Rethink... winners and losers

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Hello and welcome to Rethink, where we take a fresh look at modern society, investigate emerging issues, and discuss the new ideas that might make the world a better. place. I'm Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford, and this week we're looking at winners and losers.

So I'm going to kick off now with two statements for you to consider. Here's the first. Illegal immigrants are a drain on the taxpayer and the NHS and they need to be deported. And here's the second. Billionaires and big business fat cats hold too much of the UK's wealth and they need to be hit with a tax on their assets. Now, on the face of it, those two statements seem to be from very different ends of the political spectrum.

but proponents of them share an identical underlying idea. The statements are both examples of zero-sum thinking. And that is a belief that if one group wins... Another must lose. Zero sum thinkers view society and the economy... Like a pie. Apple, chicken and leek, steak and stilton, take your choice. But either way, it's just one pie and we're all fighting to get the biggest slice. And you also think that if one group gets a bigger slice...

Then the other group automatically gets a smaller one. The phrase zero-sum comes from game theory in economics, which examines strategy in competitive situations. But why is it important? Well, zero-sum thinking, it's neither right nor wrong, moral or immoral, but it does have real effects for individuals and for society. And more importantly, it can help us to understand aspects of modern politics.

So it can help us understand why so many US voters thought that China had unfairly benefited from international trade and caused American manufacturing to suffer. And that in turn is one of the reasons why Donald Trump was re-elected, allowing him to implement global tariffs. Now, most economists say that those kinds of zero-sum beliefs, well, they just make us all poorer.

In fact, the belief that there are winners and losers really isn't popular in economics. Economists call that kind of thinking the zero-sum fallacy. They argue instead that increased business through free trade actually grows the economy. So, back to that pie I mentioned earlier. Imagine that instead of fighting over slices, we'd cooperated going down to the corner shop to buy some more flour and eggs and sugar.

And so our pie would have got bigger, and everyone would have got a decent-sized slicer. Win-win for all of us. Now... At that point, you might say, Ben, give up the happy-clappy stuff, mate. There's plenty of situations where you really do only have winners and losers. And I hear what you're saying, and we'll come back to that later in the programme.

But first, zero-sum thinkers can't be placed in the usual boxes marked left or right wing, rich or poor, northern or southern, so who are they as a group? Professor Stephanie Stancheva is the founder of the Social Economics Lab at Harvard University. Her research involves large-scale surveys involving tens of thousands of people, and she says that zero-sum thinking is not tied to any single political view.

is being taken advantage of because of another group. And so government action is needed to help. So for instance, if you believe that rich people gain... At the expense of poor people, you're going to support much more redistribution because you don't believe in this idea of a tide that lifts all boats. So you will support more progressive taxes, more generous transfers to lower income people.

At the same time, you will also, for instance, support clamping down on immigration because you believe that non-immigrants tend to lose when there are more immigrants. So it will have this interesting flavor of both sides of the political spectrum. Despite currently having a president who purely thinks in terms of winning and losing, it's not actually the case that all Republicans as zero-summon Democrats aren't. There are some people with that sort of mindset in both parties.

Democrats who tend to be more zero-sum are those who are going to be more opposed to immigration. Similarly, for instance, among Republicans, those who are more zero-sum are actually going to be the ones supporting most redistribution, more universal health care. A mindset that tends to actually really explain within party variation quite a bit more than across party.

Her research also questions other political assumptions. For example, the assumption that as levels of education increase, people view situations less in terms of winners and losers. Well, that is the case, but only up to a point, because the most educated people, people with PhDs, well, they often have the strongest zero-sum beliefs. Guilty as charged.

Stephanie Stancheva says that that might be because graduate programmes are highly competitive and she found that where intense competition exists in different circumstances, then so too does that kind of thinking. Within the US, zero-sum thinking is actually much more prevalent in urban areas than in rural areas and you could

Map it to this idea of urban areas might have a larger competition for jobs, for housing that could foster this type of zero-sum mindset as opposed to more rural areas. One of the most zero-sum states is actually New York. One of the least zero sum states is Hawaii, followed by Utah. So there's a possible link here between competition and the number of people with zero-sum beliefs. But Stephanie Stancheva says it's only one of the possible factors that can lead to this type of thinking.

