The Nationality Paradigm

Once a year or so, I conduct an exercise in my senior electives called "Win as Much as You Can." It's based on the "prisoner's dilemma," and is designed to confront people with the question of how individual goods and communal goods interact. At the start of the exercise, the class is divided into three or four pairs, given the following score sheets, told to examine them carefully, and then instructed to make choices in consultation only with their partner, not the rest of the group.


Instructions: For 6 consecutive rounds you and your partner will choose either an X or a Y, and each of the other partnerships in your group will make the same choice. The payoff for each round depends on the pattern of choices made by your group.
 Payoff schedule 

Group choices	Payofff
4x’s	Lose 1
3 x	Win 1
1 y	Lose 3
2x	Win 2
2y	Lose 2
1x	Win 3
3y	Lose 1
4 y	Win 1

Before long, people recognize that if every pair will agree to throw "y," then everyone will win points in every round. If anyone throws "x," however, at least one pair will lose points.

In fifteen years of running the exercise, sometimes twice or three times a year, only twice have I seen people come around to a cooperative approach, and in one of those instances one of the kids had already been through the exercise. In every other run-through, at least one pair or one person went ahead and played with a "screw your neighbor" approach in an effort to grab as many points for the one pair as possible. Whenever that happens, resentment and anger blossom. Sometimes the biggest losers simply resign themselves to being pummeled, but the losers are never happy.

This behavior is predicated on the assumption that "win as much as you can" means "for the smallest group possible, compared to everyone else." Even when we review the arithmetic to show that an "all y" approach most likely will garner the most total points not just for the group but for individuals, the "winners" always insist that their methods were preferable because they did better (lost less) than others.

Many of our economic behaviors rest on similar assumptions. In this case I am not referring only to the idea of capitalist competition, which can have beneficial effects for everyone if pursued thoughtfully, but to the very idea of "GDP" or "GNP" as described in an earlier post. As the recent crisis in Greece demonstrates, attempting to separate "this economy" from "that economy" no longer works -- if it ever did. The "global economy" is a zero sum game, whether we intend for it to be so or not.

In the The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1999), Gordon Wood described the mentality of American colonists, which assumed that the internal trade between or within the colonies had no value to the colonists themselves. "The meer handling of goods, one to another, no more increases any wealth in the Province," said one colonist, than Persons at a fire, increase the Water in a Pail by passing it thro' twenty or forty hands." (p. 66) To gain anything, this man believed, we must take it from someone else -- another group if not another individual. Note that these days, protectionists would argue the opposite -- that we should keep all trade local as much as possible, so that our resources never leave our own kind.

If we expanded our sense of who "we" are, in the economic sense, many of the crises of the current world might be different. Oil shortages might still occur, for example, but in a global rather than a national context, and the solutions therefore would be different.