Why do people believe in a zero-sum economy?

Abstract

Zero-sum thinking and aversion to trade pervade our society, yet fly in the face of everyday experience and the consensus of economists. Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) evolutionary model invokes coalitional psychology to explain these puzzling intuitions. I raise several empirical challenges to this explanation, proposing two alternative mechanisms - intuitive mercantilism (assigning value to money rather than goods) and errors in perspective-taking.

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