On Society
By: Eugene Ghanizadeh
Tags: Game Theory, Economics, Politics, Mechanism Design, Society

Imagine there is this utopian society where no one engages in robbery or stealing in any form. If one day then comes this exceptional case of a single individual who have stolen something, one can easily attribute the occurrence to the personally unique traits of that individual and put all of the responsibility upon them. The pragmatic solution might as well be to incarcerate that individual and isolate them from our utopia to revert it to a state of zero stealing. The problem is the individual, and obviously removing the individual would easily solve the problem.

Now imagine a more realistic looking society, where for example five percent of people indulge in stealing. The society is still mostly free of that crime, but as a direct result of the sheer number of individuals that constitute this society, five percent would mean a number far larger than one outlier individual. Statistically, it is highly unlikely that there exists this unique and rare personal trait that results in this situation, as even if it is a result of a personality divergence it is one that afflicts five percent of the population and hence is more logically attributable to the society as a whole rather than distinct individuals. Factoring in the massive role of context and circumstance in decision making of each individual as well, it is highly unlikely that these “stealing people” would be distinguishable from the rest by just considering the individual. It becomes simply not pragmatic to blame the individual, as it is rather evident that the issue is indeed with the collective.

The same argument can be easily made for a lot of divergent and “undesirable” social phenomenon, the deciding factor simply being statistical significance of the phenomenon among members of the collective. Poverty, addiction, joblessness and crime, bribery, corruption, biased journalism or misinformed scientific research, aggressive advertising and breach of personal privacy in name of security, all are way more prevalent than to be attributable to individual misalignment, and practically can only be blamed on the society itself.

However, in many cases, we still tend to only see these issues through the lens of individual ethical or social failures and treat them as such, as if the reality of our society was indeed the unrealistically utopian case of our first example. More progressive societies might have started tackling a number of these issues with a more practical approach, for example in many parts of the world joblessness is no longer understood as a personal unfitness but rather a socioeconomic phenomenon. However, we still love to declare wars on drugs and political corruption and indulge in name calling and frowning on biased journalism, while turning a blind eye to the system that causes that phenomenon.

The reason for this short-sightedness is rather obvious: a single individual or a specific group is a tangible external target for the negative emotional reactions one might have towards these undesirable phenomena. the easiest and probably least fruitful, if not mostly counterproductive, response to high crime rates is of course expanded police force and authority. The idea of taking the responsibility as a collective also subjectively implies taking personal blame for issues not involving “me”, which naturally results in an emotional guard that impedes necessary logical reflection under a non personal and objective light.

This inappropriately personal interpretation stems from a negligence on what constitutes a society in the first place: a society is not a large group of independent individuals living in physical proximity, it is rather the rules and mechanisms that binds these individuals (who are most probably in each other’s physical proximity merely as a direct result of our now rapidly fading limits in communication, and hence by no means an essential aspect of the concept of society) to form a bigger collective with a higher level of internal synergy. As a result, when a particular problem is said to be one of the society as a whole rather than the individual, it simply means that there is an aspect of that mechanism, game if you will, that is not well understood and has resulted in an unintended and undesired outcome.

This lack of knowledge can of course itself be the result of a lack of a full understanding on the decision making process of the players, i.e. members of the society. For example we know now that even statistically these players aren’t making rational decisions, as they behave more conservatively in face of perceived gain and more risk taking in face of perceived loss, even given mathematically identical situations. Misunderstanding of this core aspect of human decision making played an important role in 2008’s financial crisis, and although dire effects of that crisis still affect more susceptible economies around the world, we have yet to change the rules of the economic game that was designed based on that false assumption.

That economic game was among the few that were actually (mostly) designed based on a systemic perspective of the collective involved rather than individual expectations. More often than not, the mechanisms and rules fail due to the inherent flaw in the framework they were designed within. Our laws are (mostly) written as guidelines to outline the exemplar citizen rather than to establish a mechanism that would in effect encourage individuals to behave as such. Crime is mostly seen as a result of ethical shortcomings on a personal level rather than a symptom of the system that causes it. The punishments that typically accompany undesirable behavior will of course dampen the gains of such behavior and hence do affect the game, however when the gains seem high enough that simply changes the goal to “try not to get caught” or in cases with much higher rewards “lets cheat the system responsible for enforcing the law”, which always inevitably leads to deep corruption within the legal system itself. What is worse is that still after all of that we would see the situation a result of individuals’ ethical weakness and seek the solution in hands of “moral heroes”, while practically we are turning a blind eye on the actual problem and refusing to even attempt to understand it, let alone resolve it.

As for another example one can take a deeper look at how most modern democracies are maintained. The key for a democracy to be truthful is of course the guarantee that governance is representative of the collective and public interests. Since governance always includes access to great amount of social power, it is always extremely beneficial for individuals that are that representation to act in contrast to their own mission by sacrificing public wellbeing for private ones, most possibly those of their own and/or of certain select groups (such as corporates). The main mechanism we have for countering that is constant public vigilance in such affairs. However, alongside other shortcomings, this mechanism merely changes the game to that of being publicly perceived as truly a representative and not actually being one. In this context, one optimal solution for the game is a government who dedicates majority of the resources at its disposal focused on the goal of maintaining that public image by the narrowest possible margin, i.e. that only the minimum sufficient percentage of the population has the minimum sufficient belief in that public image. These margins of sufficiency in turn do depend on how much the government, once established, is dependent on that public image to be able to maintain function, so for example governments with higher reliance on tax and/or constant public votes tend to maintain a more democratic image than those reliant on military power or natural resources.

All this simply means that the political game that we have enacted in order to maintain democracy does not naturally lead to efficient and benevolent leadership, instead it gradually converges on populists portraying that public image in a marginally believable and acceptable manner. It is not a matter of personal ethics, as even the guy who wants to utilise that leadership status towards charitable prospects for the society needs to be paying the same game. It is also notable that in face of perceived loss, due to the aforementioned increase in risk acceptance on part of the public, that margin of believability decreases to encompass otherwise deemed impossible individuals as serious policy makers and leaders. As the cost of maintaining a believable public image reduces in such cases, if the costs of propagating the perception of loss and danger aren’t too high, the strategy of criticising the status quo in an overly exaggerated manner in support of an abnormal individual or group becomes highly effective as it yields better results for lower costs. As such, there should be no surprise that in a sociopolitical environment susceptible to such fear mongering tactics, rise of controversial and outlandish populists becomes all but prevalent.