Fairness

My previous post wasn't fair.  I left a lot of my thinking about it out, and put in only tidbits, leading one reader to respond with some good questions about consistency and terminology, below:

I'm confused as to what meanings you attach to a lot of the terms you're using, such as "fairness", "equilibrium", or "coordination game". You start off saying that things aren't fair, without explaining which idea of fairness you mean (there's like five trillion of them, counting just the ones that are precisely defined). Then you talk about an inefficient equilibrium of an n-person prisoner's dilemma (your driving example). Then you say "In sum, we play very large coordination games," even though what you've talked about one sentence before is not a coordination game, and you also say "When disequilibrium occurs..." even though the example you've just set up is an equilibrium, not a disequilibrium.

To sum up, I have four questions (which of course you are welcome to ignore!):

1. What do you mean by "fair"?
2. What do you mean by "equilibrium"?
3. What is the driving example an example of? (An unfair outcome? A fair outcome? A disequilibrium? An equilibrium? Something else altogether?)
4. What is the main thought you're trying to communicate in this post?

So, to respond.  My notion of fairness here is admittedly weak.  It is closely associated with a recent post about the importance of de-emphasizing ego and entitlement.  The point was to say that we don't always get out of a situation what we put into it, and that our reward for buying into something is affected by collective decision making that may make sense when viewed in the aggregate, but not make us happy individually. It is a very basic idea to diffuse some of the self-centered notion that persists in my own thinking about my own priority in the world.

Equilibrium was a term used to describe the flow of traffic. It relates to the amount of cars, the capacity of the roadway, and the speed of cars.  An equilibrium is met when the flow of cars getting on and off the highway balance to keep the average speed of cars at 55mph.  Disequilibrium occurs when one of the elements changes--traffic ensues.  There's snow, so the cars must go slower, but the same amount of drivers come on the highway.  Or an exit is blocked because of an accident. 

The main point of the post was to say this: at times it might seem to make sense to act in a certain way individually--to speed onto the highway and beat out other cars, for instance--but that individual act actually constrains the aggregate a little bit more (because, for instance, one car leaving the highway stays at the average speed instead of speeding off to balance the oncoming car).  We think we make gains individually, but it is much harder to tell whether there was net gain or not.  Ultimately, and here's the take-home, understanding net gain will help us attain higher levels of individual gain.

I think.