Zero Sum Thinking: Origins and Implications

A week after being awarded the A.SK Bright Mind Award at the WZB, Harvard economist Stefanie Stantcheva will give a WZB Talk on the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking - the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others.

Using a new survey of a representative sample of 20,400 US residents, she and her co-authors measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy views, and a rich array of ancestral information spanning four generations. They find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Furthermore, zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.

Stefanie Stantcheva is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard and founder of the Social Economics Lab. On November 14, 2023, she is awarded one of the A.SK Bright Mind Awards alongside the Princeton sociologist Filiz Garip.

Please note that this event takes place in English only with no translation.

The event is part of the WZB Talks series.