The Stag and the State
One argument in three parts: what shrinking horizons do to agents, to people, and to institutions.
Why autonomous agents default to mediocrity — and how to engineer the trust required to fix it.
Scoring systems don't make people worse. They make cooperation irrational — for the scored, not just the scoring.
The socialist calculation debate isn't over. It moved into the private sector — and it's currently being lost there.
The series runs one game-theoretic idea through three scales. The shadow of the future — the weight tomorrow casts over today's choices — is what makes cooperation rational; every part examines a system that shortens it. Part 1 watches autonomous software agents abandon high-value cooperation because disposable identities make every transaction a last round. Part 2 turns the same lens on people living inside scoring systems, where unappealable, asymmetric scores delete the next round the way burner identities do. Part 3 reaches the institutions: the platforms that own the venues of exchange, and now set the length of everyone's horizon — private central planners whose discipline, where it survives, is the one thing keeping a market from quietly becoming a plan.