Mercantilism assumed a zero-sum static world unlike modern growth economics.

Evidence

[I]mplicit in the “tragedy of mercantilism” was the belief that what was one man’s or country’s gain was another’s loss… . It was, after all, a world in which population remained remarkably static; in which trade and production usually grew only very gradually; in which the limits of the known world were expanded slowly and with great difficulty; in which economic horizons were narrowly limited; and in which man approximated more closely than today to Hobbes’ vision of his natural state: for most men most of the time, life was “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 181

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what the ‘tragedy of mercantilism’ means as a worldview.