Re: It doesn't bother me ( was Re: The Poppy Game)

[Ray Evans Harrell]

.
>
> (REH)
> <<<<
> Maybe you mean to set a context for what you are saying and if that is the
> case then I apologize but you state things as if they are laws and they
> aren't.
> >>>>
>
> Well, I've set a context for those one or two games I've described so far.
> As for their being laws, I haven't said that. Remember that I've said that
> games theory experiments are repeateable, cross cultural and that they are
> saying something valuable *only within the context of the experimental
> parameters*. They're not valid otherwise. 

As if refers to the tone of what you state.   I read it as very certain, almost didactic.    I do the same but I take credit for being didactic about my own experience and history.     We can have parallels but we are each different.

 

 

 
> (REH)    
>  <<<<
> As for the Games?   Game theorists set the rules for the game biasing the
> outcome by the words they use for the rules.  Math serves to eliminate the
> ambiguity of reality.  The problem with ambiguity is that it is the root of
> creativity and change.  That is the flaw IMHO.
> >>>>
>
> Not at all. The theorists set the parameters of the experiments. They don't
> know the 'rules' and they don't set them. They are often surprised by the
> results. In fact, most of those that are published in the literature are
> surprises -- or else they wouldn't be worth publishing.

 

Rule: Mathematics. A standard method or procedure for solving a class of problems. American Heritage Dict.

 

Surprise has nothing to do with it.   They prescribe the rules of the game, not so for the players.    Everyone is surprised by who wins at football.

 

 

> (REH)
> <<<< 
> I published Free Rider Game studies on this list from George Mason
> University four years ago that made the same points but asked embarrasing
> economic questions. The answer was a deafening silence.
> >>>>
>
> Intriguing! I think I was 'resting' from FW list then -- as actors say --
> when I was setting up my business. If you can fish these up from your
> archives and give me references I'd be most interested.

I don't have the archive but it was Robert Sugden writing.   You might try the internet or George Mason University.

 

> (REH)
> <<<<
> Game theory seems to be useful in examining the structures of such things
> but it also is severely limited in its Societal application thus far.
> Remember Enron.
> >>>>
>
> Exactly what I've been saying several times. The conditions have to be
> specified and the parallels with real life clearly established. But games
> theory is having many useful things to say about circumstances when the
> public don't meekly do what the authorities (or the marketing departments
> of corporations) expect them to do.

 

I agree as an approach but not THE approach as many game theorists seem comfortable to assert as well as doing such things as assigning their approach to Nuclear warfare which effects us all.   Such over specialization arrogantly applied to the real world reminds me of the "scientific experiments" of Dr. Mengele who took the Yellow Fever experiments of Walter Reed (who got Army Privates to volunteer to be bitten by mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever,) to a new level.    (Yes the same Walter Reed as in the major Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.)   Can you imagine the uproar if they opened those Mengele experiments and then named a hospital after him in Berlin?    

 

Today's Game Scientists make claims about cross cultural "truths" but the studies I have seen only make very general statements about the culture of the people they use in their experiments and nothing about their individuality except gender and a general set of six "personality catagories" related to the way they chose to play that day.    Most of them are undergraduates who must play the game in order to keep their scholarships or they get paid a stipend.    Most are also the results of years of computer games with a separate ethos for games from their regular lives or at least we would hope so.   Look closely at these "experiments".     Labor is expensive and nailing down its context is even more so.   Most of these researchers are academics with a $5,000 grant to play and publish.    As we say in the theater,  "there's too little information here to put it on stage."   And yet they take such things to the Pentagon to be played by Nuclear Submarines with real missiles on board.  Nuts!

 

 

The public don't always fit comfortably
> into smooth supply-and-demand curves so beloved of the neo-classical
> economists. The public sometimes objects to being part of an aggregate. And
> it is these exceptions which are happening  increasingly in the modern
> world and becoming critical in economic policy making.

Exceptions are the Grist in the Mill of Artistic Work.    Game theory is to human exploration as Reality TV is to Drama.

 

>  
> (REH)
> <<<<
> But the one area that is avoided at all costs by the monetarists is the
> Free Rider phenomena in Public Goods. All of the research that I've seen
> sounds like a machine running out of gas.
> >>>>
>
> On the contrary. It is the left-wingers who daren't tackle the free rider
> problem of state welfare systems. The particular Public Goods game I
> mentioned earlier clearly shows that if taxpayers don't have some form of
> direct control over the withdrawal of welfare from known malingerers then
> the whole system will inevitably be brought into disrepute over the longer
> term. (This means we need local welfare systems not distant, centralised
> ones.)

 

Nonsense.    We are filled today with great immigrant workers of every ILK including the new Artistic Director of the Metropolitan Opera from the "welfare" system of Russia.    They compete well on any level with the Capitalist motivation and there are more of them.   You say the same yourself in your posts on education.    If you want to do a study about the success of motivation in the Welfare system of the old Soviet Union compared to the continual harrassment of welfare mothers by self-righteous politicians, case workers and other incompetants, I would reluctantly believe that the Soviet System worked better in solving the Free Rider problem.   Not distribution or factory upgrade.    Americans were better than that but Americans without the competition from the East are not doing so well these days either.

