The Roots of our Zero-Sum Moment

Mar 9, 2026

Stefanie Stantcheva, Harvard economist who leads the Social Economics Lab, explores zero-sum thinking and its roots. She discusses how lived experience, intergenerational mobility, immigration history, and slavery shape views. Conversations cover generational shifts, geographic patterns, links to anger in politics, policy preferences around redistribution and immigration, and upcoming work on AI and collaboration.

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INSIGHT

Family Mobility Shapes Zero-Sum Beliefs

Personal and family upward mobility reduces zero-sum thinking: seeing your family do better across generations fosters a positive-sum mindset.
The paper measures family histories across parents and grandparents to link micro mobility to mindset.

INSIGHT

Zero-Sum Mindset Produces Crosscutting Policy Preferences

Zero-sum mindset predicts a mix of policy preferences: more support for redistribution and affirmative action, and simultaneously more support for restrictive immigration and protectionism.
This mindset explains within-party divides (e.g., more zero-sum Democrats favor stricter immigration; more zero-sum Republicans favor more redistribution).

ANECDOTE

Unexpected State Map Places New York As Most Zero-Sum

The paper's state map surprised researchers: Utah ranked least zero-sum while New York ranked most zero-sum, defying simple red/blue expectations.
Stantcheva cautions this could reflect selection or treatment effects from local experiences like housing competition.

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Stefanie Stantcheva is an economist at Harvard and the head of the Social Economics Lab, where her team has done extraordinary work investigating how people form their opinions about economic and political topics. That work was the subject of an earlier New Bazaar episode.

In this episode, Stefanie chats with Cardiff about the findings in her paper (with co-authors Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, and Sandra Sequeira), “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences,” which was just published in the American Economic Review.

From the paper’s abstract:

“We 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. 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 and Cardiff also discuss:

Rising anger in American society
The subtle ways that the two major political parties are similar and different when it comes to zero-sum thinking
The economic geography of zero-sum thought
The finding that surprised her the most
The generational gap in zero-sum thinking between young and old
The policy implications of her research

Finally, Stefanie previews her upcoming work on zero-sum thinking and concerns about AI.

Related links:

“Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences”
“To understand America today, study the zero-sum mindset” (Stefanie’s guest essay in The Economist)
“Emotions and Policy Views” (Stefanie’s working paper with Yann Algan, Eva Davoine, and Thomas Renault)
“Dancing with the Stars” (Stefanie’s paper with Ufuk Akcigit, Santiago Caicedo, Ernest Miguelez, and Valerio Sterzi)

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