All the World's a Stag

For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how political inequality undermines cooperation in game theory scenarios:

In the opening pages of the second half of his 1755 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagines a scenario in which a group of early human hunters work together to stalk a stag—at least until one of them sees the chance to break cover to capture a hare. “Having caught his own prey,” Rousseau says of this not-so-noble savage, “he would have cared very little about having caused his companions to lose theirs.”

Read more at templeton.org