The Zero-Sum Paradox: When More is Less and Less is More
Relentless expansion is a hallmark of human progress and has led to a number of zero-sum games where one person must lose in order for another person to gain. Economic inequality is the most obvious and pressing example, but this also applies to opportunities in the labour market, where one applicant’s success means a missed opportunity for another, to healthcare, where allocation of resources in one place can mean a lack of resources in another, and for land use and housing, where gentrification and rising property values may benefit some residents but displace others, leading to an increasing expansion of urban and suburban centres and fewer opportunities for younger people to own property than was the case in their parents’ generation.
One of the reasons this problem is so complex to illustrate is that it involves large numbers and patterns of human behaviour rather than individual transactions. In the area of employment, job opportunities are finite until the market expands, but then the market must continually expand to create job opportunities for the new generation of job seekers that were initially created to expand the market.
It’s a commonly held saying in academia that a good journal article will eventually be published in the right journal. The infamous publish-or-perish culture has led to a world of relentless…
