Last night I was at Gresham College where their Professor of Commerce, Michael Mainelli, was lecturing on global risks (read his lecture here).Mainelli concluded his lecture with this neat throwaway line:
I sometimes think global risks keep us from attacking each other by providing a common enemy. So, if we get started attacking global risks collaboratively, perhaps we can save the planet from us, and us from ourselves.
It’s an interesting argument – part true, and part wishful thinking (as Michael of course recognises). In the face of a threat, people either round up a posse and drive it out of town, or they abandon Main Street to the bad guys and cower in shuttered houses. There’s a knife edge, in other words, between atomisation and collective action.
We can see this happening at the moment, where the food crisis is (mostly) driving countries towards a narrower view of their self interest – as they block exports and build up reserves, even if this is leading to a less effective collective outcome. The UN, meanwhile, is trying to round up the posse…
This is classic Prisoner’s Dilemma territory – where players make a rational decision to compete, even though co-operation would make more sense in the grand scheme of things. They treat a non-zero-sum game like a zero-sum one.
An iterated prisoner’s dilemma (where the game is repeated with the same players), however, has a different logic. Robert Axelrod:
What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that players might meet again. This possibility means that the choices made today not only determine the outcome of this move, but can also influence the later choice of players. The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present and thereby affect the current situation.
This ‘shadow of the future’ argument reminds me of the controversy over the use of discount rates in the Stern review. Stern’s critics argued strongly for a higher discount rate – they wanted to shrink the shadow of the future. As John Quigley explains:
Nordhaus and Boyer propose an even higher rate of 3 per cent, which is tantamount to saying that the future (certainly anyone more than two generations away from us) can go to hell for all we care, since the welfare of our great-grandchildren has about a tenth of the weight we accord the current generation. Not surprisingly, this translates into a ‘do-nothing now’ approach to global warming.
In his talk, Mainelli identified four types of glue that can hold together a collaborative response: knowledge (or shared awareness, as Alex and I refer to it); markets (mechanisms for pricing risk and rewarding response); standards (which frame choices); and policies (which regulate them).
But the stickiness of the glue is determined by how much of the future we mix in. Given narrow horizons, there’s little chance that a communal response to a risk can emerge. This quote, from the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, captures the challenge well:
The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail, none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.
