Retrospective and prospective
The classical liberals built a world celebrating individual freedom to pursue one’s own goals in an organized civil society that relies on individuals’ reciprocal respect. Neoliberals seek to approximate this same world but on the assumption that individuals satisfy their preferences despite others.
Human civilization differs little from that of other creatures on earth or even throughout the cosmos. Behavioral traits are programmed into organisms as a condition of their survival and propagation. Alternatively, habitual action conforming to Nash’s mutual-best-reply equilibrium can emerge and become mutually sustaining over cycles of repeating encounter. On this view, language, communication, and truth-telling emerge as behavioral patterns that serve life forms in their individual maximization of a salient environmental property necessary for survival.[700]As an analytic paradigm, game theory cannot be falsified, nor can it be empirically demonstrated to be prescriptively valid.[701] [702] In its standard form, it is limited to the logic of consequences and cannot acknowledge gratuitous generosity. It thus negates the classical liberal perfect and imperfect duties. Furthermore, it typically only accepts noncooperative individualistic maximization and limits value to scarce sources resembling energy in physics. As a result actors cannot work together as teams, and they compete for limited sources of value as in the parlor games John von Neumann originally studied.
Neoliberal explanations will gravitate toward the analytic and empirical centrality of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.11 Neoliberal institutions will treat actors as though they were strategically rational and solely motivated by incentives.[703] [704] Acknowledging that the Prisoner’s Dilemma impasse lies at the core of neoliberal political economy, the political theorist Philip Pettit observes,
The norms that have been at the focus of concern in the rational choice literature are those such that conformity to them enables people to resolve free-rider problems, in particular problems that are also many-party prisoner’s dilemmas.
In a prisoner’s dilemma each party faces options of cooperating or defecting in some way and the following two conditions are fulfilled: universal cooperation is Pareto-superior to universal defection, being better for some - perhaps for all - and worse for none; but defecting is the dominant option, being better for each regardless of what others do.13Pettit finds that reliably telling the truth, keeping promises, refraining from theft or violence, serving public interest in the capacity of an officer of state, and reliably contributing to public interest that serves everyone’s goals has the structure of a multi-actor Prisoner’s Dilemma. He states, “Arguably, conforming to norms like... [this preceding list] is equivalent to cooperating in a many-party prisoner’s dilemma, so that universal... [or] fairly general conformity... represents an escape from the predicament.”[705] Behavioral norms are the solutions to games but, as the Nash mutual-best-reply equilibrium indicates, may not exhibit patterns of optimal resource use. Behavioral tactics including either strong governance or endogenous punishment through vigilant shaming of defectors are necessary to prevent every actor from pursuing the temptation of free riding on others.
Analyzing and modeling “social dilemmas” with the PD game and identifying some incentive structure, either through endogenous punishment or exogenous sanctioning, have characterized much of the neoliberal enterprise. However, we know from experiments that situations that researchers frame as PDs are often not interpreted as such by subjects.[706] Moreover research reveals that treating individuals as strategic rational actors who are moved only by incentives can crowd out ethical and other-regarding conduct.[707] Analytic modeling suggests that opportunists, or the standard rational actors Pettit describes who have the preference to defect while others cooperate, can also negatively impact their partners in interaction who respect alternative logics or values for action.[708] Hence, noncooperative game theory may best be viewed as a transformative paradigm that may be used for descriptive modeling, but it is also presented as a tool for individual decision making, in addition to public policy and institutional design.[709]
Cultivating neoliberal subjectivity conforming to strategic rational action then can be achieved through learning its method, inhabiting institutions structured in accordance with its logic, and being exposed to neoliberal actors.
Prisoners of Reason opened with the contrast between the theoretical underpinnings of classical versus neoliberal agency and political economy to demonstrate at a minimum the unique and idiosyncratic character of strategic rationality, and more ambitiously to offer its Western predecessor as an alternative understanding of action familiar to many within a generation’s reach of the present.19 An individual who wishes to resist neoliberal subjectivity and imperatives of action faces the challenge of going against the grain of a cultural era in which noncooperative strategic rationality is the academically sanctioned norm at elite universities and leading institutions and polices are designed to implement its logic.20The demands of expected utility theory are great: every conceivable world state must be ranked ahead of time and for all time on a single consistent scale including lotteries of potential world states, and this utility function renders superfluous the actual moment or act of judgment.21 Ex ante and ex post consent are, in this worldview, irrelevant distinctions. Consent is gathered directly from preferences. The operationalization of game theory relies on simplifications, the most prominent being the introduction of monetary denominations to reflect individuals’ preference rankings. However, the single metric criterion, which must operate as a limited resource, reveals that, ultimately neoliberalism deploys a philosophy of value that more resembles mercantilism than classical liberalism. The single criterion scale requires that preferences for an outcome be stated as a willingness and ability to pay for an outcome with resources already on hand. All value then is constrained by the finite scale that must have a well-defined cap to be useful. This method is perfectly transparent if, as von Neumann and Morgenstern originally observed, expected utility functions such as temperature in physics and is responsive to an underlying objective energy state of the system.