This mindset is very much shaped by your own experiences. And if you have experienced a lot of zero-sum situations, you will be more zero-sum as well. So it's truly rooted in people's reality, in their lived reality. And that doesn't have to be something that happened to you. It could be something that happened to your family. For example, if your ancestors faced extreme zero-sum situations like persecution at the hands of another group.

And one of these important experiences is, of course, slavery and general experiences of enslavement. So not just in the US South, but also the Holocaust or forced reservations of indigenous people. So people who have had these experiences in their family. whose ancestors have lived through these experiences, are much more likely to be zero-sum. And this tends to correlate with, for instance, African Americans in the US being more zero-sum than others.

But being a minority doesn't automatically make someone zero-sum. She says that immigrants to the US are less likely to be zero-sum thinkers because they've chosen to move there and to follow the American dream. And historically, then they've done well economically, and that optimism extends to their children.

within a family if your family has experienced upward mobility so if you do better than your parents for instance you are also less likely to think in zero-sum terms so it is very much related to the economic experience But if you combine a lack of upward mobility, stagnant economic growth, and increased competition for resources, such as a limited amount of social housing or healthcare, well then... zero-sum thinking becomes more common.

are much more zero-sum than older generations. It is a very striking pattern. It is true in the US, and it is also true in other rich countries. How can we explain this mindset? And we see that it's very related to the economic environment, specifically to economic mobility. So generations that have lived, grown up in times where there was more mobility and more growth are less zero-sum. So those tend to be the older generations in the US and in other rich countries today.

On the other hand, the younger generations grow up at times with lower growth, lower mobility, and they are much more likely to think in zero-sum terms. Stephanie Stanchever's research suggests that when resources are scarce, like the extended period of austerity that we've had in the UK, well then zero-sum thinking will dominate. So, how do these zero-sum thinkers then see the world?

and behave. That's exactly what my next guest has been trying to find out. My name is Patricia Andrews Farron. I am a social psychologist, and my research examines implicit game theories, so in particular, the zero-sum mindset. A zero-sum game is any game or situation in which two people can't be successful together.

And then a mindset is like a mental model that we adopt to try to make sense of the world around us and how to behave in it. Given that people with a zero-sum mindset think in quite dog-eat-dog terms...

I asked if this is, well, is it all just a euphemism for people who are ultra-competitive or just antisocial? It's a little bit more nuanced than that because when you see the world as a zero-sum game, it... restricts your strategic options and not necessarily because you're mean or don't want to contribute so much as that it seems like the only choice.

It removes cooperation as a viable path and really reduces you to something more like fight or flight. So you're more likely to either avoid it, which can also lead to a lot of missing out on competitions that you should have engaged in. But then also if you. are engaging, then you might feel the need to engage in a cutthroat way, sort of like a take no prisoners kind of way of being competitive. Well, that seems a bit extreme.

So why can't people with a zero-sum mindset cooperate easily with others? They tend to see the world through the lens of fixed scarcity, through really rigid... hierarchies and cutthroat competition. And this makes the world a very dangerous place. So in my research, I find that people with a zero-sum mindset are just much more likely to interpret someone's actions as hostile.

And that's a problem because if you are perceiving hostility in others, you're going to respond in a way that creates your reality. I think that's one of the other things about... mindsets that is so powerful is that when you perceive the world as if it is dangerous and threatening and hostile and zero-sum, then

You respond with those kinds of strategies. And then suddenly other people around you who might have otherwise been allies and collaborators, they'll respond in turn. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way. You create the reality that you see. What are the implications for people's mental health then about thinking that way?

So there's definitely a strong relationship between the zero-sum mindset and so generally low trust, higher levels of depression and higher levels of what's called relative deprivation, independent of... actual deprivation. So in other words, two people with the same objective amount of resources, the person with the zero-sum mindset is much more inclined to experience that as deprivation.

