If there were one idea I could drill into the head of everyone on earth, it would be the prisoner's dilemma. I am complete serious in saying that if you don't know what I mean, that you should read the rest of this post, and then spend the next couple hours further studying the topic. The prisoner's dilemma, or more broadly game theory, is an absolute necessary component of understanding politics, economics, biology, and human relations.
So what is a prisoner's dilemma? Essentially, it is any scenario where two people or groups interact in such a way that
...
If they cooperate, both do well
If one cooperates but the other double-crosses the cooperator, the cooperator is screwed and the betrayer makes out very well
If both double-cross the other, both do poorly
....
The problem with a prisoner's dilemma is thus: no matter what the other party does, you are better off if you betray them. If they cooperate, you do very well, rather than merely well, if you cheat. If they betray you, you are screwed if you cooperate but make out merely poorly if you cheat as well. So if you are the self-interested person of the economics textbook, you cheat. Unfortunately, the other party faces the exact same incentives you do, so if they are self-interested, they cheat as well. Hence, everyone winds up doing poorly, rather than everyone doing well, as would happen if they cooperated. Game theory is simply the extension of this to more complex systems, with repeated encounters, memory, multi-party, etc. The key thing to note here is that depending on the payouts, self-interest does not lead to optimal outcomes.
So is the prisoner's dilemma relevant to the real world? Absolutely. An oft-cited example is the observation that male peacocks have huge tails that both attract females and make them vunerable to predators. Why don't they all cut (or evolve) their tails in half, maintaining their pecking order but making all of them safer? Because it's a prisoner's dilemma. Why can't the US and China agree to cut carbon emissions? It is a prisoner's dilemma. Why do states keep offering corporations "incentives" in order to poach jobs from one another? It is a prisoner's dilemma. Why do athletes dope? It is a prisoner's dilemma.
Note that a key element of most prisoner's dilemmas is ranking. Prisoner's dilemmas often arise when what matters is not ones absolute performance, but relative performance. Any improvement in your performance lowers everyone elses' relative performance, forcing them to do more just to get back to where they were. But once they do, everyone is putting in more effort but in the same place they were before. Variants on this theme riddle every aspect of human (and biological) endeavor, and to understand and identify them as prisoners' dilemmas brings some level of clarity to the issue.
Unfortunately, prisoners' dilemmas are hard to resolve, requiring repeated rounds of trust-building, acts of faith, and a few well-timed (but clearly explained) sticks being used to push the laggards from behind. However, if you find yourself in a prisoner's dilemma and are arguing for defection, you really need to reflect on what the end game is. Sure, defecting might work in the short term and you might even be able to drag forth evidence supporting such. In the long run, however, defection only leads to ruin for all. It is always a good idea to examine your political beliefs, identify any lurking prisoner's dilemmas, and ask yourself if you are arguing to defect. If you are, you are probably wrong.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Monday, April 1, 2013
Sunday, February 10, 2013
High Speed Rail–Density Distraction
It is absolutely certain that one of the first objections anti-HSR individuals will express is that the US has too low of a population density to support HSR. This is logical, if you believe that our purchase of Alaska somehow diluted the population density of New York City. Of course, that argument would be absurd. What matters is local and regional density, not nation-wide density. The question is what parts of the US have sufficient density for HSR, and which ones will during the time-frame of their operation.
The “mid-west corridor” serves as a good example of a typical place that is suitable for HSR. Specifically, this discussion will focus on five state – New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, which form a fairly densely-populated corridor between New York and Chicago. The population, land area, population, and GDP of this five-state region stacks up very comparably to France, which has one of the world’s best HSR systems, the TGV, which not only servers over 100 million riders a year, but has set numerous speed records and generates annual profits of over a billion dollars. In contrast, no true high speed rail exists in the United States, with the closest example being the Acela Express, which barely averages half the speed of HSR.
