Intro to Collective Action

Humans cooperate at a scale no other animal does. We went from bands of a few dozen to villages, cities and nations of millions, and each jump came from new institutions and culture: ritual, kinship, law, money, the state. We also fail to cooperate in ways that could be catastrophic: arms races, overused commons, the race to build AI. These are collective action problems (sometimes called Moloch, or the multipolar trap) and they are a central pattern of dysfunction in the metacrisis. Addressing them is a key part of civilizational renewal. This course looks at both sides: why cooperation fails, how it has been made to work, and what it would take at planetary scale.

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This is a prototype. The material is being developed as the course runs, and the outline below will change.

From arms races to planetary cooperation. Moloch, the metacrisis, and how cooperation scales.

About

The structure behind an arms race shows up in climate change, the AI race and bioweapons: each party does what makes sense for it, and the combined result is something none of them want. The course starts there, with the basic dynamics and the vocabulary for them.

But a collective action problem is also a collective action opportunity. The reason to understand failure is to get better at success, and most of the course is about how cooperation has actually been made to work.

Communities govern commons for centuries. States, markets and treaties hold strangers together. Every jump in the scale of human cooperation — band, village, chiefdom, city, nation — came from a cultural innovation: ritual, kinship, religion, law, money, the firm. The last two sessions ask what that implies for the jump we now need to make: to planetary cooperation.

Course outline

Session 1: Metacrisis Motivation

Why should we care about collective action problems? How do they relate to climate change, runaway AI and the metacrisis in general?

• Introduction to collective action
• War and arms races
• Relation to the metacrisis and the big challenges like climate change and technology governance
• Why this matters so much now

Session 2: Stag & Moloch

Why do rational, decent people end up in outcomes none of them want? The basic dynamics of cooperation and defection with basic theoretical frameworks and key terminology.

• Prisoner's dilemma, stag hunt, tragedy of the commons, public goods and free riding
• Some basic game theory
• Reframing: a collective action problem is a collective action opportunity
• The many names — multipolar trap, race to the bottom, Moloch (and why Moloch is great branding but problematic conceptually)

Session 3: How Do We Ever Cooperate?

We do cooperate, constantly. What makes that possible, and why does it hold at village scale?

• The cooperative ape
• Olson on group size, selective incentives and privileged groups
• Repeated interaction and the folk theorem — observation, punishment, the shadow of the future
• Axelrod and Nowak on the evolution of cooperation
• Ostrom's design principles, and what real communities do to govern a commons
• Commons we can overuse, and commons we have to create
• Why this gets harder at scale

Session 4: Cooperation Among Strangers

How do you make cooperation work when the group is larger? What have we built, and what has actually worked?

• Coercion, Hobbes, and the state as a collective action technology
• Changing the payoffs: taxes, subsidies, property rights, Coase
• Schelling on commitment, focal points and arms races
• Polycentricity — stacking villages rather than scaling one
• The record: Montreal, Kyoto, non-proliferation, fisheries, and what the difference turned on

Session 5: Cultural Evolution

How did we get from bands of 150 to a planet of 8 billion? What innovations made each jump possible?

• Multi-level selection, cultural group selection, and the coevolution of the two
• Ilahita: ritual, initiation and manufactured kinship holding thousands together
• Turchin on war as the ratchet of cooperating group size
• Sosis and Norenzayan on costly signals and moralizing gods
• Henrich on kin networks, the Church, and trusting strangers
• The bill: cooperation scales by building in-groups, and in-groups need out-groups

Session 6: The Planetary Turn

What would cooperation at planetary scale require? Do we need a planetary religion?

• What modernity already achieved: human rights, international institutions
• Why nation-states and markets can't hold AI, climate and the biosphere
• Why this enlargement is unlike the previous ones: there is no outside
• Enlarging the sphere of moral concern at each cultural paradigm shift
• Thich Nhat Hanh and a new religion of Interbeing

What you'll come away with

• A working vocabulary: prisoner's dilemma, stag hunt, tragedy of the commons, free riding, multipolar trap
• The main answers to "how does cooperation happen at all?", from repeated interaction and Ostrom's commons to the state and the treaty
• A picture of how cultural evolution has scaled cooperation, and what it has cost
• A way to look at AI, climate and nuclear risk as cooperation challenges, with a sense of what has and hasn't worked

Who it's for

Anyone interested in what lies beneath some of the biggest challenges and opportunities of our time, from AI governance to climate change.

You might be interested if you work on or care about the commons, institutional design, cultural evolution, community-building, or technology governance — or if you've come across Moloch or the metacrisis and want to go a level deeper into the mechanics.

No prior game theory or economics needed.

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