The Roots of our Zero-Sum Moment

About this episode

Stefanie Stantcheva discusses her research on zero-sum thinking and its implications for US political differences.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Cardiff

Guest: Stefanie Stantcheva

Topics covered

• zero-sum thinking
• political differences
• government redistribution
• affirmative action
• immigration policies
• economic geography
• generational gap

Keywords

• zero-sum mindset
• political opinions
• economic mobility
• affirmative action
• immigration
• generational differences
• economic geography

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard, American Economic Review

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