We did a lot of driving over the Christmas break. At one point during that driving I was pondering our chances, as a civilisation, of surviving the looming climate change. It occured to me that dealing with climate change is fundamentally a trust problem.
Noone seriously denies that we have the technology to run our economy with less carbon output. The only serious (evidence based) debate is how much it's likely to cost, and whether or not costs are likely to outweigh the opportunities (the kinds of business opportunities which arrise in times of change).
So if we have the technology, why not make the effort to make the changes necessary to minimise the harm of climate change?
Trust.
We will all have to expend significant effort to overcome this problem, both as individuals and as countries... and very few people or countries will make that effort if they don't trust the majority of other countries to make a similar effort.
None of this is original, or particularly interesting. However, has it occured to you before that this is analogous to the Prisoner's Dilema?
The Prisoner's Dilema is one of the fundamental problems of applied mathematics known as Game Theory. In a nutshell: two suspects are arrested, the police don't have enough evidence to secure a conviction on either except for a minor offence (6 months sentence each). However, the suspects are seperated, and told that if they squeal on their partner they'll get off free, while thier partner will get 10 years in the slammer. If they both squeal, they both get 5 years in the slammer.
Obviously, if the Prisoners work together they'll get the most mutually beneficial outcome... but can they trust eachother?
I hope you'll see the parallells. But is this insight useful? I don't know. But I do know is taht game theory already examined this kind of trust problem exhaustively. Maybe we could we learn something essential to solving the trust problem of dealing with climate change from game theory.
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"The unique equilibrium for this game is a Pareto-suboptimal solution, that is, rational choice leads the two players to both play defect, even though each player's individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperatively."
ReplyDeleteYep, screwed. But I intend to be less screwed than you!
Ahh, but are we rational or superrational? Game Theory only predicts what a perfectly rational player would do, and that doesn't seem to reflect the way real humans play... but in this instance, in relation to climate change action, I suspect we will act perfectly rationally (and selfishly), and hence screw ourselves.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't sound very rational does it?
Damn, I just heard Robert May on the science show mentioning that getting action on climate change is like the Prisoners Dilemma, or the Free Rider Problem, or the Tragedy of the Commons... so my insight wasn't original.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this does reinforce the point that this is a well-researched problem, and we therefore already have a good idea of which approaches are likely to succeed at getting collective action on climate change, and which are likely to fail.
Yes, the Prisoner's Dilemma does cover it. If each country (and individual for that matter) acts for short term interest and without trust in anyone else, we are screwed. If we act ethically (not a word often encountered in diplomacy) and all do our bit we could pretty easily fix the problem.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I see Abbott is proposing a million new solar photovoltaic installations on homes. Sounds good for attracting votes, but the money would probably be better spent on industrial-scale renewable energy. Ho-hum; what else is new?