I was taking a bit of a break from writing today and came across this image in my Facebook timeline. My first reaction was to post angrily about the rather ignorant view of economics. To equate real life economics to those of Monopoly implies that the original poster was just completely clueless about economics or, and this is more likely, was deliberately ignoring those differences in order to elicit the sorts of emotional, anti-capitalism comments the post received.

Real world economics, unlike Monopoly is not a zero sum game. There is no fixed amount of either wealth, the bank in Monopoly, or material goods, the various properties. These things are created continually by individuals every day, leaving the entire world better off in the process. As philosopher Harry Binswanger put it in one of his lecture, there was no gigantic hoard of automobiles, iPads, airplanes, televisions, cell phones, stereos, medicine, house, trains, computers and so forth locked away in a castle somewhere in the Middle Ages, hidden away by some nobleman. All of these things were created by the reasoning mind of man and such things are continually being brought into existence today and will be in the future.

So it is simply not true that you “lose immediately” just because someone starts out with more stuff than you. Great men such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller started out with next to nothing and ended up being among the richest men of their times by creating new value where there was none before, cheap steel and oil respectively.

Put I didn’t post that on Facebook. Actually, I didn’t post anything on Facebook. (Well, this post will end  up there.)

The more I thought about the image, the sadder I became as I realized what it implies about the view of the world, of existence, held by the original poster, and likely a good number of the people who shared and commented on it.

How sad it is to believe that the world is a zero sum game like Monopoly. To believe that because one person wins, another person has to lose. The implication is, of course, that if YOU succeed someone else, and judging by the image many someones, will have to fail.  More, what does this imply about achieving non-material values. Does this mean that for you to have love and friendship these same values must be denied to someone else? If not, then why would you expect this to be the case with material values? How can they be any different?

While it is certainly true that with regards to any particular concrete item if one person has it no one else can, this is not true of life as a whole. My success, such as it is, does not come at the expense of someone else but rather from my own efforts. Could I achieve more? Almost certainly and that success too would not come at the expense of someone else either.

While the creator of the image implies that there are people who think everyone who “fails,” whatever that means, is lazy, I don’t know anyone who thinks in such a completely collectivistic, irrational way. Individuals can fail for all sorts of reasons besides being lazy, such as bad luck or making bad choices and I have known people in all three categories and combinations thereof.

If there is a trend of laziness among those who don’t succeed, I think it is caused precisely by the world-view expressed in this image. It is a sort of spiritual laziness based on the view that says:

Well, other people have succeeded and have 95% of the wealth already, so there is no way for me to succeed too. And anyway, if I were to succeed I would just be causing someone else to fail, since life is a zero sum game and no one can win without someone losing. Maybe it isn’t worth succeeding, or even trying, after all.

With such a view of the world, how long would anyone keep trying?

This view reminds me of a lecture at the University of Georgia I read about a couple of years ago. The topic was the argument against success stories and the tagline of the event was apparently “1 in a million means 999,999 left behind.” That is exactly the view expressed here, and is equally false.

The success of others imposes no limitation on your ability to succeed, nor vice versa, and in fact helps you, both by making the world a more prosperous place and by giving you a success story to look up to and say “They made, so can I.”