Comment by Workaccount2

I think what's meant is that you need to be open to changing your opinion and manner of approach to things. To stay with the analogy: when you "remake" your bed and it ends up the same, chances are that you didn't try to improve on its design.

By turning on Fox sometimes (provided it's not your main source) you might already not fall into the category of people not trying to remake their bed.

Well, the first thing is to realize CNN is also just a stream of lies and BS. Every media news organization in the world has become (they always were?) pure garbage.

Listening to first-hand sources is the way, I guess, but also remembering they can be lying as well, so be vigilant.

I'm speaking about the collectives, not the individuals. There are always deranged individuals and some of them, many of them, manage to get in power. But the ideological collectives all have pretty much the same core goals. Needs met, population happy.

This is incorrect. There are few physical resources that we have reached the limit of, such that one entity’s gain is necessarily another’s loss. There are also a great many things of value that aren’t simply raw resources, for which the pie will never be fixed, because the pie is made by humans and can be made bigger or smaller.

This zero-sum narrative is only true in a world of no growth, where all resources are being fully utilized to maximum effect. That is very far from the world we live in, where there is enormous room for additional extraction, creation, and efficient utilization of resources.

I guess I can interpret the strongest form of your argument to suggest that resources and markets have a specific level of economically relevant supply at any specific time, which I suppose is an empirical claim that’s true. I feel like recent days’ trade policy earthquakes might operate along a similar line of reasoning: there’s only so much, “they’ve” been getting better off, which means they’ve been “taking” from the US, so the US is taking back.

In the same sense it’s true that there are only so many bushels of seed corn left after the winter. At the moment, we can squabble over how to divide the fixed supply. I could take all the corn, eat half, keep the rest for myself to plant this season. Or, if I’ve already got enough to plant all my land, and you’ve got more land and nothing else to do, I could invest some of my leftover corn with you and we can all have double the harvest in a few months… when the supply will have dramatically expanded, assuming I don’t treat it as a zero-sum game right now. Or I could focus on “winning” right now, and we’ll both be poorer after the harvest than we would have been otherwise.

While I agree that you could frame most any political issue in zero-sum terms, I feel like the blind spot is the same: it tallies the score based on assumptions fixed in time, and it takes a pessimistic view of cooperative potential, of humans’ power to influence the constraints themselves.

That's not how economics works. The pie is not fixed, it tends to grow over time as there's more trade between countries and their economies get bigger. The global economic pie has increased a massive amount over the past century.