PLAN FOR THE DAY

1
PLAN FOR THE DAY

• Admin Stuff
• Rational Choice gives us a common vocabulary
• Elster
• Collective Action a recurring theme
• Elster
• Taylor
• Anarchy and the Collective Action Problem
• Taylor
• Kropotkin
• Dahls Refutation of Anarchy
• Discussion

2
ADMINISTRIVIA

• Two Apologies
• Missing the Second Week of Class
• Not being More Specific about the Readings
• Through page 51 for today
• Through page 79 for Wednesday
• Through page 209 for the exam
• Reminder about Readings
• Do them before (and after) class
• Ask questions
• In class, after class, over e-mail, during office
  hours
• You are responsible for ALL the readings
• Study Guide will Help (to you on Wednesday)
• Take Roll
• Questions of an Administrative Nature?

3
RATIONAL CHOICEFILTER 2 DESIRE/UTILITY

• When faced with several courses of action,
  individuals usually do what they believe is
  likely to maximize their utility. Elster
  p. 22
• Decision making under certainty
• Preference ordering
• Utility function
• Decision making under risk
• Lotteries
• Expected utility

4
WHAT ABOUT CONTEXT? FILTER 1 THE ENVIRONMENT

• Context Matters!
• Both constrains and empowers
• Affects the contents of the Opportunity Set
• And the payoffs of the opportunities
• Positive Direction
• Negative Direction
• Rational choice REQUIRES history and culture!
• When DONT people behave this way?

5
DESIRES OPPORTUNITIES

• VERY Powerful Simplification
• What do People WANT?
• What Options are Available?
• Sometimes Desires are Irrelevant
• Do They Matter at All?
• Given the same opportunities, same choices?
• Same people, different shoes?

6
REVIEWRational Choice

• Desires and Opportunities
• Cost-Benefit Calculation
• Utility
• Risk, Lotteries, and Expected Utility
• But is the World Static?
• What about its stochastic properties?
• What about other people?
• We Must Model Interaction

7
INTERACTIONPRISONERS DILEMMA

• Dominant Strategy
• Equilibrium
• What would YOU do?
• Why might you cooperate?
• Iterated Game

NOTE THESE ARE IN UTILITY NOT YEARS IN PRISON!!!
8
INTERACTIONPRISONERS DILEMMA

• Dominant Strategy
• Equilibrium
• What would YOU do?
• Why might you cooperate?
• Iterated Game

9
COLLECTIVE ACTION PROBLEM

• Examples of Regular Cooperation
• When it is better for all if some do it, but
  better for each not to do it (p. 126)
• Lets Get a Feel For It
• Tragedy of the Commons
• Deforestation
• Others???
• n-person Prisoners Dilemma

10
1,000 WORDS?
Cost of Cooperation
Great
Terrible
Many
Few
11
TERMS

• Free Rider
• Sucker
• How Can We Solve These?
• Carrots (inducements) and Sticks (fines)
  (INSTITUTIONS!)
• Socialization? Iteration? Anarchy?

12
TAYLOR ON COLLECTIVE ACTION

• Taylor Begins by Clarifying CA and PD
• Two Types of Solutions
• Internal Solutions do not change the environment
  or desires of the players
• External Solutions affect the environment and/or
  desires of the players
• Decentralized (norms, culture)
• Centralized (the state, hierarchies)
• The State has Become the Primary Means of Solving
  CA/PD problems.

13
TWO PROBLEMS WITH STATE-BASED SOLUTIONS

• Use of the State Created/Creates a New One at the
  Inter-state Level
• What is the mechanism for this transformation?
• How can it be solved?
• The Destruction of Community
• The utility of internal solutions is inversely
  proportional to the size of the community
• States aggregate small communities, thus making
  internal solutions more difficult

14
THE BIG PROBLEM WITH STATE-BASED SOLUTIONS

• The Decay of Voluntary Cooperation
• the more the state intervenes to provide
  public goods and solve CA/PD problems the more
  necessary it becomes, because positive altruism
  and voluntary cooperative behavior atrophy in the
  presence of the state and grow in its absence.
  Thus, again, the state exacerbates the conditions
  which are supposed to make it necessary. We
  might say that the state is like an addictive
  drug the more of it we have, the more we need
  it and the more we come to depend on it. (page
  168)
• Is the State addictive? Can we live without it?

15
KROPOTKIN ON THE STATE and SOCIETY

• Similar to Taylor, but More Empirical
• Defines The State
• Territory, government, oligarchical, sets and
  enforces rules.
• Separate from Society
• Describes Society
• Predates the state- predates man!
• Clan based. Internal and Decentralized Solutions
  to CA/PD
• No permanent authority
• The medieval village community as an ideal type
• Society worked for Thousands of Years (more?)
• But could not compete with the efficiency of the
  state armies
• What if they had continued? What if they were
  recreated?
• Would they work the way Kropotkin thinks?

16
KROPOTKIN ON THE REVOLUTION

• Two Types of Revolutionaries
• Should use the state to create socialism from the
  top
• Should destroy the state and create socialism
  from the ground
• (We will return to this theme later when
  discussing social democracy)
• What is Kropotkins Critique of the First Type?
• How does he Defend the Second Type (why would it
  work? How?)
• How, according to Kropotkin, would society solve
  the CA/PD without the state?
• Culture, norms, decentralized and temporary
  authority, perfection of social morality
• Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution
• Do you buy it?

17
DAHL ON ANARCHY

• Dahls Summary of Anarchist Thought
• No one is obliged to support or obey a bad state
• Coercion is intrinsically bad
• All states are coercive
• A society without a state is a feasible
  alternative to a society with a state
• Therefore, all states should be abolished
• Dahls Critique
• Coercion would occur without the state
• Some coercion is justifiable (eg, for
  overthrowing bad states)
• If not, then the theory is impractical (Tolstoi)
• Democracy minimizes coercion
• Need states to protect people from sociopaths
• Anarchist defense of this never dealt with
• As per Locke et al, you can disobey laws when
  nesecarry
• Discussion of Anarchy and the Necessity of the
  State