Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.

I’ll begin with a confession. Our 23-year-old daughter, who is a financial analyst with a degree in business administration, has forgotten more about economics that I will ever know. Even so, this column begins with an economic observation.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump was asked during an interview with AARP how he would combat high prices. His response: “We’re going to start by drilling and getting oil. I call it ‘drill, baby, drill’.”

That response got me to thinking that there are several different kinds of economic models we could choose to follow. “Drill, baby, drill” is the battle cry for one model, which I call an ‘exploitation economy:’ an economy based on exploiting non-renewable natural resources. The Americas, both North and South, have been in the crosshairs of exploitation economies for centuries.

Originally, the Americas were targeted by exploitation economies based in Europe, but as the Americas became colonized by Europeans, these new Americans took over the controls of various exploitation economies that traded in gold, furs, coal, oil and other natural resources.

One problem with exploitation economies is that these resources eventually run out or become increasingly expensive to exploit, both in terms of the cost of recovery and the environmental damage left behind. How many bison are left in the American west? Someday, our oil, gas and coal reserves will go the way of the buffalo — if the environmental cost of burning those fuels doesn’t get us first.

An even bigger problem with exploitation economies is a psychological, philosophical or, dare I say it, a spiritual one. There is only so much oil and only so much coal. An exploitation economy is a zero-sum game. There are only so many resources to exploit, so my getting mine necessarily makes it harder for someone else to get his or hers.

As a result, zero-sum exploitation economies inevitably set up oppositions: what’s mine and what’s yours, haves and have nots, winners and losers, us and them. As an alternative to exploitation economies, I envision ‘innovation economies:’ economies that foster the incubation of forward-looking technologies and fresh ways of thinking and doing things. For me, the principal advantage of an innovation economy is that, rather than setting up fights over who gets how big a slice of the pie, innovation economies seek to grow the pie. They create new wealth to lift up all the boats rather than perpetuating a system in which one person’s success depends upon another person’s failure.

In an exploitation economy, renewable-energy technology is a threat to the fossil-fuel industry and must be thwarted. In an innovation economy, renewable-energy technology is an opportunity to be embraced and a boon to all.

Moreover, getting past zero-sum thinking has applications beyond economics. President Trump was re-elected in part because of a platform that vilified immigrants and defined them as a threat. But aren’t there ways of characterizing the large number of people who want to come here in search of opportunities? Maybe immigrants are not invaders from whom we need to be protected but are, instead, potential partners in making America great in new and unexpected ways.

Perhaps most sad of all, zero-sum thinking seems to have found its way into the so-called culture wars.

Take, for example, the Defense of Marriage Act from the 1990s, which sought to legally define marriage as a union of one man and one woman. I never understood how my marriage to Nancy Jo had to be defended against the marriages of same-sex couples. Just how do their marriages threaten mine?

If marriage is such a great institution, and I believe that it is, isn’t the institution strengthened by allowing more people to participate in it? And if marriage is good for society as a whole, isn’t society benefitted by allowing more couples to marry? Grow the pie.

While same-sex marriage was the big cultural battlefield of the 1990s, today’s culture wars are being fought over, among other things, the rights, health and safety of transgender people.

Just as I could never understand how a same-sex marriage threatens my “traditional” marriage, I just cannot see the harm that could result from viewing sex and gender as a continuum or a mosaic rather than a binary either/or proposition. It seem obvious to me that society as a whole benefits from having more people rather than fewer people feeling affirmed and safe in their gender identities. Don’t we all win when fewer of us have to defend ourselves against those who claim that our very identities are somehow wrong? How does society benefit from a governmental edict that there are two sexes and no genders, an edict that tells thousands of people that they do not exist?

Like acceptance of same-sex marriage, acceptance of transgender people is an application of innovation-economy principles to a social issue. Perhaps we could devote a little bit more time and energy to increasing the number of people we are willing to call “us” and stop working so hard to identify some people as threats and walling “them” off from “us.”

Let’s grow the we.