And as well as feeling poorer, a lack of willingness to cooperate could actually make people with a zero-sum mindset poorer than they could be. In life and business and economics, these are areas where maybe there's some competition, but there's definitely essential needs for cooperation as well. And so if you're approaching...

these areas with the zero-sum lens, you're missing out on opportunities where you really needed an ally to be successful, or you really needed a little bit more trust to experience growth. And so what we find is in the workplace... People with this zero-sum mindset might tend to see status in the organization as more zero-sum and therefore be more likely to try to use dominance and fear tactics. This can also earn you some enemies.

We've also found that people tend to experience less growth. It's not necessarily that they are losing or going down economically from where they started, but they comparatively experience a lot less. They don't grow the pie as much.

So even though I said right back at the start of the episode that zero-sum thinking is neither moral nor immoral, right or wrong, it can make you less well-off than you could be and it can make your life feel more miserable. However... it also makes you the sort of person that Britain's insurgent political parties, Reform and the Greens, are looking out for because they say that they have answers as to why you're losing out and who is gaining at your expense.

Millions of people are being allowed into Britain, most of whom by the way don't even work. and are costing us a fortune. We have so much more in common than the 1%, the 1% being corporations that are destroying our environment, destroying our democracy and destroying our communities. Well, that was the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage. and the leader of the Green Party, Zach Polanski.

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Cleo Watson is a veteran political campaigner, having worked for both the Obama campaign and Vote Leave and in government for Theresa May and Boris Johnson. She is also the presenter of How to Win a Campaign here on Radio 4. She told me that the Greens and reform are targeting zero-sum voters because they're leaning into an attitude that's been growing since the financial crisis almost two decades ago. I think that politics and particularly campaigning is...

a battleground and you wield whatever weapon you can. But I think the 2008 crash in austerity, what it really did was People who do not feel well off and do not feel like the state is serving them and that the country is going the direction they want, they really suffered both from the initial crash in 2008 and austerity afterwards.

and elites in the establishment, people are left thinking, one will for them are two tier, or this is for the few, not the many. And you can see how it does all come down to... a sense of winning and losing us and them. Ian Mansfield, director of research at Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think tank, says that a zero-sum populace is also a direct result of politicians simply failing to deliver on their promises.

when they vote for politicians, those politicians don't seem to have any power and that they're increasingly being made by quangos and by courts, rather than what the politicians said in their manifesto. And that's something which we don't think is healthy for our democracy or for commanding public confidence. And it feeds into this sort of zero-sum thinking. And that dissatisfaction has been very clear since the 2024 general election.

People are very dissatisfied with the Conservatives. They voted Labour in, but they're not seeing those improvements. So the natural response is to try the right or the left, whether that's reform, perhaps the Greens. The real question for the centre is, can it take the hard decisions? And I know we're talking about zero-sum or win-win, but very few things are pure Pareto improvements, by which I mean no one is worse off.

You can make these sorts of choices in multiple different ways, but if the centre parties aren't willing to make those choices at all, then I think they may keep losing ground to the insurgents. Cleo Watson argues that these insurgent parties are targeting the group who are most likely to have a zero-sum mindset, and that is young voters who've only ever known austerity in their adult lives.

There are young people who don't feel like they have good prospects. And you can also sense how they have parents and grandparents who have been let down again and again by the more traditional parties. There was obviously a trust issue. Interestingly, these young people think, I'm yearning to get involved in something, I want to do something now. And there was a certain glamour to a lot of the content being made.

by these, let's call them insurgent parties. It's not just the parties themselves. It's also having a sort of figurehead who is authentic and engaging and can... win over people and can convince them that particularly if they are zero something because they have their best interests at heart and it's it's actually quite hard to do that if you are

the prime minister or the leader of the opposition, because you become establishment figures, particularly now when you have these kind of new and exciting insurgents. But is there a price to be paid for this kind of campaigning? Dr Parth Patel is the Associate Director for Democracy and Politics at the left-leaning think tank, the IPPR. He worries that when parties lean into an us-and-them tactic...

It erodes social cohesion. When we think about winners and losers, there's usually two types of losers that people pick out. It's immigrants and the 1%. And today in British politics, immigrants are certainly the story of the day. And when you peel that back, there's a darker underbelly.

Behind some of those discussions, of course, the Reform Party's top of the polls and its animating issue is immigration. What actors on the right more broadly are advancing is a different way of thinking about the common good. That's not just challenging what is good, but who is common. And...

