The Zero Sum

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* If I am having sex with a woman you are not. If she is pergnant with, nursing, and rearing my children, she is not doing so for yours. In all but the most bizarre and perverse situations, this stuff occurs in some kind of monogamous, or at least matrimonial, relationship, usually with a component of domestic teamwork. I’ll make it concrete. I have a wife and son. I work and they – and only they – get to live on my dime. No one else gets to make whoopie with me or my wife. She only makes babies for me, I only put babies in her. Other people might like to bang me or her, but they lost out to the competition. That’s what zero-sum is all about. A limited resource (my wife’s cha-cha, womb, caregiving, etc. and my hoo-hoo dilly and earnings) is only available to one person. Everyone else loses out. It’s the same with many things: land, food, water, people. If I’m occupying it, eating it, drinking it, or banging it, you ain’t. In fact, very little is not a zero-sum game in this world. Information is a classic example (everyone in the world can read The Iliad at the same time, no trouble, with no one else being prevented from it). But even certain kinds of information are zero-sum (e.g., trade secrets).