Humans behave altruistically more than any other species. Racism, though not universal, is common in humans. Humans are also one of the few species that practice war. In many cultures valor in war and sacrificing yourself for others are considered admirable. Why is this?
If the state is as so bad, why is it still here? In game theory the model of hierarchical strategies helps explain how the state can persist even though there are better options.
Property can be described many ways. It can be described as a legal or moral concept. It can be thought of as an economic or political concept. However, property is fundamentally a strategy to avoid conflict that arises from competition over scarce resources. To understand property better let’s consider a game from game theory called the Hawk-Dove game also know as the War of Attrition. In the Hawk-Dove game two players are in competition for a valued resource. Each turn a player can either share or take all. The take strategy is called hawk and the share strategy is called...
I sometimes take my family to a nearby park to feed ducks. On one of these visits, we found that in a particular part of the park there was a male red-winged blackbird that would chase any ducks or even geese that crossed some invisible line in the pond. This daring little bird would chase a goose many times his size until it left his territory. I could estimate where the border of his territory was, by throwing breadcrumbs to lure ducks or geese into his territory to see his reaction. He was clearly claiming ownership over a part of...
The prisoner’s dilemma is often claimed to show that people do not have an incentive to cooperate. It is sometimes called the invisible foot because it seems to disprove Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor of cooperation. It is then claimed that the state is needed to intervene to force people to cooperate...
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