I had an inspiring meeting this morning with folks from Mobilizing American’s Youth. MAY has more than 25 “mobilizer teams” across the country that bring together youth of diverse ideological perspectives to discuss issues and develop common agendas. They train these teams, partly using their Mobilizer’s Guidebook. They also have an online Youth Policy Action Center that provides information about issues and easy ways to make one’s voice heard. MAY is a perfect example of the core values of the “civic renewal movement,” as I’m calling it. MAY is ideologically open-ended and pragmatic, deliberative, collaborative, committed to political engagement (voting and beyond), and oriented to the civic development and leadership of the next generation. Whenever you are about to despair about our political culture, you need to interact with a group like this one.
Author Archives: Peter Levine
thoughts about game theory
The Nobel Prize for Tom Schelling (which is enormously exciting for everyone in Maryland’s School of Public Policy), makes me think of a few points about game theory:
1. It’s a form of political theory that harkens back to classical authors from Hobbes to Rousseau (with echoes of Plato’s Crito and other ancient works). That is, it makes certain assumptions about the preferences and goals of “players”–usually individuals or states–and then asks what must happen when they interact. This is the same method that led Hobbes to believe that individuals, motivated by the goal of minimizing pain, would kill one another absent a state. Hobbes’ conclusions were rejected by other theorists, but his method remains alive in modern game theory. There is a rival tradition of political theory that treats people as deeply embedded in cultural contexts. For Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, Foucault, Habermas, and others, the important question is how and why culture has changed, not how individuals will act under specified theoretical conditions. Some results of game theory seem to generalize across all existing cultures–which wouldn’t have surprised Hobbes or Locke.
2. Since game theory starts with players and models their interaction, it can handle markets, wars, and votes equally well. Schelling’s work is typical in that it doesn’t fit within the borders of his own field (economics), but could equally belong to political science or–in the case of his famous model of racial “tipping points”–sociology. There is something impressive about a theory that explains human behavior without arbitrary limits.
3. Some people assume that the “players” in game theory are selfish. That is not true. A game-theoretical model can work very well to explain behavior driven by any motives. Usually, altruism makes human interactions turn out better, and then games are uninteresting–but not always. Consider, for example, the bad outcomes that can result when X and Y are picking a restaurant, and X only wants to eat at Y’s favorite place, and Y only wants to go where X wants to go. They may withhold information about their own preferences, causing a big mess, even though their motives are selfless.
4. If game theory has a limitation, it is not an assumption of selfishness but rather a presumption that the players have preferences and identities prior to interacting. For instance, if the players are the USA and USSR (as in Schelling’s classic work), then their identities are those of the two nations and their goals are assumed to be security, or domination, or whatever. However, a person’s identity as a representative of the USA or the USSR is not just given; it is forged as a consequence of social and historical change, and it can fall apart. Soviet officials were supposed to bear the identity of “international Communists”; they really identified with the USSR or narrowly with their individual security interests; and then suddenly around 1990 most began to see themselves as Russians or even Europeans, but not as Soviets. This was a massive political change.
Even given players with fixed identities, it is not obvious that they will want any particular goals (such as security, pleasure, dominance, honor or salvation). We may start wanting one thing and persuade ourselves to value something different. It’s not clear that these processes of identity-formation and preference-setting can themselves be modeled as games. When we deliberate about who we are and what we want, the reasoning is not strategic in the same way. However, this is not a criticism of game-theory, simply an argument that it belongs in a broader context.
en route
I try to post something substantive here every workday. In fact, I’ve addressed one topic or another for the last 700 days except during family vacations. However, as Monday, Oct. 10 begins, I’m waiting for a delayed midnight flight from Atlanta to Columbus, OH. (We were in rural Georgia for a true Southern family reunion, complete with a pig roast. I’m going to Columbus for a meeting on service-learning that John Glenn will address.) I feel tired enough, as I await this late flight and the prospect of two days of meetings, that I don’t expect to be able to manage a substantive post until Tuesday at the earliest.
