Much of "How God Makes God" is about the game theory concept of creating wealth. This is a short overview

Game theory is a conceptual framework for dealing with competitive situations in conditions of uncertainty. Making money and creating wealth are certainly within this realm.

Game theory makes an essential conceptual distinction between "zero sum games" and "non zero sum games".

Making money is often associated with "zero sum games", where winners gain at the expense of the losers. This must involve some kind of deceit or trickery which works against the establishment of sound cooperative situations. In terms of any sensible strategy to create wealth this is the worst possible kind of situation to get into.

Real wealth creation is about playing "non zero sum games" where wealth is created as a result of cooperating in a game where every player can be a winner. Cooperation improves efficiency and wealth comes about as a direct result of improved efficiency.

A book by Thomas Schelling, "The Strategy of Conflict", was the trigger which allowed me to see how the setting up of profitable systems of cooperation could be considered a game. By turning his pay-off matrices around (applying cooperation instead of conflict) the game of creating wealth can be viewed in terms of a strategy for setting up arrangements for cooperation.

Using this inversion of Schelling's model, the basic premise of Keynes's famous work on "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" can be interpreted as being about the competitive game played by employers competing with each other for the cooperation of employees.

Using the financial trick of converting incomes into capital and capital into incomes it became patently obvious that long term secure cooperations have immense value. This is the underlying principle of creating wealth and making money .

It is the "secret" of wealth creation: becoming skilled in "non zero sum games" of cooperation which result in increased efficiency.

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