The Necessity of Non-Zero-Sum Thinking

with Robert Wright

This excerpt is taken from my recent conversation with journalist, author, and Bloggingheads co-founder Bob Wright. Here we spend a little time in Bob’s wheelhouse, and it’s a big wheelhouse. Bob’s books cover things like “the logic of human destiny” (the subtitle of his book Nonzero), the relationship between religion and tribalism, and Buddhism’s anticipation of the findings of modern psychology.

We don’t cover all of that, of course. But Bob and I do discuss one important through-line in his writing and thinking: The role of non-zero-sum games in human social and political life. Bob thinks that the more humanity recognizes that we’re facing problems that are best solved by cooperation rather than competition, the better off we’ll be. We can think of nuclear weapons. If all nations possessing nuclear weapons pledged to dispose of them (and stuck by that pledge), then everyone would be safer in the long run, even if nuclear-armed nations would be giving up some power on the world stage in the process.

Now, as an economist, I find this idea appealing. As Bob notes, non-zero-sum relationships are an essential component in market economies—agents engage in exchanges whereby both parties benefit in some way. And it’s certainly true that some of the world’s problems simply require more non-zero-sum games if they are to be solved. But I’m skeptical that, with the nation and the world as fractured as it is, we can come to a point where people are willing to engage in the sort of good-faith negotiation required for non-zero-sum games to be effective.

What do you think? Can we foresee a time when the world will be ready to come together to solve our great problems? What about within the US?

This video and transcript are taken from a longer conversation currently available only to newsletter subscribers. It will be made publicly available later this week. For early access to videos and podcasts, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below to subscribe.

---

GLENN LOURY: Well now, if anti-tribalism was one of the raisons d'etre of your initiative with Bloggingheads, you seem to have struck out. Maybe not at Bloggingheads, but for the journalistic enterprise altogether, that sounds so quaint and idealistic. I think all the gloves are off and everybody is in their corner. Their camps are formed, and—I’m speaking of journalism across the board—what a shame. Because one doesn't know where to find an honest broker anymore.

ROBERT WRIGHT: It is a problem. I devote a lot of thought to it, and I've done some writing about it. And I mean, my newsletter, the Nonzero Newsletter, which is put out by the Nonzero Foundation, which is also the umbrella that Bloggingheads is under, in the newsletter I devote a fair amount of attention to this problem, and I plan to start devoting more soon.

In terms of my books, I've written about evolutionary psychology. My last book was about Buddhism and also mindfulness meditation and the role that mindfulness meditation can play in combating what is sometimes called the psychology of tribalism, which is what I called it in the book.

That's Why Buddhism Is True.

The name of the book is Why Buddhism Is True. I apologize for the lacking in epistemic humility title, I guess we might say. I mean, first of all, I should say I'm talking about the naturalistic part of Buddhism. I'm not talking about rebirth and the more kind of exotically metaphysical or traditionally religious parts, the gods and so on. I'm talking about why I think Buddhist philosophy and practice really adroitly isolate the problem with human nature and try to do something about it.

And that includes, as it happens, some of the cognitive biases that constitute the psychology of tribalism. It's a very anti-tribal philosophy, I think, in practical terms. And that's the part I'm arguing is true. I am willing to defend that that, that the Buddhist diagnosis of the human predicament, including somewhat arcane metaphysical doctrines—although not the religious ones—and at least what are in some traditions the Buddhist regimen of practice, I'm willing to defend those as really deeply valid and very important right now.

This is a line of thought that you've been developing consistently from Nonzero through The Evolution of God to Why Buddhism Is True. Even without a deep immersion in your canon, I can grasp—as an economist, somebody who knows a little something about the prisoner's dilemma and about problems of noncooperation—when everybody would be better off if we could just figure out a way, but everybody wants to self-aggrandize a little bit. They want to do a little bit better for themselves and … Anyway, not to wander into your subject matter, but what I admire here is this persistent development of what is a fairly compact set of ideas through social science, into spirituality and into evolutionary biology. That's pretty impressive, Robert.

Well, thank you. I don't know whether it's good or bad when you are kind of obsessed with a single worldview and are just trying to illuminate different aspects of it, but I'm glad you see the continuity. It might not be evident to everybody. But you're certainly right to focus on the non-zero-sum game. As the title of the book and the newsletter suggest, I think those kinds of games are important.

