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4 A Primer on Games Oh, the Rand Corporation’s the boon of the world, They think all day long for a fee. They sit and play games about going up in flames; For counters they use you and me, honey bee, For counters they use you and me. Malvina Reynolds, ‘‘The RAND Hymn,’’ 1961 Game theory has a dark reputation, particularly in the humanities. The central thesis of this book is that meaning arises from the rational use of language to signal messages. Game theory itself is concerned with rational decision making where the outcome of a decision depends on the behavior of other agents. My hypothesis is that linguistic meaning arises out of strategic decision-making by rational agents. There is a lot in this hypothesis to arouse suspicion. Are people, after all, ultimately rational decision makers? For people outside of game theory, the very words game theory suggest an icy model of human behavior that views behavior as grounded solely in ‘‘rational’’ self-interest; it seems to counsel greed and self-centered behavior of the sort that led to the economic meltdown of 2008, hardly an optimal outcome by rational decision makers. It’s hard not to associate game theory with the Cold War world of the arms race, mutually assured destruction, and credible deterrence. The RAND Corporation, which played a central role in the early development of game theory, is notoriously associated with the policies that influenced early U.S. nuclear strategy , from the arms buildup to the problem of delivering the mail after a nuclear strike. It’s hard now, in our post Cold War world, to reconstruct just how evil the RAND Corporation seemed to many people; the fact that RAND fellows worked on such sinister topics as whether nuclear war is winnable guaranteed a reputation somewhat worse than Halliburton ’s and marginally better than Satan’s. John von Neumann, one of the central figures in the early history of game theory, argued that the United States should carry out a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union before that country could get the bomb. According to his obituary in Life magazine, After the Axis had been destroyed, von Neumann urged that the U.S. immedi ately build even more powerful atomic weapons of their own. It was not an emo tional crusade. Von Neumann, like others, had coldly reasoned that the world had grown too small to permit nations to conduct their a¤airs independently of one another. He held that world government was inevitable and the sooner the bet ter. But he also believed it could never be established while Soviet Communism dominated half of the globe. A famous von Neumann observation at that time: ‘‘With the Russians it is not a question of whether but when.’’ A hard boiled strat egist, he was one of the few scientists to advocate preventive war, and in 1950 he was remarking, ‘‘If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not 1 o’clock?’’ (von Neumann 1957, 96) I think that I can understand von Neumann here. He had left Hungary as a young man to avoid the Nazis, only to have the country seized by the Soviets after the war. The world must have seemed a dark place, ruled by the ruthless, where the best we could hope for was that the worst impulses would be held in check. The strategy that emerged from that period, mutually assured destruction , was a game of stalemate. Both sides sought to make the cost of nuclear exchange unacceptable to the other side by building enough arms to destroy everything and by persuading the opponent that they had the will and means to retaliate in the event of a first strike. I grew up haunted by the bomb, like everyone around me. Since my family lived near White Sands Missile Range, my father was convinced that we were a primary target for Soviet thermonuclear missiles and that there would be no surviving a thermonuclear strike. In my boyhood, I started having a recurring nightmare. I was alone in the city, which was completely deserted. I would run through the streets with a growing sense of dread; I felt stalked by a malevolent thing. I turned a corner and saw the mountain that divided the city. Then, behind it was a huge flash. I would always wake up. I had this nightmare well...

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