Against Positive-Sum Thinking

why conflict is necessary

Conflict is bad. This is my immediate instinct whenever I see people fighting. Not bad in the sense of evil: evidence of moral failing, deserving of punishment and ostracism. Bad in the sense of incompetent: a failure of skill, requiring correction and education. Conflict seems so unnecessary, so wasteful. Couldn’t they just talk it out, get to mutual understanding and then decide on a win-win course of action? Sure, you can construct abstract scenarios where conflict is inevitable, like chess. But in the real world there’s always a way to make both parties better off.

This is what makes economics so attractive as an ideology, especially to verbally intelligent nerds who couldn’t hold their own in a street fight. Hear the Good News of Ronald Coase! It turns out you don’t have to fight at all! You don’t have to choose a side and risk defeat! You don’t even need to leave the comfort of your library! Instead, with the deep academic magic of game theory and mechanism design, with a careful analysis of transaction costs and Nash equilibria, you can find the solution, the way for everyone to be better off and grateful to you, the new Solon, the lawgiver, the magician that inaugurated a new era of peace and prosperity.

the mechanism designer surrounded by admirers (self-portrait)

I’m not even being sarcastic; a part of me deeply believes this. It’s a compelling narrative, that you can do good in the world without ever stepping into the muck of zero-sum conflicts. To look down on all the conflict theorists pulling each other down like crabs in a bucket. To exclude your own interests from consideration with consummate professionalism. To insist with a saintly, patient smile that “I’m just here making sure everyone gets more of what they want”.

So what’s wrong with this perspective? How could enabling consensual, positive-sum interactions ever be a bad thing?

The Limits of Individualism

Humans are a collective species. Just as an anthill is more than the sum of its individual ants, humanity is more than the sum of its individual human beings. Much of what is valuable and meaningful in human life emerges from communities and relationships rather than being located in any individual: traditions, rituals, religions, musical genres, games, arts, ideologies, sciences, the list goes on.

The problem with the typical positive-sum framing is that it privileges the perspective of individual humans and the choices they make individually. But those choices, compounded across people, will nourish some communities and destroy others.

For example, building a railroad connecting a small town to a metropolis seems like a straightforward win - it gives each individual strictly more choices. But it might destroy the culture of the small town as its most driven and ambitious residents take advantage of the shorter commute and spend all their time in the metropolis, while tourism from the metropolis prices out poorer residents and the mom-and-pop burger shop gets replaced with a Five Guys.

While every individual may be better off, the small town and the metropolis, seen as collective entities, are engaged in a genuine conflict over the human resources that are their lifeblood. In particular, eventually we might say so little of the small town’s culture remains that it has died, or perhaps been murdered, though a sense that isn’t captured by our legal codes nor by our economic models.

It’s small comfort that the murder was performed with the consent of individual townsfolk. Imagine luring each ant into a small individual-ant-sized box with honey, then scattering the boxes. This “maximizes the revealed preferences” of each individual ant, but it kills the ant colony as surely as boric acid.

Isn’t this just a complaint about externalities?

A skeptical economist might ask: two people negotiate a contract that harms a third person, perhaps via some spooky mechanism like “culture”, isn’t that just a bog standard externality? Doesn’t the Coase theorem show that we can solve all externalities, provided we have clear enough property rights and low enough transaction costs? Why can’t we just have the groups, that are allegedly fighting to the death, negotiate a win-win bargain with each other?

The problem here is that our legal system is fundamentally oriented around individual rights, not group rights. No group has the property right to any individual. (No group, that is, other than the state). We recognize no legally protected rights of any non-state organization to the attention or time of any person. So deals between groups cannot be made, and reducing transaction costs between individuals will reliably lead, not to Paretotopia, but to the extinction of small groups and the increasing dominance of the state.

I don’t know of a way to legally reify group rights that wouldn’t be a moral catastrophe. I don’t want to re-fight the culture wars of the Enlightenment that led to our individualist world. But insofar as what I value emerges from non-state-mediated communities and relationships, then all the state’s legal machinery and all the economists’ tricks provide me with no protection. I am in the Hobbesian state of nature, locked into a deadly struggle, and must fight for what I believe.

Thanks to Divya Siddharth for the conversation that inspired this essay.