The thesis of the book was that one way to describe the trajectory of human cultural evolution broadly speaking—if cultural evolution includes political ideas, science, religion, the entire body of non-genetically transmitted information that makes up the human heritage—one way thing it has done over the last 10,000 years is move human social organization from the level of hunter-gatherer society to a global civilization, and we’re even on the verge of a global community. In the book I said much of the driving force there was that technologies come along that either facilitate or otherwise encourage the playing of non-zero-sum games over larger expanses of territory including more and more players, like a lot of information technologies, going back to cuneiform and transportation technologies and so on.

But anyway, to cut to the chase, we are now at the point where I think non-zero-sum relations—that is to say games with potential win-win outcomes or lose-lose outcomes—encompass the whole planet. So a classic example would be climate change. We solve the problem, pretty much most nations are better off. We don't, they're worse off. That's a non-zero-sum game. It's not like a tennis match where there has to be one winner and one loser. That's a zero-sum game. You know all this, of course. But nuclear war: non-zero-sum. If you don't have one, you both win. If you have one, you both lose. And the very essence of economics, certainly market economics, is voluntary non-zero-sum exchange, right?

Indeed.

And that's an important part of the story I tell them the book. I'm saying that we are now at a point where we have a lot of non-zero-sum games among nations. The famous ones [are] climate change, avoid nuclear war, but I think more and more, controlling bio weapons, controlling contagious viruses, right?

Indeed.

Classic non-zero-sum thing here, where your fate is positively correlated with the fate of someone around the world. Every time the virus spreads anywhere, that's bad news for us here. Every time they hold it in check anywhere, that's good news for us here. The very definition of a non-zero-sum game is that fortunes are positively correlated to at least some extent, not necessarily perfectly. There are zero-sum dimensions to the pandemic and so on, but I think the pandemic is one of many examples of more and more non-zero-sum relations among the people of the world, many of them created by technologies.

We don't need an arms race in space. We don't need an arms race in artificial intelligence or a cyber war. There are a lot of things it would be in our mutual interest to control. And I think to control them, you're going to need a lot of policy at the international level. But for that to even become realistically thinkable, I think you're going to have to get the psychology of tribalism under control, not just within this nation so that we can propose coherent policies that we would actually abide by. But tribal tensions, you might say, divide the nations, right? We seem to be moving from one kind of war—war on terror—back into a new kind of cold war. And if that is too riven by tension and hostility, that's going to make it very hard to solve these problems. I'll stop. I've been talking for a while.

You're interesting. I'm just sitting here thinking, dilemma or tragedy? The prisoner’s dilemma or prisoner’s tragedy? And by that I simply mean, so the logic of the dilemma is, yeah, we're both better off if we cooperate than we are if we don't cooperate. But I'm even better off if you cooperate and I don't. And that's a kind of inexorable lure to eschew cooperations. There may be solutions. We may be able to find devices, whether they're psychological or there's some kind of institutional devices that mitigate this thing. But for some problems, I don't know, maybe it's just a tragedy at the end of the day.

Yeah. I mean, that is the setup in the classic prisoner's dilemma, which is of course only one example of a non-zero-sum game. But yeah, you imagine these two prisoners, they're doing their plea bargaining separately and can't talk to each other, and either one of them can snitch on the other. They did the crime together. That's the idea. And if they both refuse to cop a plea, refuse to admit guilt, and don't rat out the other one, then they only get a one year sentence. But if you rat out the other guy and he doesn't rat out you, you get no years in prison and he gets five. That's the setup.

I guess it's an example of a collective action problem. But to take it back to any of these international problems, the US is probably ... it may be a sort of a smaller country, but certainly if you're Norway, and all the other nations are willing to restrict their carbon emissions to keep climate change under control, and you can get by with cheating, that's the best of all possible worlds. The problem is solved and you don't have to pay the price of using more exotic fuels or anything.

You're right that that's the temptation with any of these kinds of problems, the collective action problems. There is this dimension of bargaining where there's a zero-sum dimension. We'd all like to get a better deal. But honestly, I feel we'd be lucky to get to the point where that was the problem, if you know what I mean. We're not even discussing these things. We're not even talking about whether an arms race in space would really be a great idea for the planet. We're not having these conversations. And one reason is we're spending so much time …Well, our foreign policy brainpower just seems to me to be spent doing a lot of mainly stupid stuff.