Away from Win-Lose

Win-Win interactions are ones that both parties see as beneficial. For example - a homeless person looking after an empty house, two friends meeting up for a chat or someone with a disposal problem finding someone who actually wants the goods that are in surplus. Win-win interactions are least likely to be formally accounted, perhaps because of the race memory of the gift economy that formed the basis of traditional economies.

Lose-Lose interactions, by contrast, are the most commonly monetized. Since they decrease the welfare of all parties involved, they represent a dead loss to society, as everyone loses out. It is highly regrettable that modern societies are suffering a rapid increase in rent-seeking and other lose-lose interactions, in which both parties undergo unwanted experiences. Money transfers, especially selfish maximisation of profits motivate all manner of such socially destructive practices including predatory lending, frivolous lawsuits, exploitation of legal loopholes, pernicious information hiding etc.

A society with many interactions in the top right (win-win) quadrant can be termed 'healthy' since both parties consider such transactions to boost their welfare. In such a society, the dominant social cycles are likely to be of the positive, life-affirming type rather than the reverse, conflict-based type. Single-value scoring, such as the competitive system of traditional money does not, alas, allow these cases to be identified:(

As the economic sphere swells, ever more activity are brought under zero-sum, financial jurisdiction. This is leading to a rapid increase in lose-lose activity, resulting in ever more destructive and wasteful activity. Even as ths happens, new technology is opening up opportunities for altruistic cooperation, such as www.wikipedia.org and Linux. To magnify the importance of altruistic interactions, the first thing we need is an economic system that can identify them! Altruistic Economics was designed with a multiple value scoring system, so everyone has a chance to independently state their perception of the value of a transaction. An interaction between X and Y can have a result anywhere on the axes shown above.

Human interaction is not zero-sum, and to rid ourselves of a short-sighted, money-obsessed view of what constitutes 'profitable' activity we need an alternative system of economics that reflects this!