| Location | Population | Area (sq mi) | Density | GDP ($bil) |
| New York | 19,570,000 | 47214 | 415 | 1157 |
| Illinois | 12,875,000 | 55584 | 232 | 644 |
| Pennsylvania | 12,764,000 | 44817 | 285 | 576 |
| Ohio | 11,544,000 | 40948 | 282 | 483 |
| Indiana | 6,537,000 | 35867 | 182 | 268 |
| Total | 63,291,000 | 244249 | 282 | 3127 |
| France | 60,876,000 | 210688 | 289 | 2560 |
A robust mid-western HSR system might look something similar to the map below. One line would leave westward from Boston, travel across upstate New York, along Lake Erie to Cleveland, where it would become the “Tri-C” line heading south through Ohio into Kentucky. A second line would leave New York City, head west to Pittsburg and then bend back north to meet the first line at the Cleveland airport before heading straight west to Chicago. There it would turn south for St. Louis. Several small and medium size north-south connectors and the DC-Boston line would fill out the grid pattern. The total distance of track covered within the five-state boundary is just shy of 2500 miles (4000 km). France, for comparison, has about 1200 miles of HSR in operation, 130 miles under construction, and over 1600 miles in the planning stages.
It is clear that at a regional level at least, the mid-west corridor states have sufficient population density to support HSR. This argument is only going to grow stronger with time, as the population of the US is projected to rise by more than 50% during the remainder of this century. The only possible objection I see here is that local population density might be insufficient – that while our cities have enough people, they are too sprawled out. There is some truth to this, but this ignores both the fact that our population is going to grow, and the fact that the very act of building HSR will influence future density patterns. Land near HSR stations is some of the hottest real estate on earth. Build it and people will move there.
What goes for the mid-west applies elsewhere. The entire eastern seaboard has population densities similar to the mid-west corridor. Florida has a population density of 350 people per square mile. California’s population is 242 per square mile, but half of the state is empty deserts and mountains and virtually all the people reside on either the coast or the central valley. Even the eastern third of Texas, where most of its residents reside, has a population density similar to France.
There may be good reasons not to build HSR along our eastern, western, and southern coasts, as well as the mid-west, but density is not one of them. They already have sufficient regional density to support HSR and will only have even higher densities for the foreseeable future.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
High Speed Rail - Build It and They Will Ride
Over the coming weeks, I am planning on presenting a series of blog posts defending the construction of a nation-wide network of high speed rail (HSR) trains. This would be a major endeavor for our nation, costing in its most expansive forms, such as the "Dream" system shown above, sums on the order of a trillion dollars.
Having used the Japanese Shinkansen HSR system many times and ridden the French TSV once, I am absolutely convinced that HSR is the best transportation system for mid-distance intercity travel. In the range of 100-400 miles (150-600km), HSR is as fast or faster than flying, faster than a car, and far more comfortable and timely than either, while costs are similar on a per-mile basis. Additionally, HSR results in about a quarter of the carbon emissions relative to flying and driving, while reducing many other major pollutants by similar amounts. HSR, like all forms of public transit, tends to increase property values, enhance economic activity, provide mobility for the elderly, handicapped, and young, and help foster the "walkable urban" communities that compose some of the most sought-after real estate in the country. Oh, and did I mention that HSR is TSA-probing-free?
Given that our projected population in the year 2100 is almost 478 million, finding ways to move the additional 160 million Americans who will be living here a century from now is a long-term project that we cannot ignore. It is also likely that more roads and more airplanes are simply not the answer, both due to issues with congestion and limited returns on trying to cram more vehicles through the same spaces, and due to the fact that both are heavily reliant on oil, whose price is almost certainly going to rise with time. HSR, which is compact, self-contained, and electricity driven, can complement both our two existing networks intelligently, while greatly improving our chances of successfully integrating so many new Americans.
Social Security Sustainability
Any retirement system, when faced with increasing life spans, must resort to at least one of the following:
1: Delayed retirements / increasing the retirement age
2: Lower payments during retirement
3: Higher savings rates or taxes when working
There is nothing wrong with this. This is simply an obvious result of longer lifespans, and is equally true whether the retirement system in question is public or private.
Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan and the Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Niell made a deal with regards to Social Security in order to deal with the gradual increase of life spans that had accumulated to that point, thus extending Social Security's actuarial balance into the 2030's by building up a reserve for the retiring baby boomers. This was accomplished by a mix of tax increases and raising the retirement age, which was set to gradually increase to age 67 by 2022.
