Real

True Narratives

Richard Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship (W.W. Norton & Company, 2012). “A look at the relationship between the prime minister and the president.”

From the dark side:

• Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC – 1492 AD (HarperCollins Publishers, 2014): when reciprocity fails. “It was only when the Christians and Muslims turned on the Jews, singling them out for humiliation and, in the case of the Christians, grotesque insult and slaughter, that Jews began to withdraw or be pushed into their own separate spheres.”
• Jeff Shesol, Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War (W.W. Norton & Co., 2021): “. . . Shesol’s story raises inescapable questions about whether space exploration is quite what its enthusiasts have often claimed.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

In the 1940s, a new discipline called game theory emerged within the social sciences. This discipline, which has advanced rapidly in the decades since its inception, studies the character of interactions between human beings and other organisms in dynamic environments in the context of competition and limited resources. I place this essential discipline under this heading not to suggest that mutuality and cooperation are in any sense inevitable, or even likely in general terms, but only to point out that game theory tells us how we can structure interactions to promote cooperative behaviors that lead to socially desirable outcomes. This grouping reflects a desideratum, not a scientific principle. Of necessity, the game theory is the study of conflict as well as the potential paths toward sustainable outcomes such as often arise from cooperation.

Game theory’s main foundation is the evolutionary principle, because the emergence of new behaviors under varied circumstances is what game theory is centrally about. We will get to cooperation as an element of spirituality later. For now, an understanding of the practical dynamics that ease the path to that development is our focus. This topic belongs in the pantheon of ethical considerations, because it explores the nuts-and-bolts dynamics of ethics and its antagonists.

• John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944): the seminal work that gave birth to the discipline.
• William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb (Doubleday, 1992).
• Michael Maschler, Eilon Solan and Shmuel Zamir, Game Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Luca Lambertini, Game Theory in the Social Sciences: A Reader-Friendly Guide (Routledge, 2011).
• Roger B. Myerson, Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1991).
• Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole, Game Theory (MIT Press, 1991).
• Steven J. Brams, Theory of Moves (MIT Press, 1993).
• Steven J. Brams, Game Theory and Politics (Dover Publications, 2011).
• Joel Watson, Strategy: An Introduction To Game Theory (W.W. Norton, 2007).
• James D. Morrow, Game Theory for Political Scientists (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Andrés Perea, Epistemic Game Theory: Reasoning and Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist (Princeton University Press, 2013).
• Here is a link to a site listing academic journals on game theory, and a link to the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Here are some leading works on using game theory to produce fair and just outcomes:

• Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984).
• Robert Axelrod, The Comlexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration (Princeton University Press, 1997).
• Steven J. Brams and Alan D. Taylor, Fair Division: From cake-cutting to dispute resolution (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
• Steven J. Brams and Alan D. Taylor, The Win/Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everybody (W.W. Norton, 1999).
• Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (Random House, 2016): “‘Connectography’ represents Khanna’s latest effort to arbitrage his personal networking skills into a theory of geopolitics. He is interested in how connectivity and geography will affect the future of global affairs . . . ”

The roots of cooperation among humans are biological/genetic, and so are the roots of selfishness. In A Natural History of Human Morality, Michael Tomasello fleshes out the two-edged nature of human ethical inclinations. The belief that humans are hard-wired to treat each other decently has some basis in fact but so does the belief that we are hard-wired for self-interest. In an earlier work, A Natural History of Human Thinking, Tomasello argues that our unique ways of thinking are grounded in the fact that “humans participate in shared intentionality in a way that their nearest primate relatives do not”.

• Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard University Press, 2016).
• Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• John F. McNamara and Olof Leimar, Game Theory in Biology: Concepts and Frontiers (Oxford University Press, 2020): “. . . it is not just the abiotic environment that matters to organisms, but often equally or more the characteristics of other organisms. The Fitness of one individual . . . depends on the strategies of others.”.
• Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace (Holt, 2020): “The book revolves around his visits with three scientists studying animals in the field: sperm whales in the Caribbean, chimpanzees in Uganda and macaws in the Amazon of Peru. Along the way, he repeatedly emphasizes that the profundity of what he’s seeing is that each species has a culture. Members learn from one another, pass down traditions — a navigation route, a toolmaking skill, even a parrot’s dialect — in a way that was once thought to be fundamentally human.”

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films