So much here, Tim. For the moment, I remember Phil Curtin really taken by game theory in working out interpretations of historical findings? Optimization of interest, presumption of rational choice actors? But I also think of chess...in which part of the strategy is to figure out another’s plans and to act on them with the contingencies associated with the possibility that one perceives a plan different from the one the opponent is deploying.
Yes, he was, and with the idea of 'wargaming' out historical scenarios; that is to say, provisioning agents with their local rationalities and finding out how the pursuit of their competing optimizations could lead to non-optimal outcomes. That was one reason as I understood it that he became so fascinated with European mortality in 18th and early 19th Century Atlantic exchange in West and Central Africa--that the profits of slave trading didn't seem to align with the danger that Europeans faced in direct participation in the trade. He really didn't want to turn to "culture", broadly speaking, as an explanation, nor to "capitalism" as a system whose imperatives might not derive from nor be solicitous towards the optimized interest of individual actors. So what he wanted to know in that late-career research project was not just "how dangerous was the trade to Europeans" but "did they *know* it was that dangerous?" e.g., was this a problem of asymmetrical information?
Chess is an interesting case where it's possible to play 'deceptively' without concealing information from the opponent as such; poker is the opposite, where information asymmetry is built into the action of the game.
Let us just say that he was an antagonist whose motivations I had to urgently attempt to decipher...The odd thing is that a lot of this stuff you and I and selected others know about him we know because it was expressed more pedagogically and discursively as an interlocutor to other people's work as it was on the page--in writerly terms, he favored a much more theoretically and interpretatively uncommitted persona, the sort of "non-ideological liberal".
So much here, Tim. For the moment, I remember Phil Curtin really taken by game theory in working out interpretations of historical findings? Optimization of interest, presumption of rational choice actors? But I also think of chess...in which part of the strategy is to figure out another’s plans and to act on them with the contingencies associated with the possibility that one perceives a plan different from the one the opponent is deploying.
Yes, he was, and with the idea of 'wargaming' out historical scenarios; that is to say, provisioning agents with their local rationalities and finding out how the pursuit of their competing optimizations could lead to non-optimal outcomes. That was one reason as I understood it that he became so fascinated with European mortality in 18th and early 19th Century Atlantic exchange in West and Central Africa--that the profits of slave trading didn't seem to align with the danger that Europeans faced in direct participation in the trade. He really didn't want to turn to "culture", broadly speaking, as an explanation, nor to "capitalism" as a system whose imperatives might not derive from nor be solicitous towards the optimized interest of individual actors. So what he wanted to know in that late-career research project was not just "how dangerous was the trade to Europeans" but "did they *know* it was that dangerous?" e.g., was this a problem of asymmetrical information?
Chess is an interesting case where it's possible to play 'deceptively' without concealing information from the opponent as such; poker is the opposite, where information asymmetry is built into the action of the game.
You know your Curtin!!!
Let us just say that he was an antagonist whose motivations I had to urgently attempt to decipher...The odd thing is that a lot of this stuff you and I and selected others know about him we know because it was expressed more pedagogically and discursively as an interlocutor to other people's work as it was on the page--in writerly terms, he favored a much more theoretically and interpretatively uncommitted persona, the sort of "non-ideological liberal".