Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 08:08:13 -0800 (PST)
From: " Rahul  Mahajan" <rahul_saumik-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: M-I: Game Theory 3 - Some conclusions


Giving the devil his due:

As I stated earlier, the problem which is represented by the Prisoner's Dilemma
is one of the most fundamental, if not the most fundamental, problems facing
those who are trying to build a better world. This fact is, I think, known to
anyone with even the most marginal experience in trying to win people over
politically. As I also attempted to establish, the analysis of the game does
not give us any results that are really concrete and unambiguous. Anything that
you can get out of the analysis you can get as well out of common sense.  A
similar example from political science involves utility-based models of why
people vote: you weigh the utility cost to a person of voting versus the
probability that her vote will change the result of the election (multiplied by
the utility benefit to her of the changed result), but the chance of a single
vote's changing the result is so small, that in order to get a positive utility
for voting (which you need, because the fact is that some people, at least,
vote), you have to posit a utility benefit merely for the act of voting. In
other words, people vote because they like to vote. An archetypical example of
the stunning profundity of bourgeois social science. The models they set up to
explain behavior either give the wrong result or have to be modified by ad hoc
introduction of mechanisms that, at best, crudely recapitulate the results of
common sense, and, at worst, like in the voting model above, trivialize the
analysis to a degree almost unamiginable to anyone not in possession of an
advanced degree.

Even so, the problem, as stated above, remains, and cannot be circumvented
merely by an invocation of solidarity, selflessness, revolutionary ardor, or
whatever else. The fact is that people who are willing to fight are, in almost
all situations, in a small minority, and we see little sign of that changing.
Even under a future socialist order, this fact will have to be taken into
account. I have great hope for, if not necessarily faith in, the possibility of
the creation of the new human (pace Che) under socialism, but it is throughly
untenable to claim that everyone will be a cooperator in any case. I think we
have progressed well beyond the determinist fantasies of the early 20th
century, when people ranging from revolutionary communists to conservative
bourgeois social scientists thought that human behavior could be molded into
any form desired by creation of the proper environment. We know now that the
interaction between individual and environment is much more complicated and
cannot be reduced to either a biological or a cultural determinism or even to a
crude 80% of this, 20% of that sum.

One of the reasons for the rise of repressive mechanisms in all socialist
countries to date, in addition to imperialism, internal power plays, what have
you, is the fact that the socialism that was conceived was vulnerable to the
defection, to put it in Prisoners' Dilemma terms, of even a small number of
members of society. This seemed at the time to necessitate some combination of
state repression and reintroduction of capitalist relations in order to deal
with it -- thus, we get phenomena like the NEP or the institution of
piece-rates in many industries in the Soviet Union around 1930. Of course, part
of the solution of "free-rider" problems is ideological, but a society that is
to be non-repressive, physically and ideologically, must be stable under the
defection of a substantial minority of people -- reducing the number of
defectors to zero will always require more repression than it's worth. I have
little faith in any attempts to work out how to do this in abstract models
unconnected with real practice, but it's a consideration that anyone who works
toward socialism should always have somewhere in the back of her mind. 

Rahul

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