Originally posted by Evil Dave
Here\'s another Idea...population density.
For example New Orleans alone had a higher murder rate than the rest of the state combined.
Less people overall but more people in one tiny area.
look at our big cities and look at the rural areas, the difference is staggering.
I liken it to rabbits, yes cute fuzzy bunnies.
When a warren of rabbits is overpopulated
the cute fuzzy bunnie become some of the nastiest, vile creatures you\'ve ever seen, eating their young, killing others, it\'s nasty.
Maybe people weren\'t meant to live so close together in such large groups.
That\'s true.. and that is actually one of the criterias for a prisoners dilemma to occur. It goes like this, in smaller groups we are able to control and monitor each others behavior. Even in moderately large groups it is possible to overwatch that everybody is cooperating in the provision of public goods and keeping peace. That there are no freeriders or people that defects and that such people are punished. We will then know if the system is just (even if it is just in its own terms), and therefor we can rely on cooperating or leave the society if it\'s unfair (if there are other places to go to). But if the group of people is too large, it becomes an untenable situation. One version of solving that issue is to introduce a centralized sanctioning institution, like for example a modern state. Our chances of cooperation (under a state you might name it voluntary coercion
) vastly increases if we can rely on the state to carry out sanctions for us. And that is more or less the liberal justification of the state.
However.. the state doesn\'t necessarily solve the problem it was set out to solve. States wage wars against each other, corruption, not being effiecient in carrying out the punishments, inequality between social groups, media scaremongering. All those are things that makes us stop relying on the state as an unpartial sanctioning institution.. and then we\'re suddenly stuck with the fact that we have to take care of ourselves, we\'re on our own. In such large societies as today, we can\'t induce cooperation, as we can\'t that other people cooperate, even if it\'s the most rational thing to do.
And that is also a point brought up by some anarchists. They say we need to live in small selfproviding communities basically to get along. But the weak points of that argument is that if we don\'t rely on the state we have today, another type of institution may do the job. Even if it\'s nowhere like anything we have today. And secondly, the small selfproviding communities might wage war against each other too if the resources are sparse. You just bring up another prisoners dilemma, but this time between larger groups of people.
