From its founding until the rise of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, the US was largely defined by zero-sum thinking. Land was the focus of policy and we engaged in continual warfare against the first nations of people who were here, fighting them and the British and the French and the Spanish for the land of this continent. War, genocide, and slavery were natural consequences of this focus on land and zero-sum thinking.
How did Republicans end that? Well, not abruptly. But they did shift the focus of progress from land to capital. There was in this still plenty of residual acting that came from a zero-sum thinking, but capital meant that one had more options than simply fighting over acreage, gold mines and oil wells. One could also create new products, factories and markets. Gradually a variable-sum, a win-win thinking came to shape more of the economy, more of our behavior.
By the middle of the 20th century, a new kind of economy was clearly emerging. This was an information economy based on knowledge, knowledge workers and their information technology. Again, this did not mean an eradication of win-lose, or zero-sum thinking. It did mean that we increasingly had options, though, to think differently, to act differently, to jointly create value rather than fight over value discovered on the continent in the form of forests, farmland, mines and oil deposits.
Knowledge work at its best generates lots of options, an abundance of possibilities and potential solutions. The big pharma clients I've worked with who develop new drugs may literally start with thousands of possible molecules. They have a target site in the body - a region of brain or kidney, the blood or nerves. And they first generate models of the molecules that might become a drug to predict how it'll interact with a particular form of cancer or virus, say. And they gradually downsize this abundance of molecules into a few through simulations and models and then begin to manufacture and test some. It takes about a decade from the time they start this process until they have a drug you can pick up at CVS but it starts with abundance and ends with some exotic drug name for a condition that they have not long understood and finally have some way to ameliorate. You start by generating thousands of options and end by finding one solution that is safe and effective.
Zero-sum thinking is best expressed with the phrase,
"There is only so much."
"There is only so much."
Variable-sum thinking, win-win thinking starts with the same phrase but jettisons the "only," leaving the expression as simply,
"There is so much."
"There is so much."
If zero-sum were reality, the fact of the global population being 7 billion more than it was in 1500 would mean that we'd be more impoverished than at any time in history. Instead, humanity enjoys more prosperity than any generation before. What is reality? Variable sum. We can act in ways that create abundance for all or just a few or poverty for all or just a few.
Getting rid of the only means being open to different approaches, different philosophies, different goals. The US and Canada are the most diverse communities on earth by some measures. Farmers from various regions ended up as neighbors and shared techniques and ideas from the countries they'd come from and out of that developed new methods. Now their great grandkids collaborate in office parks or zoom calls. Out of that constant interplay of generating an abundance of possibilities from which they shape a workable solution comes new products, new companies and industries and new wealth and jobs.
"There is only so much" or "There is so much?"
Which one becomes your reality depends on whether or not you can get rid of the only, how open you are to the influence of data, other's ideas, possibilities and a willingness to discard your hypotheses once they shipwreck on the shore of reality.
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