done something outside of the government's involvement. Every
time the federal government has been involved, it has created chaos,
waste, and corruption. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Writers aren't in competition with one another. It isn't a zero sum game. If you have a good book, a good cover, a good product description, and a low price, you can sell well. — J.A. Konrath

We have the data to prove to men that gender equality is not a zero-sum game, but a win-win. — Michael Kimmel

Economic development is not a zero-sum game; the world does not need poor countries in order to have rich countries, nor must some people be poor in order for others to be rich. Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. They are poor despite the fact that Bill Gates lives in a big house. For a complex array of reasons, America's poor have not shared in the productivity gains spawned by Microsoft Windows. Bill Gates did not take their pie away; he did not stand in the way of their success or benefit from their misfortunes. — Charles Wheelan

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen. — George Gilder

The funny thing about advertising is that it's not a zero-sum game ... Historically, in the digital ad world, pie has gotten larger and it's possible for everyone to win, and it's perfectly possible that will continue to be true for quite some time. — Eric Schmidt

Life is also, as George Carlin taught us, a zero-sum game. We all lose in the end. We all die screaming. If that's the case, we might as well make for ourselves a paradise in this world. Make yourself happy and comfortable as often as you can, because sooner or later, the infinite hands you a bill for all these goods and services. What — Kevin Smith

War is grounded in the notion of triumph and defeat. It is zero-sum. — Bruce Jackson

I don't believe love or sexual pleasure is a zero-sum game. — A.V. Roe

We believe that economics does not necessarily have to be a zero-sum game; it can be a win-win proposition for everyone involved so long as they have the tools in which to succeed. — Ron Kind

Thus evolved some members of the Core - not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy. — Dan Simmons

There are two kinds of people: eaters and bakers. Eaters think the world is a zero-sum game: what someone else eats, they cannot eat. Bakers do not believe that the world is a zero-sum game because they can bake more and bigger pies. — Guy Kawasaki

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming. — John Carmack

Are two kinds of people: eaters and bakers. Eaters think the world is a zero-sum game: what you eat, someone else cannot eat, so they eat as much as they can. Bakers think that the world is not a zero-sum game - they can just bake more and bigger pies. Everyone can eat more. People trust bakers and not eaters. — Guy Kawasaki

Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino. — Michael Lewis

The whole purpose was to say that it doesn't have to be a zero sum. It's not the environment or jobs. You can have both. You can help the auto industry achieve that if you have investment in plants. — Jennifer Granholm

Global education is not a zero-sum game. The rise of universities in Asia will be a benefit to the entire world. — Richard Levin

A group of boys lumbered down the halls of Adas Israel, laughing, punching, blood rushing from developing brains to developing genitals and back again in the zero-sum game of puberty. — Jonathan Safran Foer

This is not a zero-sum game. We know that if we provide access and education, particularly where there are gaps in the market, we will create more jobs, we will create more growth, and we will create more activity in the U.S. market, which will be good for our economy. — Karen Mills

Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another. — Robert Reich

If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it. — Robert Wright

We still find, especially in parts of academe, the damaging notion that everything is a struggle for power, or being empowered, or hegemony, or oppression: and that all competition is a zero-sum game. This is not more than repetition of Lenin's destructive doctrine. Intellectually, it is reductionism; politically, it is fanaticism. — Robert Conquest

Fair-minded people avoid zero-sum games in which one-person's win translates into another person's loss. — Frank Sonnenberg

If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa. — Michael Lewis

Positive rights are the right to shelter, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to a living wage. These things are - these are, I would call them, more properly, political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky, because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum. — P. J. O'Rourke

This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. — Adam Grant

The thing about credit is that it's not zero-sum. There's room for everybody, and you'll shine if other people are shining. — Adam M. Grant

The employers who do best are employers who reject these false choices. It's not a zero-sum world where you either take care of your workers or you take care of your shareholders. You can do good and do well, too. — Thomas Perez

happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game, — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The zero-sum nature of the medieval economy was reinforced by a Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources. — Steven Pinker

Four circles to the kissing come, The smaller are the benter. The bend is just the inverse of The distance from the centre. Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb There's now no need for rule of thumb. Since zero bend's a dead straight line And concave bends have minus sign, The sum of squares of all four bends Is half the square of their sum. — Frederick Soddy

Conflicts like competitive races are zero sum games, meaning that there is one winner and one loser. This also means that the winner will win at the
expense of the loser. If there is no engagement because one party to the conflict has retreated, the remaining party will only consume resources and
create opportunities for inner discord among its own members by not also retreating. — Kambiz Mostofizadeh

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics. — P. J. O'Rourke

Limited resources. Everything's a zero-sum game." "What — Matthew B.J. Delaney