> The question you should ask yourself is: in what kind of society do I want to live and do my actions contribute to it and if so at what cost? What if everybody acted like I did?
But then of course this is the wrong question to ask. This is nothing more but a complicated version of a multi-party, repeated Prisoner's Dilemma problem. Except that you don't know your negative payoff when an opponent chooses to defect, but it may well be minus infinity (you get holocausted or nuked into paleolith). And then defection by any single party gets you the negative payoff. So if you only ask the question you suggest and ignore the rest of the options, you are doomed.
I'm afraid that the world's politicians (most of them at least) are completely sane, and all this "race to the bottom" stuff going on is just the result of the game theory & life being what it is.
This is true if you think in an egoistical game theory mode, where all the other can be is an enemy, where only one party can win and where the idea that you win automatically when the other loses is accepted. In reality both can win or both can lose as well (and they do so regularily). So if both sides can predict a race to the bottom wouldn’t the better thing be an approach that tries to disolve the binary situation (which is btw a very american thing in itself because political compromise is far more common in nations without two-party systems).
I think context is key, and we shouldn’t theorize conflicts in everyday life in the same way as all out nuclear war or other existential situations. Maybe that is just the naive idea of a guy who benefits from the wealth and peace produced from a Europe which for the first time in centuries doean’t feel the need to kill each other for (in hindsight) more or less meaningless reasons.
But then of course this is the wrong question to ask. This is nothing more but a complicated version of a multi-party, repeated Prisoner's Dilemma problem. Except that you don't know your negative payoff when an opponent chooses to defect, but it may well be minus infinity (you get holocausted or nuked into paleolith). And then defection by any single party gets you the negative payoff. So if you only ask the question you suggest and ignore the rest of the options, you are doomed.
I'm afraid that the world's politicians (most of them at least) are completely sane, and all this "race to the bottom" stuff going on is just the result of the game theory & life being what it is.