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        ID-4-2          Zero sum games.               November 26th, 1985




        Zero sum games.


        Think of yourself as a leaking bucket.

        You have only so much water-money and it is leaking away 
        through holes in the sides and the bottom.

        The leaks in the bottom are constant, as long as you have 
        anything they will keep running - rent, food, fuel, etc

        The side leaks are only relevant when the level is high - they  
        represent spending you do when you can afford to.

        Your bucket is filled from a variety of more or less reliable 
        sources representing income from employers, customers, lotteries, 
        government subsidies and other trickle down phenomena.

        Whenever money leaves your bucket it is essentially gone, and any 
        that returns to your income does so entirely by chance.

        Since your sources of supply are not entirely reliable, you are 
        generally concerned about the level in your bucket, as is 
        everybody else.

        Nobody seems to think they have enough.

        When you deal with another person money flows from one bucket to 
        another.

        It's everyman for himself out there.

        Only a fool would think otherwise.

        A competitive game for survival thus dominates the economic 
        interactions between people in community, and between communities 
        in the world.

        Given that this is so, the basic strategies and tactics assumed 
        by the players will be selected for their competitive power.

        This point is so clear to most people already that the major 
        difficulty for them is to see that different games with different 
        behaviours are at all possible.














        Landsman Community Services Ltd.              ID-4-2    Page    1