Failures

The Tragedy of the Commons

Free Rider Problem

If you give people the choice to support public goods or not, rationally self-interested people without a coordination mechanism will often free ride on public goods.If enough people free ride, the whole system collapses due to lack of support.This is why many Regenerative Cryptoeconomic problems attempt to solve the free rider problem.

What Are Coordination Failures- systemic risks to human thriving (Moloch)

Coordination failure occurs when a group of humans could achieve a desirable outcome by working together, but fail to do so because they don’t coordinate their decision making.

Examples of coordination failure

Nation-states refuse to give up Nuclear Arms because they want to defend themselves, despite the existential threat they pose to the world.

Consumers refuse to give up fossil fuel-powered services because they want to get around conveniently, despite the existential threat fossil fuel burning imposes on the world.

Users of Open Source Software consume Open Source Software because they want to build things faster, despite the burnout that cumulative use imposes on OSS maintainers.

Individual cells of the human body live harmoniously pooling their resources for the greater good of the organism; but if a cell defects from this equilibrium, it becomes cancerous—eventually outcompeting all the other cells and taking over the body.

Coordination failure can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, if one firm decides a recession is imminent and fires its workers, other firms might lose demand from the lay-offs & then respond by firing their own workers—leading to a recession.

dictatorless dystopias, situations that each citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures regardless.

non rivalrous (my consuming it does not stop you from consuming it) and non excludable (one cannot put clean air behind a velvet rope and charge for it), there is no business model- each individual actor has a rational incentive to free ride on the system. Why contribute back to a fund the maintenance of this software if I already get it for free? This is the first trap: the single player trap.

If enough actors choose to free ride, the entire system begins to bear a burden, and if that burden increases to a point of systemic collapse, no one gets these public goods. This is the second trap: the multiplayer trap.

Obvious solution is for everyone to do their part to support—but without a coordination mechanism that makes it rational for everyone to contribute, they do not.

We face global coordination failures

Climate Change is a coordination failure. As individual actors in the world economy, we make decisions everyday to achieve our individual goals. But the actions we take can cause carbon to be emitted, and over time, the collective begins feel the consequences of this - through floods, fires, or increasing global temperatures.

An underfunded & insecure digital infrastructure is a coordination failure. As individual actors in the information ecosystem, we make decisions everyday about what information to consume. Rarely do we think about the free & open source software that underpins that infrastructure. Our global digital infrastructure is not well-funded by governments, as traditional infrastructure is. And those free & open source software providers often do not have a business model - this creates a systemic lack of investment in maintenance of digital infrastructure at precisely a time in which we are increasingly dependant upon it.

There’s many many more: misinformation, inadequate access to education, inadequate access to employment, overfishing, the loss of biodiversity, are all coordination failures.

What’s at stake?

When your coastal property floods due to climate change, when an authoritarian is elected to power due to misinformation, when a hospital is held hostage by ransomware because of an insecure internet, each of these create human suffering .

This local suffering is caused by global coordination failure. The scale of the impact of these coordination failures is global, but the impact is local.