In the early 60s, Robert Axelrod was a math major messing around with refrigerator-sized computers. Then a dramatic global crisis made him wonder about the space between a rock and a hard place, and whether being good may be a good strategy. With help from Andrew Zolli and Steve Strogatz, we tackle the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic thought experiment, and learn about a simple strategy to navigate the waters of cooperation and betrayal. Then Axelrod, along with Stanley Weintraub, takes us back to the trenches of World War I, to the winter of 1914, and an unlikely Christmas party along the Western Front.
Radio Lab: What’s Left When You’re Right?
More often than not, a fight is just a fight… Someone wins, someone loses. But this hour, we have a series of face-offs that shine a light on the human condition, the benefit of coming at something from a different side, and the price of being right.
3 Part Series:
- British Gameshow features prisoner’s dilemma, which one contestant solves by promising to always defect.
- Enneagram 1 confronts uncooperative bike mechanic and potentially schizophrenic man, to the growing appreciation of possible Enneagram 9, who typically tries to go-along-to-get-along.
- Why is left-handedness a 90-10 trait?
Donald Trump and Other Animals
It was like Mr. Trump giving his second wife, Marla Maples, a prenuptial agreement that would eventually have provided her with a serious piece of his fortune — then dumping her just months before her entitlement was to come due.
.. he was born rich but still managed to mock other scions of inherited wealth as members of the “lucky sperm” club, and also the part about how his father incessantly urged him on, chanting, “you are a killer … you are a king.”
.. The thing in my book that caught Mr. Trump’s eye was a line about the advantages of looking like a lunatic. It’s right up front in his introduction: “Almost all successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world, an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy.” He also liked the idea that it was possible to win the game of chicken by convincing opponents that “he might actually enjoy a head-on collision.”
Why Banks Don’t Play It Safe, Even When It Costs Them
To understand both why the banks didn’t go further on their own and why the threat of regulation helped things along, even before the rules were agreed upon, it’s worth consulting a famous essay from 1973 by the social scientist Thomas Schelling, written on the subject of hockey helmets. At the time Schelling was writing, the N.H.L. had yet to require players to wear helmets, which had been around for decades. Players were allowed to wear them, but the vast majority did not, even though this increased their chances of serious injury, and despite the fact that informal polls suggested that many players would have preferred to use them. The problem was that, while not doing so had obvious costs, it also had perceived benefits: a player’s peripheral vision was slightly better, for one, and it conveyed a sense of toughness. As a result, players tended to believe that anyone who wore a helmet was, in effect, hurting his performance relative to everyone else on the ice.
.. Bonus clawbacks, for example, reduce the chances that bank employees will take foolish risks or engage in fraud, and so would seem to make banks “safer.” But banks are competing against each other for talent. And, in that competition, any bank that insisted on clawbacks would be at a disadvantage. Even smart traders or executives can make bad bets in financial markets. So, all else being equal, prospective employees would almost certainly opt for a contract that didn’t include the threat of clawbacks over one that did.
.. This is the paradox that Schelling’s essay exposes: sometimes, having your freedom restricted makes it easier to do what you wanted to do in the first place.