WPR's The New Rules: A Zero-Sum Future Doesn't Add Up
Monday, November 1, 2010 at 9:14AM
Writing recently in the Financial Times, long-time economic journalist Gideon Rachman lamented the passing of a post-Cold War "golden age," in which "countries shared a belief in globalization and Western democratic values." In Rachman's calculation, that consensus has been battered by the global financial crisis, which ushered in a "new, less-predictable era."
Rachman, whose book entitled "Zero-Sum Future" comes out next February, is clearly prepping the literary battlefield by positioning himself as an "anti-Robert Wright." The latter's book, "Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny," argued that human progress has been characterized by -- and thus depends on -- our increasing appreciation for and adoption of cooperative behaviors. So when Rachman predicts more unpredictability, he's really predicting less cooperation and more conflict -- today's currency wars translated into tomorrow's shooting wars.
Read the entire column at World Politics Review.
Reader Comments (3)
Nice agreement among two old-core pillars.
When do we start to see these kinds of agreements among new core pillars? It seems as if the agreements there are more about raw materials and food stuffs (lower on the chain), so is it only a matter of new-core and new-to-the-core countries growing up?
Hey Tom, have you by chance read Robert Wright's "Evolution of God"? Great book, one of my favorite reads of the year. When he talks about the non-zero-sumness of polytheistic trading societies vs the zero-sumness of monotheistic 'mercantile' societies, I immediately checked to see if Robert Wright was just your pen name.
We had coffee at Princeton and talked about it while he was writing it, but I have not gotten around to the book. Trying.