Every country has its depressed regions, dominated by cultures that cling to habits of thought and cultural patterns that no longer take advantage of local resources and global markets and so deprive them of opportunity, wealth, and happiness: its mezzogiorno, its Ostmark, its Appalachia. Yet only in America today does it seem to amount to half a country, and have a plutocratic poiltical party fighting hard to enlarge it: Noah Smith: Zero-Sum Thinking Makes Our Fights Much Nastier: "Universities, meanwhile, continue to be the engine of American technological dominance...
...But they are increasingly under attack from conservatives who worry they serve as engines of liberal indoctrination, causing Republicans to threaten to cut their funding. Strangling the world’s best university system might make the U.S. a bit less liberal, but it would certainly make the country significantly poorer. In all of these cases, zero-sum thinking is replacing the win-win thinking that prevailed throughout much of the 20th century. In a world of slow growth, inequality and reduced opportunity, there’s a seductive tendency to think that one can only be enriched if one’s neighbor is beggared. The danger is that policy becomes something like war was for our ancestors—a struggle of interest group against interest group that ends up harming all the groups at once. Our ancestors spent millennia trapped in a self-destructive cycle of constant warfare. Let’s try not to get trapped in a cycle of bitter zero-sum policy battles. In such a world, there are no real winners...
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