Jim Devine wrote:
>>It is the standard view -- the conventional wisdom, if you wish -- >>that a bunch of individualists will hurt each other (and thus the >>collectivity) if >>they are put into a Prisoners' Dilemma-type situation...
But it has *always* been known "that a bunch of individualists will hurt each other (and thus the collectivity)..." Adam Smith was great, among other reasons, because he specified institutional arrangements under which this would not be the case.
I don't know if it has "always" been known or not. It seems that Thomas Hobbes was the first one to state the problem. Before that, people mostly assumed that people could get along (at least in small groups) or emphasized conflict between groups and classes (cf. Plato or Aristotle). But I could be wrong. The individual vs. group interest problem does seem to be right at the center of the broadly-defined liberal world view. It's also part of the economism vs. class consciousness & organization problem of Marxism (using Lenin's sense for "economism").
But what is this "Prisoner's Dilemma" stuff? The original formulation of this "dilemma" (the situation in which the prisoner has neither access to a lawyer nor the elementary intelligence not to believe anything his jailers tell him) is so absurd that I find it a bit hard to think that even economists could base a theory upon it. So has anyone ever given this "Dilemma" a rational formulation?
I've thought for awhile that the good cop/bad cop routine (and other tricks of the trade) are more important than PD situations in law "enforcement." I've suggested as much to game theory types (such as pen-l's Gil Skillman) but I've never received a reply. Even though many economists would like to take credit for the PD, it's something that all sorts of social scientists and even philosophers use -- and should take the blame (if any) for. It's not really a theory. Rather, it's a model. I know that most professional economists don't make that distinction, but I do: a model is simply a mathematical or graphical representation of a theoretical insight about how the world (or a small part of the world) works. A model is more of a mode of a communication than it is a theory. For more on the PD, I recommend Hargreaves Heap & Varoufakis' book on game theory. It's possible that game theory will give some new insights some day, while it's part of economics that doesn't have an inherent bias toward _laissez faire_. One economist has a pretty good insight that may or may not be true: game theory is most useful not in helping us understand the world as much as helping experimental economists to structure experiments so that they have clear results. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
