Game Theory

[the last donut of the night]

The other day, I was discussing socialism with some rightie. He kept up bringing game theory, and how it apparently disproved socialism. What is it, anyway?

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

For me, the concepts maximax, maximin, minimax, and minimin are the most important.

[Guerrilla22]

If he claims game theory disproves socialism then he has no clue what he is talking about. Game theory supposively can determine human behavior in areas such as politics by regarding the situation as a game. People will do what is most logical given the rewards of winning the game and the cost for playing.

[JimmyJazz]

He probably meant the "Free Rider problem".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

Some game theorists would predict that free riding is the most rational human response to a good or service being made freely or publicly available. Thus everyone's responding in such a situation would move steadily in the direction of free-riding, eventually causing the system to collapse.

It could be a problem in total free access communism, but not if people were simply rewarded according to the value of their labor.

[mikelepore]

Those pseudo-intellectuals also cite the "tragedy of the commons" problem. In this concept, if a natural resource is privately owned, the owner would conserve it and take care of it. But if it has no private owner, users will waste the resource and ruin it. So they say people will overfish the fisheries, let cows overgraze the grass, etc. They offer this as an argument against socialism. But their position is self-contradictory, because it it was socialism there wouldn't exist those privately owned businesses that are doing the overuse of the resource for their private gain, such as the fishing company that wants to make a quick buck at other people's expense by overfishing, or the private rancher who wants to profit by letting the cows overgraze. So the critics of socialism defined this problem to have common ownership of a natural resource so that they could all it socialism, but then they immediately added the feature of profit-seeking businesses, which makes it capitalism. These towering intellectuals don't even notice their self-contradiction. They must be real geniuses.

[MarxSchmarx]

But their position is self-contradictory, because it it was socialism there wouldn't exist those privately owned businesses that are doing the overuse of the resource for their private gain, such as the fishing company that wants to make a quick buck at other people's expense by overfishing, or the private rancher who wants to profit by letting the cows overgraze. So the critics of socialism defined this problem to have common ownership of a natural resource so that they could all it socialism, but then they immediately added the feature of profit-seeking businesses, which makes it capitalism. These towering intellectuals don't even notice their self-contradiction. They must be real geniuses.

This is is simply a matter of the theory failing to explain the empirical data. Game theory is internally consistent, it just doesn't suffice as an explanation of how some companies operate. The game theorist could always claim that such companies are not acting rationally, but this isn't an argument against game theory's internal logic.

[Die Neue Zeit]

What about my usage of the four terms in my programmatic work, then?

[RedCommieBear]

I'm just curious, has anybody seen that documentary the Trap? I guess it talks about game theory and how it influenced the free market econ of the last few decades. I've read about it, but haven't seen it - is it any good?