Life is not a zero-sum game, or at least it shouldn’t be.

In his announcement to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement last week, Donald Trump said: ‘The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement -- they went wild; they were so happy -- for the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage’. Trump’s statement shows both an astonishing level of cynicism as well as ignorance about how the Paris Climate Agreement was created and is intended to work. But it hints at something deeper too: Trump in this statement is speaking directly to his core voters, the ‘left-behinds’, who respond to this kind of rhetoric and who can relate to a situation in which one party wins at the expense of the other.

The left-behinds respond for a good reason, because indeed they have been left behind. For them, the last twenty years of ‘progress’ have not resulted in any noticeable improvements in living standards. This is because the social contract around economic growth has been broken: a contract in which as economies grow, we all benefit. The positive spill-over effects of growth should take place through the re-investments of profits in further economic activity and in wage growth for everyone. When this doesn’t happen - when profits aren’t reinvested and wages stagnate - we lose the trust that is fundamental to the social contract. In many societies we have failed in this respect and are now dealing with the consequences.

So, Donald Trump gets a point from me, for knowing how to appeal to his core voters. He simultaneously gets minus 1000 points for all the self-harming, short-sighted and ill-informed policy decisions he is making, based on a flawed narrative and understanding of how the world works. Or at least how it should work. Because there is a deeper level of responsibility at play here as well, and that is the responsibility for allowing the phenomenon of Donald Trump to happen. This responsibility lies with the governments that have followed a set of economic policies which have focused on creating economic growth – itself a wonderful thing - without doing the follow-up work of seeing to it that the benefits of this growth are more equally distributed.