 

> Politicians in England have been well aware of this and every now and again
> government departments publish telephone numbers for the public to
> confidentially report false claimants.

 

You make my point.   Your system can't handle motivation except through harrassment and public spying.

 

 

But they don't get much response.
> It's the same problem as the lack of witnesses coming forward to the police
> in the case of many serious crimes -- people won't snitch to the
> authorities because they might be involved in long and tedious procedures.

 

Yes, you turn your population into snitches and no one wants to report anything.   Even the worst crimes.  It is not only the pain of having to wait around in the police station.    Most of it is immoral and works against the family and community networks.   The police retort is to call such networks Cronyism or they compare it to the Mafia.   Stupid is what I would call it.    We are doing it here in the name of keeping GWB in the White House through the "Wag the Dog" tool of terrorism.    Its real but its costs are worse than its bite, thus far anyway.    It is also a very old tool used by politicians over here.   So we are cynical about its truth and just stay quiet.

 

 
> (This is particularly tragic in the case of wife-beating which is far more
> widespread in modern society than reported. Only a small proportion of such
> crimes is reported to the authorities by friends and neighbours. In
> medieval England, when small communities were the norm, wife-beaters would
> be effectively shamed at charivari time or, if this didn't work, punished
> by moots.)    

 

How did we get from Free Riders to Wife beaters?    Surely you don't think them equivalent.    Meanwhile here is something significant.    Paul Krugman on Tax relief for the wealthy and benefits for out of work employees.    Connected in the minds of the local right wing politicians.   With both shouting entitlement.   It makes me sick and embarassed to be connected to these poor babies.    And yes, if you go to the Art then you will find that it is drawn from life and not the reverse.

 

Ray Evans Harrell

 

February 19, 2002

Workers Held Hostage

By PAUL KRUGMAN

oes life imitate art, or what?  Last weekend's box office was dominated by a movie in which Denzel Washington takes an emergency room hostage to secure treatment for his dying son. Last week's major political event, though it went largely unnoticed by the general public, was also a hostage drama: House Republicans blocked vital aid to the nation's most vulnerable workers, and have refused to release it unless they secure passage of a dying stimulus plan. The plan, you won't be surprised to learn, consists almost entirely of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

Here's how the blackmail scheme works. U.S. unemployment insurance, unlike benefits in many other advanced countries, has a sharp cutoff: 26 weeks and you're out. This cutoff can be rationalized as tough love; arguably the American system, by giving workers no choice other than to find new jobs, has helped prevent the emergence of a European-style class of permanent unemployed. But it's a very harsh rule to impose during recessions, when new jobs are simply not available.

And that's the current situation. Last week 80,000 workers reached the end of their benefits; the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that two million workers will have exhausted their insurance by June.

Fortunately, in practice the rule is relaxed in hard times. When recession strikes, Congress invariably acts to extend unemployment benefits. During last fall's stimulus debate, everyone favored a 13-week extension. True, both sides tried to tie that extension to other measures. But everyone expected that in the end Congress would extend benefits whatever the status of other stimulus proposals. Indeed, the Senate passed an extension by unanimous voice vote.

But the hard men of the House leadership refuse to allow a clean vote on unemployment benefits. Instead they continue to insist that it's their way or no way: they won't allow a vote on benefits extension except as part of a bill that mainly consists of tax cuts for corporations and families in upper tax brackets, pretty much identical to the failed stimulus bills of the fall. And they rammed that bill through last Thursday.

Let's leave aside, for a moment, the economic merits of those tax cuts. What's really striking about this tactic is its sheer bloody-mindedness: the House leadership is willing to impose pain on some of the most vulnerable people in the country, desperate families whose breadwinners have been unable to find jobs, in order to push a divisive, partisan agenda.

And for what it's worth, that agenda is also bad economics. Last month the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reviewed a range of potential stimulus measures, including all the elements in the latest House bill. Sure enough, the bill consists largely of the very measures — accelerated tax cuts for upper brackets, reductions in the alternative minimum tax on corporations — that the C.B.O. concluded would be least effective.

What these proposed tax cuts have in common, of course, is that they deliver not a penny of relief to the great majority of American families.

But isn't the House leadership's behavior just politics as usual? No, it isn't. Politics as usual is trying to attach goodies for yourself to bills that provide goodies to other people. Everyone does that. But extending unemployment insurance in a recession is so standard — and refusing to do so is so cruel — that the House action takes the tax-cut crusade to a whole new level of fanaticism.

Put it this way: At first, ordinary workers were told that they would benefit directly from lower taxes — remember those "tax families"? Great effort was devoted to obscuring the simple truth that last year's tax cut offered crumbs for ordinary families, but huge breaks for the wealthy.

Then ordinary workers were told that they should support bills like the two House stimulus plans from the fall — bills that offered retroactive tax cuts to corporations, big tax breaks to families with high incomes, and nothing at all to two-thirds of the population — because those bills would create jobs. After all, tax cuts are part of the war on terrorism, or something.

But now tax-cut advocates have moved from promises to threats. Support tax cuts for the elite, the House leadership says, or we'll cut off your unemployment benefits.

So what's next? Support tax cuts or we'll break your legs?

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