The springboard for my assessment is a paper that I ran across back in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The abstract pushed all my buttons regarding game theory, climate change, the tragedy of the commons etc. I had high hopes that it would describe a way around the "free rider problem" inherent in the "Prisoner's Dilemma" game. The difficulty of dealing with free riders may have kept us from achieving global consensus on action to reduce climate change, as many important nations wait for others to go first.
Here is the abstract:
Risk of collective failure provides an escape from the tragedy of the commons From group hunting to global warming, how to deal with collective action may be formulated in terms of a public goods game of cooperation. In most cases, contributions depend on the risk of future losses
We find that decisions within small groups under high risk and stringent requirements to success significantly raise the chances of coordinating actions and escaping the tragedy of the commons. Instead of large-scale endeavors involving most of the population, which as we argue, may be counterproductive to achieve cooperation, the joint combination of local agreements within groups that are small compared with the population at risk is prone to significantly raise the probability of success.
In addition, our model predicts that, if one takes into consideration that groups of different sizes are interwoven in complex networks of contacts, the chances for global coordination in an overall cooperating state are further enhanced.
So with high hopes I forked out $10 to download the full article. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. It uses formal game theory and lots of math and charts to prove the following paraphrased proposition:
"When everyone in a group agrees that a risk they face is so serious that they cannot afford the possibility of failure, they cooperate to address it." At that point I wanted my $10.00 back.
Rather than presenting ways around the free rider problem, the paper makes it quite clear why we are failing to address so many major social and ecological problems at the level they need for a solution. The fundamental obstacle to international cooperation is spelled out in the first part of the above proposition:
When everyone in a group agrees that a risk they face is so serious that they cannot afford the possibility of failure... In climate change we have a situation where there is no universal agreement by the political and economic stakeholders on any of the three points that clause contains: that there is a risk; that it's serious; and that we cannot afford the possibility of failure. Because there are individuals and nations who don't buy into one or more of those points, the requirement for cooperation is not met, and very little global action happens.
This situation presents the Kochs and American Enterprise Institutes of the world with a golden opportunity to achieve their corporatist goals. They can block change by merely convincing enough people that one or more of the points are false. In tragic contrast, those on this side of the fence need to convince pretty much everybody that they are all true before we will see a general mobilization toward a solution.
"Scientific" mouthpiece organizations sprinkle seeds of doubt on the real science, PR firms sow seeds of fear about job losses during a recession, political think-tanks give interviews talking about the risk to national economies in the face of growing international competition, and before you know it we have Cancun, Bali and Copenhagen.
It doesn't matter how many of us know in our hearts and bones that this is an existential crisis for humanity - unless almost all of us get it, they win and life loses.
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