Prisoner's Nuclear Chicken

Again, this is inspired by a conversation I had with a good friend of mine concerning his anarchist views (which he can articulate quite compellingly). Some circuitously we came to the topic of nuclear weapons, inspired by the very comical rant by Matt Damon concerning Sarah Palin. I asked him quite simply, Why do we have nuclear weapons?

I feel that it is pretty clearly established that the launch of a bomb would send the world into the Apocalypse. Even among warhawks brandishing a Manichean perspective of the world, I have trouble believing any individual can believe the hand of God is going to protect the divinely right America when it starts raining sulphur. So if we aren't going to use them, why keep them when any lapse in judgement or strategic attack could end the world?

My friend answered quite quickly, Because we don't trust that the other world powers would also abandon theirs. And I was reminded of the economics experiment conducted in my Ecological Economics course--not the one we discussed, but the one the professor tried right after. It was classic Prisoner's Dilemma, but it failed. After the class became familiar with the benefits they had foregone by not cooperating before, they realized that they could trust each other. Now I hope world leaders have some sense of this. But when the danger of defecting--not only by dropping the A-bomb but simply the risks of holding them--is so high, why do we continue to?

Objectivity or Dogmatism

Rather than focusing on the typical market, I think I'll go in a slightly different direction--the marketplace of ideas. I had another occurrence in a non-economics course today which reminded me of an article run over at Marginal Revolution entitled "Are There Reasons to be Dogmatic". Hopefully a few of the philosophy majors I invited to the blog will be able to contribute to the following discussion...

Today, we watched a fairly innocent (and in my opinion rather balanced) documentary on the plight of the prairie dog on the Great Plains. After the film, a student--a junior environmental studies major--complained that the perspective was too "pro-prairie dog" and inquired whether we would hear the other side of the story. This rises many questions (and also a few eyebrows, given that it was fairly balanced and, considering the audience of ES majors, probably could have been much more bias), but I'd like to momentarily avoid criticizing the modern emphasis on "presenting both sides of every argument". 

Instead, I wanted to ask whether any of you believe that you have an ethical responsibility to brandish a dogmatic point of view. As an individual who has specialized in a particular science, and also studied the philosophy of science, I can likely defend both sides of any argument convincingly. However, if I took the "anti-environmental" side, I'd likely be preaching to the choir. Also, if I restrain my point of view because I know there are two sides, but my "opponent" does not because they are ignorant of one of the sides, how will the marketplace of ideas allocate decisions?

Classroom Economics

Today I had a pretty interesting Ecological Economics course. The theme of the session was "Market Failure", though it was more of an introduction to the idea rather than a full expose. We started with a pretty simple experiment designed to show Tragedy of the Commons. Briefly the game went as follows...

• Each player receives four cards (all the number card but one of each suit) and over the course of fifteen rounds you would submit two of those cards, which were returned to you at the end of that round. No one was allowed to speak before or during the experiment, so strategies were individualized. For each red card you kept, you scored "four points" in the first five rounds, and two points in each round after that. Also, for every red card that was submitted, the entire group (thirteen of us in all) received one point. So, if everyone submits two red cards (thereby keeping two black), each person in the group would receive twenty-six points for that round.

That only other quirk was that after the tenth round we were allowed a three-minute period to communicate. Can anyone guess what was said during those three minutes? The only hint that I'll give you was that the most red cards submitted before that communication period was fourteen. The highest possible score up until that point was nineteen, given that you kept your two cards when they were worth four points on the round that eleven cards were submitted.