Zero-Sum Game: The Widening Income Gap

When ordinary people think about "class system", the first to come to mind is the aristocracy system of Britain, the private system, and the Indian caste system. On both systems, it may be difficult to go beyond the place where the individual was born. Some societies relaxed the strict regulations they followed. A good example is the recent marriage of King William of England and his civilian bride Kate Middleton. William did not follow the same strict standards as his father.

One way to think about the trends that our society has followed over the past 200 years is to think about what they have fought against the zero-sum society. Zero sum game - basically a society without growth, regardless of how to define growth - is a game, each winner has a loser. Therefore, it is a society that imitates a sharp increase in conflict. Our country is actually countering the desire to imitate by focusing on the creation of economic growth and redistribution of it all. We have built an overall model of economic growth. Our only strategy for the second century was to make the pie bigger and more and more to taste it. I do not dare to say that it is easy to build, the majority of which is the result of power balance and fighting, and its evolution is only linear. However, the resulting improvement in quality of life has made Western European countries a model to mimic the desires in other parts of the world.

A zero sum game is a loss equal to the return of a player to another player. Since there is no possibility of "win-win", these games are different from non-zero games. The famous pie has not expanded. For a person, the big one means a small part of another person. Total non-zero games are usually better, as both can benefit from the game. This problem explains the situation where a player 's action (agent) affects another player (principal). If the interests of the agent and the principal are inconsistent, this can cause problems. Typical examples are politicians (agents) and voters (principals). The motivation of politicians and the resulting actions may be inconsistent with the motivation of the voters. Other examples are lawyers (proxies) and their customers (customers), mechanics (agents) and customers (customers).

Zero sum game is a scenario where acquisition or failure of a player is always a failure of another player. A board game is an example of a zero sum game. A non - zero total game is often encountered in scenes where multiple players can benefit from the behavior of one player. The economic interaction among multiple participants to expand the market size is an example of a non-zero game.