Gah

So I just finished writing a Commonwealth essay for homework and the topic was “Is competition good for us? Is there an alternative?”

I wrote something along the lines of “society slowly moving away from a competitive model towards a cooperative one” and I felt pretty good with myself because I thought I had something new going on.

Then, I read about Robert Wright’s take on the game theory on Wikipedia…

It has been theorized by, among others, Robert Wright, that society becomes increasingly non-zero-sum as it becomes more complex, specialized, and interdependent. As one supporter of this view states:

The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win-win solutions instead of win-lose solutions…. Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well – so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other – Bill Clinton, Wired interview, December 2000.

Damn. I guess it’s impossible to come up with new theories nowadays. Oh why wasn’t I born a few decades earlier? Sigh, I guess coming up with the theory independantly is quite an achievement, but I think the teacher isn’t likely to give any good grades for rewriting someone else’s theory in a slightly different way…