PS, By the time I got online and had a chance to post this, I learned some news that’s exciting to acknowledge. The great Tom Schelling, a colleague at the Maryland School of Public Policy, has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. He joins Amartya Sen as one of my two favorite winners ever. He’s not only a brilliantly original social scientist who has wrestled with the vital questions of the day (from nuclear war to global environmental threats); he’s also a beautiful writer and a true gentleman.
all the news that’s fit to print
Jay Rosen captures one’s attention with the lead to his latest post: “Just one man’s opinion, but now is a good time to say it: The New York Times is not any longer–in my mind–the greatest newspaper in the land. Nor is it the base line for the public narrative that it once was. Some time in the least year or so I moved the Washington Post into that position.” (And this from a quintessential New Yorker!)
Here is what I take away from Jay’s argument. First, the Times represents a traditional conception of the daily newspaper as an institution that tries to extract significant information from politically powerful people and present it to a judicious public. This is not the only valid conception of a newspaper’s role; I have defended a rival view (that journalism exists to promote public participation). However, if the Times has a claim to excellence, it is the conventional one.
Jay cites a series of disturbing recent cases in which the accuracy of the Times’ news coverage has been found wanting: the “breakdown in controls in reporting Weapons of Mass Destruction, … Jayson Blair, Wen Ho Lee, Paul Krugman’s correction trauma.” But everyone makes mistakes, and an outsider could imagine that the Times must now be tightening its internal controls.
The Judith Miller story reflects a deeper problem than mere error. As she investigated the Valerie Plame case and faced a subpoena for her information, Miller became part of a classic Washington story about the secret behavior of powerful people. The extraordinary list of her visitors in jail (John Bolton, Bob Dole, Tom Brokaw) illustrates how close she has come to power, and how tightly linked are our media leaders and politicos. Jay notes that “Miller is a longtime friend of the [Times] publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. They socialize. It’s not a scandal, but it is a fact.” Indeed, it is the Times’ traditional role to get close to the powerful; to offer coveted space in its news columns in return for information. Thus Sulzberger, Brokaw, Bolton, Dole, and others like them move in similar circles, as do reporters like Judith Miller. Readers potentially benefit from those connections, when the Times presses to reveal as much as possible from its exalted sources. That, after all, is the heroic story of the Pentagon Papers and Times v Sullivan.
Miller, however, became a newsmaker, a decision-maker, someone with information that she could deploy strategically. She did not choose that role: a subpoena dragged her into it. However, her contacts, her friendships, and all of her tactical choices underlined her close connections to insiders and “newsmakers.” This impression presented a challenge to the Times, whose role is to explain what decision-makers are up to. We want to assume that some have power and others gather independent knowledge about them; the state and the press do not mix. But here, through no deliberate choice of Miller’s, the lines were blended.
It was then the responsibility of the Times to show that it was a trustworthy explainer. Every instinct should have pressed the newspaper’s editors and staff to extract information about its own reporter and to explain what she had done. Instead, the Times’ coverage of Miller’s legal predicament has been confusing, low-key, half-hearted, and passive. Its columnists have been virtually silent. And it is has issued no meaningful public statements or press releases.
The implicit deal that the Times offers is this: We will cozy up to the power-brokers, but we will do it in your interests, so that we can keep you informed about their wheeling and dealing. When the Times becomes a power-broker itself, the deal comes into question. At that moment, the editors should understand that their whole justification is at stake, and they should rush to serve the public’s “right to know.” Failure to do so raises fundamental questions about the value of the New York Times that go far beyond any cases of misreporting or run-of-the-mill bias.
philosophy, the profession
On Crooked Timber recently, Harry Brighouse observed that graduate students in philosophy are wise not to publish too much. If they do choose to publish, they should reserve their work for prestigious journals. He wasn’t too sure about the hierarchy of prestige, but Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs were clearly top venues in his field (which is also, nominally, mine).
This whole discussion fills me with a vague anxiety that I rarely feel at my current stage of life. It transports me back 10 or 15 years to my days as a grad student and aspiring professor. I was extremely fortunate in some ways: for example, my doctorate was free. However, studying abroad and very much on my own, I received absolutely no tactical advice about how to play the academic game. So the idea that you shouldn’t publish would never have occurred to me.
Brighouse’s post provoked some discussion of the major journals. I admire the work that appears in venues like Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs. I must have read 50 articles from those publications in my life. Most have been difficult, challenging, and rigorous. But I don’t read the journals regularly or keep up with the overall discipline of philosophy in any organized way.