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> Widespread public problems this this cannot be solved by individual citizens or organizations. They need the power, money and resources of a government. More

by derleth 13y ago

> Widespread public problems this this cannot be solved by individual citizens or organizations. They need the power, money and resources of a government. More to the point, they need an entity that is both powerful enough to force change and not bound by the same incentives that the polluting companies are. It's down to a Nash equilibrium, which is the stable strategy that obtains when everyone makes the best decision possible for them knowing what everyone else has decided. There's no way for anyone to unilaterally change their minds without losing something, which is why the strategy is stable even if it is completely insane. In this case, the stable strategy is to pollute and not invest anything in cleanup, because the first company to unilaterally invest in cleaning up will lose profits relative to all of its competitors who aren't cleaning anything. That isn't acceptable. Therefore, Mumbai has brown oceans and Beijing has brown air. The only way out is for some powerful entity that isn't bound by the same Nash equilibrium to step in and force a new equilibrium state by imposing penalties on the polluters. That's something that, realistically, only the government can do. (What happens when governments get locked in a bad Nash equilibrium? Well, you get the Cold War, where Mutually Assured Destruction prevailed despite nobody really wanting to end the world in nuclear flame.)

sakbhatn 13y ago
What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses? Neither can the government be blamed entirely nor can people just wash their hands off saying we are not powerful enough.In a city like Mumbai there is a wide diversity of income classes. There are people who see open defecation everyday on their way to work but they do nothing about it. The least they can do is go talk to the people in the slums about how open defecation is bad and how they should avoid it. It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out. It is not just the slums that are suffering, diseases can be easily caught by anyone else who does use proper toilets and sanitation.
- Heliosmaster 13y ago
  True only if the masses care. And (worldwide) they don't (otherwise there would be ~99% participation in voting, and so on)
- zizee 13y ago
  > go talk to the people in the slums about how open defecation is bad The people in the slums probably know that it is bad, but the facilities available to them are so shit-house (literally and figuratively) that they choose to defecate onto the ground.
- derleth 13y ago
  > What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses? An entity that isn't tempted to defect from a boycott: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom > Milgrom, together with Barry Weingast and Avner Greif, applied a repeated game model to explain the role of merchant guilds in the medieval period (Greif, Milgrom and Weingast, 1994). The paper beings with the observation that long-distance trade in the somewhat chaotic environment of the Middle Ages exposed traveling merchants to the risk of attack, confiscation of goods and unenforced agreements. Merchants thus required the assistance of local rulers for protection of person, property and contract. But what reason did rulers have to provide this assistance? A key insight from the paper is that neither bilateral nor multilateral reputation mechanisms can support the incentives of a ruler to protect foreign merchants as trade reaches an efficient level. The reason is that at the efficient level the marginal value of losing the trade of a single or even a subset of merchants—in their attempt to punish a defaulting ruler—approaches zero. The threat is, thus, insufficient to deter a ruler from confiscating goods or to encourage their expenditure of resources or political capital to defend foreign merchants against local citizens. Effective punishment that will deter rulers' bad behavior requires more extensive coordination of effectively all the merchants who provide value for the ruler. The question then becomes, what incentives do the merchants have to participate in the collective boycott? Here is the role for the Merchant Guild, an organization that has the power to punish its own members for failure to abide by a boycott announced by the guild. The parallels between this scenario and the one we're talking about are obvious: Any company big enough to cause serious damage by its pollution is not going to be harmed by a boycott unless nearly everyone in India participates, but the value gained from defecting (in game-theoretic terms) from the boycott is too large for that to happen. So, instead of forming a guild to punish defection, which just increases the misery in the world, we institute government agencies to punish polluters directly instead of trying to use boycotts to punish them. Say what you will about the morality of such a system, I can go outside today and see green grass, clear skies, and breathe the air without damaging my lungs. > It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out. Except in this case, this do-it-yourself strategy has been demonstrated to not work.
