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Is there a term / better way of phrasing the general case where an intervention helps certain individuals do better at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any external value?
freedomandutility10

I think I agree with you, but I also think it's very useful to think of games as fixed-sum when making decisions relating to them.

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4Dagon
It's very often worth noticing these features in interpersonal, small-scale decisions.  Whether you frame it as "look for the win-win", "avoid zero-sum sub-games", or "prefer kindness over winning", it's good advice. I don't know many cases where it's useful on the general topics you give as examples (industries, education as a whole, dating).   I should probably admit that I actually do care about myself and those close to me more than strangers, and I acknowledge that there is some amount of zero-sum outcomes in our current perceptions of individual identity.  The overall game of individual existence is a mix of many games, and winning some of the zero-sum components lets me get higher sums on other components.
If individual performance is Pareto distributed, how should we reform education?
Answer by freedomandutility50

If ability in the underlying population is normally distributed, competition for jobs should still leads to people from the right side of the normal distribution ending up in the relevant jobs, and people from the left side of the normal distribution not getting the jobs. If we now measure the performance of people with the jobs, shouldn't we expect the graph to look like the right side of a normal distribution, which looks more like a pareto distribution than an entire normal distribution? 

So surely finding that the performance of employees in a fiel... (read more)

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1yhoiseth
Good question. You might be right about that.