Death inspires me
Like a dog inspires a rabbit.
― Twenty One Pilots, “Heavydirtysoul” (2017)
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
― Sigmund Freud, who probably never actually said this (but should have)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a fight with my wife, spoiling an otherwise wonderful night out, and email spats with two of my best and oldest friends. It was about Trump, of course. Not directly, but always on some silly tangential issue like “Should Sally Yates have resigned instead of countermanded an executive order on the basis of her personal beliefs?” or, better yet, “Is Lady Gaga authentic?” In each case, I didn’t recognize that we weren’t really talking about what I thought we were talking about, and by the time I did recognize the real issues, I was already too far down the path of combative Ben (think Bruce Banner but without the green skin) to care. Not my finest moments.
I suspect a lot of Epsilon Theory readers have had similar individual experiences of late. Certainly it seems that our collective experience as a nation and political society is breaking down this way.
What I want to write about today is not the specifics of this policy or that policy. It’s not to make an argument of any sort. It’s to write about argumentation itself, and the way in which the GAME of our politics and our society has shifted. Yeah, I know this is all very meta and has zero direct impact on your investing or portfolio decisions. But it’s actually the only thing that I think really matters for our social lives, including our lives as citizens and as investors, because it’s only by recognizing the game that we’re playing that we can survive it. Together. Maybe.
The most widely read Epsilon Theory note ever was “Virtue Signaling: Or Why Clinton is in Trouble”, published last September, where I wrote about why I thought Hillary could lose the election. The argument was that this was a turn-out election for a handful of swing states, and Democrats were all too keen to proclaim their political virtue by being anti-Trump in easy places like the Huffington Post or California metro advertising markets, where lots of like-minded Democrats would see them, rather than to barnstorm FOR Clinton in places where unlike-minded Democrats would see them, like Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin. Hubris, thy name is Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the rest of the DNC cartel.
But here’s what I wrote about Trump in that note:
Trump, on the other hand … I think he breaks us. Maybe he already has. He breaks us because he transforms every game we play as a country — from our domestic social games to our international security games — from a Coordination Game to a Competition Game.
Blowing up our international trade and security games with Europe, Japan, and China for the sheer hell of it, turning them into full-blown Competition Games … that’s really stupid. But we have a nasty recession and maybe a nasty war. Maybe it would have happened anyway. We get over it. Blowing up our American political game with citizens, institutions, and identities for the sheer hell of it, turning it into a full-blown Competition Game … that’s a historic tragedy. We don’t get over that.
Geez. Like anyone else with a public persona, I loooove being right. But I didn’t expect to be this right, this quickly. The election of Trump IS breaking us, and not because of the specifics of his policies or whether they’re right or wrong or anything like that. It’s breaking us because of the nature of repeated-play competitive games and the shifting meaning of cooperation.
That first bit — the nature of repeated-play competitive games — is a mouthful. All it really means, though, is that our real-life social interactions, whether in politics or markets or everyday life with our family and friends, are never a single, solitary game. We play the same core game over and over and over, each single interaction setting the stage for the next, and what we really should be concerned about is the overall pattern of the entire set of interactions. That’s real life, as opposed to some 2×2 matrix of Cooperate/Defect like you’d see in a game theory textbook.
And famously, repeated plays can help improve competitive games that otherwise end up in a sad equilibrium, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. A political scientist named Robert Axelrod (not to be confused with David Axelrod of Obama campaign and CNN fame … this is a different guy) wrote a really influential book back in 1984 called The Evolution of Cooperation, where he showed that a cooperative but non-patsy player (i.e., willing to cooperate first and reluctantly forgive an opponent’s occasional defection) would, over time, find enough similarly “nice” players to create an ecosystem of cooperators and dominate, over time, those not-so-nice players who were looking to WIN BIGLY in every single interaction. Axelrod’s book was one of the most popular political science books of the past 40 years, and it spawned a cottage industry of academics looking to expand this insight in theory and practice. It’s a powerful idea because it’s a hopeful idea for nice people. If only us nice people can signal each other and band together, why golly, this proves that there’s nothing we can’t overcome together in this mean old world.
Unfortunately, the evolution of cooperation through adopting “nice” strategies is not a particularly robust finding. Or rather, it’s robust, but only in a particular subset of competitive games and only if the players agree on the meaning of cooperation. For example, if you’re playing a game of Chicken over and over again rather than a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma over and over again, being nice and forgiving doesn’t work very well. At all. Google “Sudetenland 1938” if you don’t believe me. In fact, the entire concept of repeated-play doesn’t fit neatly with the competitive game of Chicken, which is a problem because it’s the dominant competitive game form in the modern world, both internationally and domestically. It wasn’t always this way, particularly in our domestic politics. But it sure is now.