Week V · 13 plates
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The Evolutionarily Stable Strategy

Invadability as the test

The big idea

A strategy is evolutionarily stable when, once common, no rare alternative can invade it. Representative democracy has passed that test for two and a half centuries. The claim of this course is that an Ownership Society is the next stable mutation of it.

By the end of this week you can
  • Define an ESS and apply the invadability test.
  • Explain why command economies were invadable from within.
  • State the Ownership Society claim in ESS terms.
Lecture hall · Week V

The Evolutionarily Stable Strategy

Plate 01 · leading message · use ← → keys

Plate 01
1973

Stable means uninvadable.

Maynard Smith and Price gave evolution a stability criterion: a strategy is an ESS if a population playing it cannot be displaced by a small number of players trying something else.

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Slides
Reading notes · Week V

What you took from the pages

Write your own notes once you have finished The Logic of Animal Conflict / SuperCooperators, then revisit them before class. Notes are private to your account and never seen by anyone else.