You don’t have to care about Marvel movies to understand this post, but my wife and I were watching Falcon and The Winter Soldier last week, and something hit me the wrong way. The group of terrorists The Falcon is trying to stop believed the world was better off after Thanos snapped half of all of the people away. When talking to another character he says, “Every time something gets better for one group, it gets worse for another.” This is what economists call a zero sum game. Zero sum game thinking puts people and groups at odds with one another because everyone believes that someone else’s gain must be their loss. Fortunately, we live in a world full of positive sum scenarios, but that does not mean all people view the world this way.

Historically, the mercantilists believed that the world had a fixed amount of wealth in it, so the only way for one nation to grow stronger and wealthier was to take wealth from someone else. Guided in part by this ideology, European powers built massive colonial empires to use indigenous labor to extract gold and send it back home to Europe.* Additionally, these nations set up numerous rules and tariffs to keep out foreign goods. Buying foreign goods would give other nations hard earned local wealth! In the modern day and age, many people still believe in the zero sum game. The Trump administration obsessed over trade deficits because Americans were “losing.” Many Democrats decry income inequality as immoral and demand wealth redistribution. Both are examples of the zero sum fallacy at work.

It is true that some scenarios are zero sum. Slavery, a common institution at mercantilism’s peak, takes from the slave to benefit the slaver. It’s a perfect example of an extractive institution,** and extractive institutions create zero sum (or even negative sum) situations. One group is abused for another’s benefit. Fortunately, extraction is not the only road to prosperity.

Free trade amongst people and nations allows for positive sum outcomes. For a moment, think back to elementary school. I’m not sure about you, but trading lunch items was a common practice for my classmates and me over those years. None of us were forced into our exchanges, and we all felt like winners after trading. David may have given me his tuna sandwich in exchange for my ham and cheese because at lunch we both preferred the other’s sandwich. When the deal was done, we were both better off than before. Wealth was created in the trade! Two parties freely engaging in a trade always ends up with people at least as well off as before. Why would I give David my sandwich if I didn’t want his at least just as much? Sure, one of us may have benefited more than the other, but neither of us regretted the trade. Neither of us lost. Everyone is better off when they are able to freely do business with whomever they please. However, there is more to it than the gains from trade.

Throwing it back to school for a little bit longer, I’d like to use my high school economics teacher’s example to illustrate the difference between these two mindsets. Zero sum believers look at the economy like a giant pie. There’s a limited amount of wealth, and you can only get more if someone else gets less. Positive sum believers remember the farming equipment in the barn; we can make more pie! Through our efforts, we can generate new wealth! Not enough pie for everyone? No problem! We can work hard to grow grain, apples, sugar cane, etc. to make more pie. There is no real limit to how much pie we can make!

Our ability to create value and trade what we’ve made with others allows us to produce more together than we ever could apart. Everyone has something they can use to create, and there is probably someone out there willing to trade your excess goods for something of theirs you’d like. If those around you cannot offer you something more than what you’ve got, don’t trade with them! There is no reason to believe that someone must suffer a loss for someone else to enjoy a gain. If we believe that’s the case, we can’t really have heroes and villains. If The Falcon is right, his enemies aren’t “bad guys,” they’re just people who oppose him or his faction. They’re not behaving wickedly by taking from others, because that’s the only way to survive. The zero sum fallacy is an unsustainable ideology that can lead us to justify extracting from others because that’s the only way to survive. Additionally, as a believer, it seems inconsistent and impossible to buy into this ideology. Proverbs 31 describes wisdom personified. She is a woman who successfully engages in commerce to provide for her family. Meanwhile, Matthew 22:37-40 describes the two commandments upon which all others hang; to love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. God cannot describe loving one’s neighbor as the number two commandment while simultaneously comparing a woman who takes advantage of those around her for her own gain to Biblical wisdom. I’d conclude that commerce cannot be inherently extractive. The zero sum game is not worth playing.

*Though not my only source of mercantilist history, Skousen breaks down the idea well in his book The Making of Modern Economics which provides a great breakdown of, well, the making of modern economics.

**I stole this terminology from Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail which I also recommend.