Anti-Climacus

LINK: Matthew Yglesias runs a clinic on international relations game theory. I have three concerns:

1. I'm reluctant to place any dispute, even a purely theoretical one, one a two-dimensional axis with the dimensions undefined. What you make those two policy questions into matters a lot, especially since Matt is trying to imply that there is or could be linkage between them, but it's not impossible to imagine a set of circumstances where you have two relatable but not linked foreign policy questions.

2. At least part of his analysis seems to hinge on the preferences of the actors being circular and not elliptical. It is, however, one of my base contentions no one is ever indifferent between options, and that one will always be more important than the other. If the preferences of all the actors skew horizontal rather than vertical (and again, it really matters what the issues are to determine how this would work out), then that radically alters the likely outcome.

3. Bringing in D in the final part of his post is a little bit misleading. The Pareto Optimal set is the blue-ish area on his graph only so long as A, B and C are the relevant actors. If D is included, then the Pareto Optimal set becomes the triangle BCD, so it shouldn't be surpising at all if the proposal D makes is within this set and close to it's ideal point. But then again, they'd do that if the Status Quo was outside the Pareto Optimal set for any other, non-catastrophic reason, so I'm skeptical about how much you can read into that.