It's largely left uncontested at the moment. And so the idea of the nation, the British nation, is being remoulded from a civic community defined by shared institutions and shared space to an ethnic community defined by blood, about ancient rights and claims. But he also says that a zero-sum political strategy can be used for what he calls the common good.

We need to almost try and turn the logic of zero-sum politics against those who exploit and abuse it. And for one group to win, another must lose. But for the group on the side of the common good to win...

The people who have to lose are the people who put themselves above the common good. The people who want to live here but pay taxes elsewhere, who want to break up the NHS because actually they use private healthcare insurance anyway and don't care about other people. People who say, not in my backyard. And I think you could...

probably articulate a project for the Commons that does have enemies, enemies of the nation. But does zero-sum thinking present a greater threat beyond making us more divided?

as a nation. Psychologist Patricia Andrews-Feron has been researching how people with zero-sum mindsets engage with politics, and she says that sometimes it could threaten democracy itself.

We've described the zero-sum mindset strategic response as being fundamentally about fight or flight. This is something that we see in our preliminary evidence or evidence under review. We see that people with the zero-sum mindset either diseng... from democratic processes so that flight or they fight that they're more willing to use

kind of underhanded, nasty tactics that will undermine democratic processes and the integrity of democratic processes. One of the biggest ones is a more blatant willingness to undermine another person's. basic right to vote. So this comes with undermining election integrity, even if it was fairly done. It also comes with a lack of pluralism, a willingness to sort of squelch the basic rights of others.

And then behaviorally, what it has looked like is greater rates of political violence or intimidation to try to achieve a political goal. So far, thankfully, disenfranchisement and claims of vote fixing have happened rarely in the UK. And according to polling by the Electoral Commission, 79% of people are still confident that our elections are run well.

However, the 2024 vote also had the second lowest turnout since the First World War. So, maybe it's the case that zero-sum thinkers chose flight over fight. But given the low turnout that's required to win a majority in Westminster, what would happen if they did all go to the ballot box en masse? Political strategist Cleo Watson still doubts that appealing to only zero-sum thinkers could win any party an election.

Going right back to the very basics of campaigning, you will know if you have your base and you will know that that base alone is not big enough to win an election outright. And so you do need to think how... wide-ranging and appealing you can be. And in my experience, you can have campaigns that essentially do both. So good examples are things like take back control, levelling up.

And for Jeremy Corbyn, say, for the many, not the few. You can be an exciting insurgent campaign, but actually when it comes to governing, you have a message. Let's use something like levelling up from Boris Johnson. That is really open to interpretation. It's always something because it could easily vote for him based on that kind of message.

Because obviously it means something slightly different in the north or south of England or your age or education level or something like that. But the problem with governing is then you have to put it into action, you let people down, and then you have a record to defend. Ian Mansfield from Policy Exchange says that politicians can avoid letting down the electorate. He says government does have the policy levers to deliver on political promises. It just needs stronger resolve.

While we're not on the brink, it's something which we should always worry about. And as someone who is a firm believer in the democratic system, then what I think the thing we need to do is not be afraid to change the law, to show that our system is responsive to democracy and not... bound in.

by international conventions, by laws passed decades ago. And we can do that through democratic means. The House of Commons is sovereign. And that would be the best way of rebutting any of those elements which may be tempted to flirt with extremism. either the right or the left. And Parth Patel from the IPPR says that hostility, fear and isolation instilled by zero-sum thinking can be countered by focusing on the common values that we all share.

I don't think it's true that Britain is broken, certainly not in the way its enemies want us to think. And there's sort of a set of culture warriors that want us to think. that we all hate each other, that Britain is lawless and it's on the edge of civil war. And that's just certainly not the case every time you go into a pub, a park or a school. Last time I checked, most people still offer directions to strangers or carry in their groceries for their elderly neighbour.

or buy their friends a pint or cook food for guests when they come over. We still do these things. This is the kind of baseline mutuality that binds us. And that's the sort of thing that I'm talking about that you need to lean into and try and extract and for the government to say, I see you.

