When I teach my students about collective action--cooperation--I teach about two basic types of problem, one which is easy and which is hard. For you political scientists out there, you know these real well:
The hard one is the so-called "prisoners' dilemma," in which two individuals both have an incentive to cheat one another rather than cooperating, because they'll both be better off, no matter what the other person does. I won't belabor this, because there are a million places you can look up "prisoners' dilemma" if you're not familiar with it, including, I'm sure, wikipedia.
But the other kind of problem is a simpler coordination problem sometimes called "the battle of the sexes," in which cooperation is always better than cheating, because cooperation always brings about better results. The story:
A man and a woman go on a date. She wants to see Must Love Dogs, and he wants to see Grosse Pointe Blank. OK, bad example, because Grosse Pointe Blank is a romantic comedy about professional killers, and it has Dan Aykroyd. So everybody wins. But still.
If they split up, date's off, which sucks. And even though the guy gets more pleasure out of seeing professional killers and the gal gets more pleasure out of seeing the chick flick, they can relatively easily decide on one of the other, because they'd both rather go on a date together than be losers and go to separate movies.
Obviously, this is a stylized explanation of a (common) problem. But another example that I often use of the same kind of problem is having people in a country decide what side of the road to drive on. If they all pick the same side, they're good. If they pick different sides, they have accidents, and maybe die. So the Brits and their colonies (like Uganda) drive on the left, and everybody drives on the right. And it works great.
Except you don't have to spend too long in places like Uganda to realize that it isn't such a simple coordination game, because in Uganda, the side of the road they really drive on is the wherever-they-damn-please side. Everybody would be better off if everybody could stick to their lane and drive on the correct (left) side of the road, but people drive on the left, right, the median, the sidewalk, whatever. The only place they don't drive is through the enormous potholes that are deep enough to swallow 18-wheelers hauling doubles.
I don't know if there's a point to this. Just that the example I usually use to illustrate this dynamic is wrong. Which sort of suggests that even simple acts of cooperation and collective action are often pretty difficult, contrary to our expectations.
2 comments:
Everyone wins with must love dogs too ... Guys love John Cusack!
So in India, it's the same deal - everyone drives wherever they please and there's no rules or lanes or anything like that.
I thought the same thing - that if everyone would just follow the rules, things would work out much better for everyone.
Then I actually started driving a scooter myself in the seemingly horrifying and chaotic traffic. Turns out, there's actually some method in the madness that you discover when you drive in it. Though the overall picture is chaos and unpredictability, the micro-scale picture is a bit better. First of all, it's so packed that you can't go that fast. Second of all, you end up following two rules: (1) keep moving as much as possible, and (2) try not to hit anything. This isn't very well *planned,* but I came to appreciate how it actually *does* end up coordinating to a system that ultimately gets people where they need to go, less the frequent traffic jams (which we also have in, for example, the Denver metro area where people drive in a rather orderly fashion with respect to our peers around the world).
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