If you don't know what zero-sum game means, which you apparently don't, you should look it up.
It means that when person X is better off by $1, someone else is not worse off by $1.
All you have to do is think about how voluntary transactions work -- both parties are better off. The fact that money is involved doesn't change that.
I know exactly what a zero-sum game is. What I can't tell is if you are willfully choosing to disregard what I wrote, or if you truly can't grasp it. Or if there's just some random tangent applied to it that gets some people to accept lowered wages.
The
reality is that much of the country has seen their effective wages go down, and their benefits slashed or removed altogether, while others within their same organization benefit greatly. This has nothing to do with a "non zero-sum game", unless there's some alternate meaning we're talking about here. Any time I've heard "it's not a zero-sum game" used to approve of monetary outcome, it's been to silence someone complaining about their small gain or non-gain in relation to someone else's big gain, saying that the one person's success is not hurting the other person (true, whether it's morally right or not). I don't know how using "it's not a zero-sum game" can be used to approve of one person
actually losing while another gains.
Or is this supported because Aye's loss of 1, and Bee's increase of 100, means that because there's a total increase of 99, Aye's loss doesn't matter because there's overall benefit? If so, that's about the stupidest thing I've heard. If this is the case, then lower wages and benefits could never be seen as bad, as long as someone is gaining to offset it. And if
that's what you are trying to say, then I guess we have nothing else to talk about.
Let me try to be clear: I'm talking about people who really have seen their wages go down. Not this hypothetical "Well, because that other person got so much, you just feel like you have less." They are actually making less.
Am I missing something here?
I wonder what these executive bonuses and salaries will be like in ten years? If they keep having to outdo each other, it won't be long before we're in the hundreds of millions per year.