simonh 13y ago
> (What happens when governments get locked in a bad Nash equilibrium? >Well, you get the Cold War Except M.A.D worked. It's an example of a beneficial Nash equilibrium because the stable state was a military stalemate. If one side had the bomb and the other didn't you get Hiroshima and Nagasaki all over again, and if neither had the bomb you'd get a conventional WW3.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  It worked because it was short enough not to work.
- arethuza 13y ago
  "Except M.A.D worked." For a truly insane value of "worked" - running terrible (and largely unnecessary) levels of risk for decades hardly has much to recommend it.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    What would be the better alternative? The risk was far less terrible than, say, a few dozen tactical nukes used by one of the sides in a third war across Europe, as the status quo of warsaw pact borders wasn't that acceptable to both armies, and only MAD ensured that the cold war didn't become hot.
    - arethuza 13y ago
      Everyone would have been deterred with a tiny percentage of the weapons that eventually ended up being deployed - no political leader in the West or in the Soviet Union could ever have contemplated a single city being hit by an H-bomb. The Soviets, more than anyone, knew what it was like to lose tens of millions to a war - for all their faults they had no desire to repeat this experience. MAD was the only possible strategy. However, the insane level of weaponry that was actually in place was, in my view, completely unnecessary. If your opponent is deterred by one level of force then having a hundred times this level does not make you safer. [NB In case anyone interprets my position as somehow being in support of the Soviets - they were, as far as I am concerned, a criminal regime just as "evil" in their own ways as the other nightmares of the 20th century. However, the level of strategic threat they posed was wildly overstated for political ends.]
ayushgta 13y ago
Being locked in a Nash equilibrium is an interesting way to look at this. That perspective however is based on the idea that both parties (polluters and the entity responsible for controlling the pollution, say the government) are doing the best they can. Without having experienced/researched it, it is not easy to appreciate the extent of apathy the governing structure in India exhibits towards its people. From the perspective of someone living in a developed country, its tempting to view this as a reasoned and logically approachable problem between different interest groups. That approach works well when the underlying institutions and the people embodying them are functioning well and functionally logically. When the people responsible for governing are simply not, well governing, then we don't need to go much further in unravelling why there is status quo. The status quo here is not because of a strategic/organic deadlock between two parties but rather because one of the parties is not doing its job. Why isn't the government doing its job? I think it takes time for large democracies to come to age. I was talking about this to a friend who made the same point and asked me to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age#Politics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age#Politics to get a sense for life in the US during a similar stage of its economic development as India is in today. The section Politics is especially resonant. In America the democratic governing institutions have had time to mature over 237 years. Even with its flaws, it is the best governance humanity has been able to achieve at scale. It has had its rite of passage, from the early days of Indian removal, slavery, the mexican war, expansion, the civil war and many other wars plus thing like Women's suffrage. Indian government is merely 66 years old. And its not starting afresh in a "new land". Its trying to govern huge masses of people whose separate histories go back a long long time. India needs to go through its rite of passage and I guess one of those alleys is full of shit.

