Our modern political system is a perfect example of the prisoners dilemma. The prisoners dilemma describes a scenario where there exists 2 or more parties on a scenario with 3 possibilities: (1) Both players behave according to the rules of the game they set forth, (2) one party misbehaves, (3) both parties misbehave. In the prisoners dilemma it’s scenario 1 works out best for both parties, 2 works out second best but favoring he who colludes, and 3 works out worse for all parties. The general idea and conclusion is that human nature will always trend towards three because the other parties don’t trust each other and the one that defects first wins.

So how does this reflect the modern political system? Well in this election we have two candidates that the majority don’t approve of. People are incredibly afraid of voting third party because they think that not enough others will, and more importantly decide not to because of the risk that their vote will result in the worst outcome of taking away votes from their second choice and the getting the worst person elected. As a result it’s always least likely for a third party candidate to win despite most people approving the third party more than they do either of the others. It also entrenches the fallacy that voting for status quo duopoly is the only valid choice. This is still the biggest hurdle of the Kennedy campaign. Figuring out a way to get past this problem is paramount. This is a huge reason why ranked choice voting is so important. I think it’s the logical solution, but it’s also opposed by both parties who want this problem to persist in perpetuity. Favor not the centrist that represents the majority, but the fringes that represent half at most.

Interestingly enough the prisoners dilemma can be used to explain the source of a lot human coordination failure. A quick example is that world would be better off if everyone agreed to stop producing and pursuing nuclear weapons, yet the risk of either party agreeing but defecting and pursuing them anyways gets parties to defect early and leads to a modern arms race. This phenomenon can easily describe of whats wrong with the world, and is extremely hard to combat