Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me: when zero-sum believers are in power, they tend to make the world less positive-sum, and when positive-sum believers are in power, they tend to make the world more positive-sum. (Thankfully, I don't live in a polity with an electorate attracted even to negative-sum believers.)

aside: speaking of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44369612 , what do you think of the syntax-as-data in https://rhombus-lang.org ? (end of aside)