by derleth 13y ago

sakbhatn 13y ago

What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses? Neither can the government be blamed entirely nor can people just wash their hands off saying we are not powerful enough.In a city like Mumbai there is a wide diversity of income classes. There are people who see open defecation everyday on their way to work but they do nothing about it. The least they can do is go talk to the people in the slums about how open defecation is bad and how they should avoid it. It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out. It is not just the slums that are suffering, diseases can be easily caught by anyone else who does use proper toilets and sanitation.

Heliosmaster 13y ago
True only if the masses care. And (worldwide) they don't (otherwise there would be ~99% participation in voting, and so on)
zizee 13y ago
> go talk to the people in the slums about how open defecation is bad The people in the slums probably know that it is bad, but the facilities available to them are so shit-house (literally and figuratively) that they choose to defecate onto the ground.
derleth 13y ago
> What can be more powerful than the collective power of masses? An entity that isn't tempted to defect from a boycott: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Milgrom > Milgrom, together with Barry Weingast and Avner Greif, applied a repeated game model to explain the role of merchant guilds in the medieval period (Greif, Milgrom and Weingast, 1994). The paper beings with the observation that long-distance trade in the somewhat chaotic environment of the Middle Ages exposed traveling merchants to the risk of attack, confiscation of goods and unenforced agreements. Merchants thus required the assistance of local rulers for protection of person, property and contract. But what reason did rulers have to provide this assistance? A key insight from the paper is that neither bilateral nor multilateral reputation mechanisms can support the incentives of a ruler to protect foreign merchants as trade reaches an efficient level. The reason is that at the efficient level the marginal value of losing the trade of a single or even a subset of merchants—in their attempt to punish a defaulting ruler—approaches zero. The threat is, thus, insufficient to deter a ruler from confiscating goods or to encourage their expenditure of resources or political capital to defend foreign merchants against local citizens. Effective punishment that will deter rulers' bad behavior requires more extensive coordination of effectively all the merchants who provide value for the ruler. The question then becomes, what incentives do the merchants have to participate in the collective boycott? Here is the role for the Merchant Guild, an organization that has the power to punish its own members for failure to abide by a boycott announced by the guild. The parallels between this scenario and the one we're talking about are obvious: Any company big enough to cause serious damage by its pollution is not going to be harmed by a boycott unless nearly everyone in India participates, but the value gained from defecting (in game-theoretic terms) from the boycott is too large for that to happen. So, instead of forming a guild to punish defection, which just increases the misery in the world, we institute government agencies to punish polluters directly instead of trying to use boycotts to punish them. Say what you will about the morality of such a system, I can go outside today and see green grass, clear skies, and breathe the air without damaging my lungs. > It is better to take some steps and do something about problems than to wait for government or any other "powerful" body to come help you out. Except in this case, this do-it-yourself strategy has been demonstrated to not work.

simonh 13y ago

> (What happens when governments get locked in a bad Nash equilibrium? >Well, you get the Cold War Except M.A.D worked. It's an example of a beneficial Nash equilibrium because the stable state was a military stalemate. If one side had the bomb and the other didn't you get Hiroshima and Nagasaki all over again, and if neither had the bomb you'd get a conventional WW3.

jacquesm 13y ago
It worked because it was short enough not to work.
arethuza 13y ago
"Except M.A.D worked." For a truly insane value of "worked" - running terrible (and largely unnecessary) levels of risk for decades hardly has much to recommend it.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  What would be the better alternative? The risk was far less terrible than, say, a few dozen tactical nukes used by one of the sides in a third war across Europe, as the status quo of warsaw pact borders wasn't that acceptable to both armies, and only MAD ensured that the cold war didn't become hot.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    Everyone would have been deterred with a tiny percentage of the weapons that eventually ended up being deployed - no political leader in the West or in the Soviet Union could ever have contemplated a single city being hit by an H-bomb. The Soviets, more than anyone, knew what it was like to lose tens of millions to a war - for all their faults they had no desire to repeat this experience. MAD was the only possible strategy. However, the insane level of weaponry that was actually in place was, in my view, completely unnecessary. If your opponent is deterred by one level of force then having a hundred times this level does not make you safer. [NB In case anyone interprets my position as somehow being in support of the Soviets - they were, as far as I am concerned, a criminal regime just as "evil" in their own ways as the other nightmares of the 20th century. However, the level of strategic threat they posed was wildly overstated for political ends.]

ayushgta 13y ago

Being locked in a Nash equilibrium is an interesting way to look at this. That perspective however is based on the idea that both parties (polluters and the entity responsible for controlling the pollution, say the government) are doing the best they can. Without having experienced/researched it, it is not easy to appreciate the extent of apathy the governing structure in India exhibits towards its people. From the perspective of someone living in a developed country, its tempting to view this as a reasoned and logically approachable problem between different interest groups. That approach works well when the underlying institutions and the people embodying them are functioning well and functionally logically. When the people responsible for governing are simply not, well governing, then we don't need to go much further in unravelling why there is status quo. The status quo here is not because of a strategic/organic deadlock between two parties but rather because one of the parties is not doing its job. Why isn't the government doing its job? I think it takes time for large democracies to come to age. I was talking about this to a friend who made the same point and asked me to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age#Politics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age#Politics to get a sense for life in the US during a similar stage of its economic development as India is in today. The section Politics is especially resonant. In America the democratic governing institutions have had time to mature over 237 years. Even with its flaws, it is the best governance humanity has been able to achieve at scale. It has had its rite of passage, from the early days of Indian removal, slavery, the mexican war, expansion, the civil war and many other wars plus thing like Women's suffrage. Indian government is merely 66 years old. And its not starting afresh in a "new land". Its trying to govern huge masses of people whose separate histories go back a long long time. India needs to go through its rite of passage and I guess one of those alleys is full of shit.