Zero-sum

“Now I’m no mathematician, but I’d like to talk about a just couple of numbers that have really been bothering me lately. And they are zero and one. Now first, let’s take a look at zero. Now nobody wants to be a zero. To be a zero means to be a nothing, a nobody, a has-been, a clod. On the other hand, almost everybody wants to be number one. To be a number one means to be a winner, top of the heap, the acme. And there seems to be a strange kind of national obsession with this particular number. Now, in my opinion, the problem with these two numbers is that they are just too close. It leaves very little room in there for everybody else. Just not enough range. So first we need to get rid of the value judgements attached to these two numbers, and to realise that to be a zero is no better, no worse than to be number one.”

—Laurie Anderson

“The privilege you enjoy comes at someone else’s expense in this zero-sum, winners and losers society they set up. That privilege you’re hoarding could be put to good use. It could be used to create space, resources, opportunity, amplification, and room for someone else. Not because they need your saving-but because that is what you do with what you didn’t earn: you give it away. You didn’t actually earn your privilege. It was the luck of the draw to be born white, male, cis, straight, able bodied, and able-minded. You didn’t hit a triple: you were born on third base.

—Brittany Packnett

Zero-sum is a situation in game theory in which one person’s gain is equivalent to another’s loss, so the net change in wealth or benefit is zero.

Third base in baseball is the third station that a player must reach before scoring a run.

“While the wealth of billionaires keeps growing, children keep getting poorer. The reality is that the West is basing its capacity to develop on the structural underdevelopment of the Global South. Although colonialism is supposedly over, more than $65 billion flows every year from the Global South – especially Africa – to Europe and the United States. Through resource extraction, foreign powers invest only to take everything else back in profits, perpetuating dependency. Development exists only because underdevelopment is actively created.”

“The reality is that we are not on an equal path where everyone is progressively growing and improving. In fact, developed countries achieved their status because the rest of the world was structurally destroyed and forced into underdevelopment—which is precisely what austerity policies continue to do.”

—Clara Mattei