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The rarest asset is mutual benefit
Beyond Zero-Sum
Playing with people and businesses capable of durable mutual benefit means working on a horizon long enough for trust, curiosity, generosity, and real alignment to compound. In a world still dominated by extraction, that orientation may itself become one of the rarest assets.
HEICO's Example
The aerospace company HEICO shows how it looks. Every member of the Mendelsohn family is involved, and the way they treat their employees and interact with the world earns the company a premium valuation and a premium experience. They do the right thing, and they do it consistently.
The Columbia Classroom
The family has joined the Columbia classroom every year for roughly twelve years. Larry Mendelsohn recently passed away, and the semester was dedicated to him. Students see how success can look when you act with integrity over a long period, and they see that you can win without the extractive short-termism that might seem like the fastest way.
Why does a long horizon reward cooperation?
In 1980, political scientist Robert Axelrod invited game theorists to submit strategies for a repeated prisoner's dilemma tournament. The winner was tit for tat, the simplest entry, which cooperated first and then copied the other player's last move. Axelrod found that cooperation pays when players expect to meet again, a point he called the shadow of the future.
How did medieval traders enforce honesty?
Historian Avner Greif studied letters from Jewish merchants who traded across the Mediterranean in the eleventh century, known as the Maghribi traders. They hired overseas agents, and any agent who cheated one merchant was shut out by all the others. That threat made honesty pay without relying on courts. Greif published the analysis in 1989 in the Journal of Economic History.