Don't get down; someone is not getting up

Sadly today was the first day I actually ducked against my bedroom wall because I thought a plane flying overhead was going to drop a bomb. In retrospect my own behavior scares me more than the perceived threat from which I hid.

I have become an adamant admirer of non-zero-sum games. That probably comes from my penchant for the economy as a complex system. A non-zero-sum game describes a situation in which the sum of the of loss and gain of each participating party does not equal zero. In contrast, a zero-sum game occurs when the benefit of the winner exactly equals the loss of the loser. For example, in a game of soccer, at the end of the match, one team has lost, the other won. The utility of each result is equal and opposite. In contrast, in a non-zero-sum game such as economy, both parties can gain. When you sacrifice your leisure time to work for your company, you benefit the company and are in turn rewarded with a paycheck.

Why doesn't any national political move in the last few years reflect this world view? I have never taken a political science or public policy class so please correct me if I sound naive. If only we understood our neighbors' utility to directly benefit our own. Man's inability to recognize his negative and positive externalities just might be his second fundamental depravity.

Atleast some people are thinking about the world in a non-zero-sum way, and some of them are even optimistic about the world's future! Meet Robert Wright, best-selling author of Nonzero and The Moral Animal. Catch a video of his inspiring talk to the TED conference at ted.com and realize that everything might not be so bad afterall if we just learn to lend a helping hand.