Rules

This is essentially me revisiting the core concept from last week’s observation that social norms are necessary but not sufficient. Simply read this Michael Lewis essay on the attempted takeover and dissolution of the Institute of Peace by a cadre of DOGE employees who seem little more than a gang of giddy vandals.

You can read it as the narrative is designed. There are good guys resisting a group of marauding (in some cases literal) children. But I think it implies a vastly more important question that we’ve been learning the answer to every day for the last two years: are there rules? If someone does not care to follow the rules, what are the consequences? If someone is creating bespoke rules on the fly with the implied promise that you are taking on great personal risk if you do not follow their rules, are they actually rules or are they something else?

Funny thing about high level governance, it takes on a far greater “fog of war” than a more optimistic observer of institutions might expect. The shape of the current US federal government and the actions it takes appears to be determined far more by the actions of individuals willing and capable of making decisions in a fog of war. That favors people who know that rules aren’t real if they are unenforced. But it also implies the potential for far greater consequences if an authority ever decides to impose consquences for prior transgressions within the fog of war in the interest of resetting precedent for the future.

In game theory, coordination games reflects the benefits of everyone settling on the same rules. Settling on the same rules can avoid a conflict and destructive competition. For example, some rules may be arbitrary, such as on which side of the road we’ll all drive. It doesn’t much matter whether a country’s vehicles drive along the right or left side of the street. As long as everyone is in the same lane, we overwhelmingly benefit from our coordination. The matrix below describes the game.

The above game reflects that whether we agree to drive on the left or on the right is trivial and that the important detail is that we agree on what the rule is. Rules like this are arbitrary. No amount of cost benefit analysis changes the answer. Other coordination rules are seemingly arbitrary, but do have different welfare implications. For example, according to English common law, a farmer was entitled to prohibit a herdsman’s flock from trampling his crops even if the farmland had no fence. Herdsmen were responsible for corralling their flocks or paying damages if they grazed on the farm. With lots of nearby farms, total welfare was higher with a rule of cultivation rights rather than grazing rights.

But the property rights could have been assigned to the herdsman instead. The law could have said that the sheep were free to graze with impunity and that the onus was on the farmer to build fences in order to keep the sheep at bay. In a world where there are a lot of farmers who are very nearby to one another, a small flock of sheep can do a lot of damage. And so, the cost-benefit analysis prescribes that herdsmen bear the cost of restricting the flock rather than the farmer. The matrix that describes this circumstance is below.

The above matrix reflects that agreeing on any rule is better than no rule at all. And, the rule that is selected has societal welfare implications. Choosing the ‘wrong’ rule means that we could get stuck in a rut of lower payoffs because coordinating a change in the rules is hard.

Schools

Another way in which the specific rule can be important is by whether it instantiates or works contrary to pre-existing incentives. Before compulsory schooling laws were passed, US states already had very high school attendance rates. Most parents sent their kids to school because it was a good investment. The ages at which children should be required to attend is largely, though not entirely, arbitrary. And wouldn’t you know it, most states applied their compulsory schooling legislation to the age groups for which the vast majority of children were already attending school. Enforcing a law against the natural incentives of human capital investment would have been more costly. The particular ages of compulsory schooling had different welfare implications due to the differing costs of enforcement.

Dryer Lint

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