Yo, I Heard You Like Optimism

So Mike Konczal put some optimism in your strategic analysis of the debt ceiling.

The relevant image:

Noticeably absent from this table’s “negotiate” branch is “weak deal,” which past discussions suggest might include (the worst idea) gutting reforming social security and medicare with chained CPI or a change in the eligibility age.

Pruning the “negotiate” branch — that is, credibly committing to being insane — would have forced the tree down the “don’t negotiate” branch in a world in which House Republicans don’t want the platinum coin to happen. This could have been done through disconnecting the phones in the White House, announcing a vacation to Hawaii until Feb. 16, and launching a “Design the Platinum Coin” contest in the nation’s elementary schools similar to the one that was done for the state quarters.

It’s not that #mintthecoin is a good choice or good outcome, but it had to stay on the table to make pruning the “negotiate” branch credible. Obama has to believe that the House Republicans both hate the idea of default and take his cheap talk verbal commitment not to negotiate seriously, and he has no reason to believe either.

A Cautionary Tale About What Can Happen When You Think You’re Acting Strategically, but Actually Aren’t

Dixit and Skeath set up their basic coordination game this way:

“Picture two undergraduates, Harry and Sally, who meet in their college library. They are attracted to each other and would like to continue the conversation but have to go off to their separate classes. They arrange to meet for coffee after the classes are over at 4:30. Sitting separately in class, each realizes that in the excitement they forgot to fix the place to meet. There are two possible choices, Starbucks and Local Latte. Unfortunately, these locations are on opposite sides of the large campus; so it is not possible to try both. And Harry and Sally have not exchanged pager numbers; so they can’t send messages. What should each do?” (105)

Ha, pagers, right? Good thing we live in the future and don’t have to deal with that problem anymore!

Except it turns out I am the worst at packing. I spent the weekend in Boston without a phone charger and with plans to meet at Jillian’s, which I guess is a place people go in large numbers (otherwise, why would they have three floors and four bouncers?). I had to choose between trying to meet inside or outside.

I picked outside. I reasoned that if I waited inside, my friend would have to guess which floor correctly. I didn’t know how many stairwells there were, so I didn’t know if this would be an issue, and, since there was only one entrance, I thought staying outside would force him to walk by me in order to get inside. With my phone dead at this point, to communicate I had to leave to find a place with wifi. After waiting for maybe twenty minutes, I did that.

It turned out he’d beaten me to the bar and had been inside the whole time. He was on the second floor, which is entirely devoted to pool, and, considering various free pool nights at The Spoke in Amherst or at the U Pub, was an obvious focal point (explained as a “coordination device” in Skeath and Dixit). An hour later and a $6 fruit smoothie I didn’t actually want but had to purchase to buy off my guilt about just wanting to borrow wifi from a frozen yogurt place, we successfully communicated our respective locations.

I think there are two lessons here:

1) Always know which tire before you stop communicating,

and,

2) Remember your damn phone charger, dummy.