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Quotes About Zero-sum

If you look at the developments in the international scene over the past many years, we haven't been able to resolve many problems and many crises, because we have approached them from a zero-sum perspective. My gain has always been defined as somebody else's loss, and through that, we never resolve problems.
~ Mohammad Javad Zarif
Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies - whether Australia, the E.U., or Mexico - are stronger. But Trump's approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.
~ Joseph Stiglitz
Active investment is a zero-sum game. Passive managers don't play the game. They buy something resembling the market as a whole, or some segment of the market, and they don't respond to the actions of active managers.
~ 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 Mr. Putin, vacillation invites aggression. His world is a brutish, cynical place, where power is worshiped, weakness is despised, and all rivalries are zero-sum.
~ John McCain
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
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
There are two ways to think about the one percent - the Bernie Sanders way, where we're all competing for a zero-sum pie where it's just a question of negotiations. The second way, which is the one I put forward, is no, it's really innovation in a knowledge-based economy.
~ Edward Conard
Further, in countries where wealth comes from rent-seeking, political patronage, or regulatory capture (which, I remind the reader, is how the powerful and the insiders use regulation to scam the public, or red tape to slow down competition), wealth is seen as zero-sum.*2
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
wealth is seen as zero-sum.
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You can tell people who come from countries with rent seeking; they think that business is zero-sum: wealth is money taken from others.
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
but I know time really is zero-sum, and it's the one thing that no one's making more of.
~ Timothy Ferriss
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
Patriarchy is sustained by those co-workers who withhold their valuable support for women colleagues because they see the world as a zero-sum universe: you gain, I lose.
~ Unknown
second reason: Most other enterprises are positive-sum. If I sell you something you want and enjoy, we're both better off. Law, by contrast, is often (though not always) a zero-sum game: Because somebody wins, somebody else must lose.
~ Daniel H. Pink
Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was now zero-sum: When one side profited, another lost. One side's victory was another's death. The old notion that politics was a trader's game, an understanding that somebody else had something you wanted—a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage—and that in the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good and evil.
~ Michael Wolff
Trump simply could not abide the knowledge that somebody was getting a leg up at his expense. His was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.
~ Michael Wolff
Most economic fallacies derive - from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
~ Milton Friedman
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