Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Cooperate-Cooperate, Betray-Cooperate, or Betray-Betray.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game

In the golden era we imagine the corporate worker relations was a cooperate cooperate game, producing hard work, good will, and strong meaningful community for everyone.

Then corporations realized they needed workers to cooperate while reserving the right to betray them (layoffs, terminations etc) because as the market grew more cut throat due to everyone's success, a company needed to stay lean and competitive.

Workers are now growing wise to this and we are entering a betray-betray era. Corperations are working to force cooperation while reserving the right to betray (see google/apple/facebook engineering cartel) but workers in high demand fields are becoming savvy as they can use their skills to go anywhere

The problem is the net result of the betray-betray game is assumed to be net lower than the other strategy to play the game, causing the community at large to gain less over multiple games.

To me this is the net result of cynicism: damaging the community in the name of optimization. Capitalism as practiced is a pain-optimization machine and until we choose to risk playing the game as a cooperative endeavor, it will never improve.

What you describe is more an iterated prisoner's dilemma rather than a static game. What's interesting is that it has been demonstrated in controlled circumstances that the most successful strategy in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game is tit-for-tat [1], a strategy that any participating party can choose to adopt at any time.

The fact is, corporate-labor relations is not a monolith. Although some (or even most) participants in the labor market may be engaged in betray-betray behavior today, that doesn't mean that such relationships are universal or will come to dominate the labor market over time. Given that tit-for-tat is theoretically the most successful strategy, companies that adopt generous performance-based policies with their employees should enjoy long-term competitive advantage against any rivals who have chosen less-friendly employee policies. If this model is predictive, the advantages of a "betray only" strategy for corporations will be relatively short-lived, because the inevitable betray-betray relationships will make such companies less competitive than entities that adopt a "tit-for-tat" strategy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat

Not everything is the prisoner's dilemma. There's no reason -- at least not in your post -- that self-motivated individualism can't be efficient; such ideas were advocated by e.g. Hayek and Friedman (to say nothing of real macroeconomics). If my time is better spent somewhere else because they offer me more money, maybe that's because the work I do there will produce more value for the world overall.

In other words your argument is circular: you assume that individualism is bad, and you conclude that capitalism (which starts and ends with individualism) is bad.

Furthermore have workers and corporations always competed cf. unionization in the 1920s and so forth; in general this has been considered an overall benefit (working fewer hours --> quality of life and education).

You assume that your wage is proportional to the value you deliver to the world. Bad. Not correct. Try again. There is a positive correlation on the population level, but on the individual level the relationship is tenuous at best.

It's not relevant to my argument. The point was that in some cases, individualism can be efficient. A didactic example is meant to be recognized as such and not attacked for technicalities in its formulation; rigor was not here the goal. Note, for example, the use of "maybe". But congratulations for irrelevant nitpicking, I guess.

Sorry about that. I thought the "maybe" was sarcastic.

Anyway, the parent's point seems to be that individualism is a strategy that is optimal for a single person, but suboptimal for society. The reason is that what activity maximizes your financial return does not generally maximize the return for society as a whole. Individualism is therefore not optimal. A specific example would be a world that had no crime and therefore no need for security, law enforcement etc. Obviously a lot more efficient than a world with crime. However, since stealing would be free of consequence, individualism dictates that you should steal in this hypothetical world. Everything may not be a prisoner's dilemma, but most is. I don't see how that's nitpicking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com