Race to disaster

With the current mess in mind, suppose we apply the prisoner’s dilemma to the politics of race relations. The optimal strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma is cooperation, but human nature is rarely high-minded enough to risk it. 

Similarly the optimal strategy for both groups in any ethnic or religious divide is to work for harmonious relations. However if bad actors in either group promote a one-sided strategy then suboptimal is what we end up with. This is what the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma tells us.

Conversely, if one group follows the optimal harmonious strategy whatever the other group does, then the strategy also fails if there are bad actors in the other group. The mere fact that one group is aware that the other has an exploitable strategy is enough to make failure likely. Assume there are bad actors in both groups – it is not necessary to claim otherwise to make the argument work. This is what we have to recognise though - both groups must follow the optimal strategy to make it work. Both groups must identify their own bad actors - nothing else will work.

This is just one reason why the ludicrously privileged BBC should have its funding removed. Apart from numerous other failings it has consistently failed to apply the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma and identify bad actors in racism debates. Of course this implies that the BBC is one of those bad actors and unfortunately there is evidence that it is just that.

The obvious problem is so many people know that anti-racism rhetoric is one-sided. Again this is no surprise because the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma suggests this as a likely outcome. In the UK the BBC is so influential that this unbalanced situation is unlikely to change until the BBC changes. At the moment that seems unlikely.

A more likely outcome is one that anyone who pays attention will see all the time. Those who see themselves as in the losing group of the debate may as well forget the optimal strategy. The logic of the prisoner’s dilemma suggests that this is the way we’ll go because, among other reasons, diversity policies are inherently unbalanced. We’ll end up with real rather than mostly imaginary racism. Many people seem to know that already.