This is prompted by Scott's excellent article, Meditations on Moloch.
I might caricature (grossly unfairly) his post like this:
- Map some central problems for humanity onto the tragedy of the commons.
- Game theory says we're doomed.
- Incentives for government employees sometimes don't match the needs of the people.
- This has costs, and those costs help explain why some things that suck, suck.
- Map some central problems for humanity onto the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
- Evolutionary game theory says we're not doomed.
Game theory is not the best way to think about the tragedy of the commons.
Elinor Ostrom got in 2009 the "nobel prize" in economics for her work of studying how people actually deal in the real world with the tragedy of the commons. It makes much more sense to go to her empirically derived work than to think in terms of game theory.
She suggests 8 principles:
But how do these rules emerge and why?