The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
This week we look, in our politics section, at the rise of zero-sum thinking. Does this represent a new fault line, replacing left versus right?
And of course, there is Charlie’s Attic, our Friday Emporium of diminishing returns. This week we look at terrible maps and terrifying public health adverts.
Zero-sum
The above chart, by data-journalist John Burn-Murdoch, was tweeted this week and really got us thinking. Taken from his recent article for the Financial Times, it follows the rise of zero-sum thinking.
The zero-sum mindset works on the basis that resources are finite: ‘the more you have the less I have’, and vice versa. Its opposite is positive-sum thinking – whereby the whole can grow, without anyone necessarily losing out.
It is easy to think of this as a fairly niche economic distinction. But there is an argument that it governs many of the dividing lines within modern politics. The debate about migration, for instance, is rooted in the zero-sum idea that more people means less to go round (sometimes known as the ‘lump of labour fallacy’). And household metaphors for the economy are also zero-sum, driven by a fear of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’. On the left, meanwhile, the assumption is that the only way to enrich the poor is by taking from the rich.
Zero-sum thinking is often wrong, but it is also deeply intuitive. It lifts the logic of the everyday and applies it to politics: ‘If there isn’t enough money then the nation must tighten its belt’. It makes sense that many of us see the world in this way, and that liberal, positive-sum arguments are harder to make. And it also stands to reason that this will become truer as the cost-of-living crisis bites and resources start to feel scarce. Those looking to change society in this context must think hard about how to engage with the inner logic of zero-sum thinking.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the part of the Weekly where there’s never enough to go round:
