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Never Defect
What traffic in my small city tells me about Capitalism
Traffic is terrible where I live. I mean absolutely terrible. Yesterday it took me two hours to get to work. Without traffic it’s a ten minute drive.
This issue is also fairly new. I mean, we have very poorly designed infrastructure — much of it established hundreds of years ago and slowly updated, or not updated, but as recently as last spring it was pretty rare for my morning commute to exceed twenty minutes. Now twenty minutes is a great day and I’m overjoyed.
So what is driving this change? After all, our population growth stalled.
First there is actual infrastructure renewal going on, finally. This is due to having a mayor who is centrist, as opposed to being on the right (which is what we had up until recently), and that is going to cause some problems, inevitably. Thing is, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The prisoners dilemma is a thought experiment. You have two prisoners. They are being interrogated. If both insist that they are innocent, both get a small sentence. If one admits guilt but the other one doesn’t, that one gets off with no punishment while the other one serves life, and if both admit guilt both get a very long sentence. The trick is, if both behave well, if neither one defects, it’s a good outcome…
