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It doesn’t feel good when politicians act like our lives are all just a game to them. Yet we have to recognise that an element of game playing is inherent in the practice of politics. Diplomats coming up with a strategy for today’s crunch summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska, for example, will have lent on game theory to try to predict what the opposite side will bring to the table.
In an article exploring what’s wrong with today’s politics, Tim Beasley-Murray, who has written a book on games, proposes that playing games isn’t, in itself, a problem. But we start to feel cheated when our leaders flout the rules consistently and so egregiously that no one else is able to play the game. This, he contends is when powerful people stop being rule benders and start just being spoilsports. The result? “The game of democratic politics is being stretched to the point of shattering.”
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is preparing for a difficult autumn as she tries to work out how to balance the nation’s books. Her own fiscal rules are constraining her, and Labour MPs aren’t exactly cooperating with any of her cost-saving measures so far. We asked a panel of experts how Reeves can fix the UK’s public finances. From cutting tax relief on pensioners to changing the rules on inheritance, they assess the pros and cons of each lever at Reeves’s disposal.
And as anger and recrimination continue to characterise the debate around the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, it is starting to feel like neither side is really listening to the other. A constructive proposal on how to change that can be found in this examination of a concept called “intersubjective empathy”. This is a cognitive technique that enables us to more accurately understand how others feel, rather than merely guessing. It encourages us to think about those on the other side of an argument as complex people, just like ourselves, rather than just a trope.
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