Thirty years later, we can see farther. Our lifespans have increased even more, and therefore we either have to save more, retire still later, or try to spread the same amount of retirement dollars over a larger number of years. What are Social Security's options for insuring its long-term stablity? Actually, they are not all that bad, requiring modifications no worse than what Reagan and O'Niell chose. There are plenty of options, such as raising the Social Security tax by 1% for both employer and employee, elimination of the earnings cap (currently $113,700, above which income you do not pay Social Security taxes), raising the retirement to 70, and a host of other smaller changes such as changing the cost-of-living-adjustment to be less generous, changing the payout formulas in order to reduce benefits to higher income workers, bring state and local government workers into the system, a straight benefit cut, etc. Of course, these can be mixed and matched in any number of ways in order to hit the target. For example, raising the retirement age one year, phasing in a 0.5% tax increase on both sides over ten years, and raising the cap 20% would put Social Security into balance for the entire 75 years that its actuaries calculate. A group of policy wonks could crank out a bi-partisan, balanced solution over lunch. Given that Democrats hold the presidency and half of congress, and polls strongly indicate that the public prefers tax increases to benefit cuts in this matter, a fair deal would probably focus on the tax side. The public, wisely in my opinion, realizes that this program is extremely valuable in ensuring a basic retirement for all, and is worth the price.
In the long run, Social Security can be thought of a system that transfers about 5% of the national income from current workers to current retirees. It is self-evident that this is forever sustainable. The only question is whether it would be better to shift this to around 6%, in order to maintain benefits at their current levels as the number of retirees increase, or whether to keep it at 5% and spread the money thinner. Either way, Social Security is forever....or at least as long as we want it, which I hope is the same.
1: Delayed retirements / increasing the retirement age
2: Lower payments during retirement
3: Higher savings rates or taxes when working
There is nothing wrong with this. This is simply an obvious result of longer lifespans, and is equally true whether the retirement system in question is public or private.
Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan and the Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Niell made a deal with regards to Social Security in order to deal with the gradual increase of life spans that had accumulated to that point, thus extending Social Security's actuarial balance into the 2030's by building up a reserve for the retiring baby boomers. This was accomplished by a mix of tax increases and raising the retirement age, which was set to gradually increase to age 67 by 2022.
Thirty years later, we can see farther. Our lifespans have increased even more, and therefore we either have to save more, retire still later, or try to spread the same amount of retirement dollars over a larger number of years. What are Social Security's options for insuring its long-term stablity? Actually, they are not all that bad, requiring modifications no worse than what Reagan and O'Niell chose. There are plenty of options, such as raising the Social Security tax by 1% for both employer and employee, elimination of the earnings cap (currently $113,700, above which income you do not pay Social Security taxes), raising the retirement to 70, and a host of other smaller changes such as changing the cost-of-living-adjustment to be less generous, changing the payout formulas in order to reduce benefits to higher income workers, bring state and local government workers into the system, a straight benefit cut, etc. Of course, these can be mixed and matched in any number of ways in order to hit the target. For example, raising the retirement age one year, phasing in a 0.5% tax increase on both sides over ten years, and raising the cap 20% would put Social Security into balance for the entire 75 years that its actuaries calculate. A group of policy wonks could crank out a bi-partisan, balanced solution over lunch. Given that Democrats hold the presidency and half of congress, and polls strongly indicate that the public prefers tax increases to benefit cuts in this matter, a fair deal would probably focus on the tax side. The public, wisely in my opinion, realizes that this program is extremely valuable in ensuring a basic retirement for all, and is worth the price.
In the long run, Social Security can be thought of a system that transfers about 5% of the national income from current workers to current retirees. It is self-evident that this is forever sustainable. The only question is whether it would be better to shift this to around 6%, in order to maintain benefits at their current levels as the number of retirees increase, or whether to keep it at 5% and spread the money thinner. Either way, Social Security is forever....or at least as long as we want it, which I hope is the same.
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