And I want to support you. And I'm on your side. Now, you might be thinking, look, this is all just a bit too idealistic. You know better. Life really is zero sum. There definitely are winners and losers. We all know that there are simply situations like this. Well, here's the thing. I've got news for you. Psychologist Patricia Andrews-Feron says, really, it's all just a matter of perspective. So two players in a tennis match, at least within the bounds of the reality of that tennis game.

it is zero sum. In order for one player to win that match, the other player has to lose. That is just logically how it's set up. However, if you were to just take even a half step back and consider how this very real zero sum game...

is situated in a broader context. You'll find that those two players at the very least getting exercise or enjoying the sport, maybe they're becoming better players from having a really strong competitor. And then of course, So you can zoom out even more and see like, oh, there are other people that may enjoy watching the game or all of the positive sum goods that can emerge even from something that we can all agree is a prototypical zero sum game.

And of course, if a tennis player does lose a match, and that's something I'm very familiar with, well, look, there's always the chance they'll win the next one, because otherwise, what's the point of playing at all? Patricia Andrews-Feron also says that zero-sum thinkers, they may think that resources are...

scarce and we need to fight over them. But that isn't a permanent situation either. Scarcity can change. The scarcity is malleable. There are ways that I can grow the pie or find it's only scarce right now. I guess that this feels very real to me right now. We've recently had twins.

And something that someone told me that I really enjoyed was, you know, with kids, there's never enough, never enough time, never enough money, never enough sleep. But, you know, there's always enough. And I think that sense of enoughness. can be such an asset to us in how we think through and navigate our lives. There's an old expression about American politics that I picked up in my decade of living in the States. Politics ain't beanbag.

What's beanbag? Glad you asked. It's a genteel game of tossing a small bean-filled bag back and forth. The fun they must have had a century ago. But politics is not so genteel. It's rough and tumble, red in tooth and claw, about winners winning and losers losing. And lots of politicians certainly think about it that way, including President Trump, who sees the world very much through that lens. Remember his famous line,

We're going to win so much you may even get tired of winning. Indeed. But if the world really was just zero-sum, if my gain was your loss and vice versa, well, then we'd all just still be scrabbling around in the dirt trying to stay alive. But that's hardly the case. We are many times richer than a century ago, back when our ancestors were playing beanbag. Now, whether you think that that came about...

because of trade and capitalism or solidarity and socialism, well, that might depend on your politics. But almost all of us are far, far richer than our grandparents and our great-grandparents. But what about compared... to our parents. Well, since at least the global financial crisis in 2008... Many of us have been stuck in a rut with an economy that's barely growing, an ever-rising cost of living and an unaffordable housing market.

And at the same time, our countries have become much more diverse with historically high levels of immigration. The toxicity of our current politics, well, it might owe something to this, an economy that feels zero-sum and a scapegoat. to blame or if your politics differ there's always the big corporations and bankers to go after because if someone else is doing well then i must be losing out right

It's not easy to snap out of this winners versus losers zero-sum mindset. Indeed, it probably made a lot of sense to early humans who never knew where their next meal might come from. We do, though. At least most of us, certainly most listeners to a Radio 4 show, we have enough. And though others will certainly have more, the challenge for all of us is not to envy the winners or disdain the losers.

but to have a sense of what Patricia Andrews Firon called enoughness. Easy to say, right? Would be lovely. But don't quote that back to me next time I moan about looking for a seat on a packed commuter train. Well, that's it for this episode, but to find out more about how the ideas we're discussing in this series are making us rethink our future, go to bbc.co.uk forward slash rethink and follow the links to The Open University.

In the future, will your taxi fly? I'm Greg Foote, host of the BBC Radio 4 show and podcast Sliced Bread. And now, dough! In Doe, we explore future wonder products that might rise to success and redefine our lives. Might delivery drones make popping to the shops a thing of the past? On-demand drone delivery could be absolutely huge.

Cars do the driving for us. If you say this whole driving thing, it's a thing that's only ever meant for humans. That's obviously for the birds. Each episode, I sit down with entrepreneurs and experts to discuss what today's everyday technology may look like tomorrow. Find out on Doe. Listen first on BBC Sounds. You get unlimited articles and videos, hundreds of ad-free podcasts and the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7. From less than a dollar a week for your first year...

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