Life is Not Zero Sum Game

I am tiring of reading posts where people who have so much think that giving people who have very little hurts the people with so much. Life is not one pie, where if you take a giant slice that leaves only a little slice for me. Zero sum is a pie.

But let’s look at things slightly differently. If you make pies to sell and there are only 10 people out of 100 who can buy your pies because they are the only people who have enough money to buy pie then your earnings are limited.

If you helped educate some of the 90 who can’t afford pie so they could get a better paying job then after a little bit of time of the number of people who could afford to buy your pies increases, which gives you the opportunity for more money.

If after time the population went from 10% who could buy pie to 99% you would be better off as a pie baker and the pie buyers would be better off because now they could have pie too.

Helping the 90% did not mean that the 10%, who could have pie at the beginning could not have pie, but helping the 90% not only helped them, but it helped the pie baker and the flour Miller, and the apple farmer and the box maker and the sugar importer because now the pie maker was able to sell more pies.

It works conversely too. If there are only 10% who can afford pies there is a chance that the pie maker can’t earn enough to bother selling pies and might go out of business so none of the 10% will have pie.

Henry Ford understood that if he paid his employees a good wage they could afford to buy his cars.

At first Ford could have kept wages low, but then he would have sold fewer cars in the long run and selling more cars over a longer period of time earned him more money. The more people who drive Fords the better an advertisement it was for Ford.

Investing in making all people better helps everyone. The people that make and sell things have a market to make more. The people who had nothing to start get to have something, which is what people need to get started having more.

Having well educated, people who have opportunities helps a whole community. Having a good community makes a place more valuable.

Having a community where there are very few people who have enough and a lot of people with nothing makes the value of the community as a whole go down and it is hard to turn around. So investing in your community is not a hardship, but an opportunity to make it better for yourself and everyone else.

Someone having less does not give you more So why would you not want everyone to have more?