Professor's Berube's article in The Chronicle of Higher Education inspired some more good thoughts by Erin O'Connor and her correspondents and links.

• From a b-school professor in southern California:

  One thing that struck me is that lit crit as currently practiced seems inherently susceptible to politicized and overheated discussions. As you have pointed out repeatedly, many profs in the area essentially talk about and teach things they know very little about: history, economics, etc. Berube's class seems just rife with this stuff. For example, I wonder if anyone in the class, instructor included, know much of the facts surrounding internment camps. And as someone who has written a bit of game theory and uses it sparingly in class, the class' treatment of the prisoners dilemma and game theory is almost pure butchery. The idea that peace can only exist when there is real trust between countries tosses out any real lessons that one could come by using game-theoretic reasoning.

  The Cranky Professor made the same point:

  Berube is teaching about Japanese internment camps via a fantasia in a longer novel -- Walt Disney is a secret-Japanese American. That does not seem to be a responsible vehicle into a serious discussion of the camp issue without considerable additional reading material. I doubt that one should use a novelist's treatment of game theory as a serious introduction to game theory without a xerox or two.

  The point about the choice of topics is right on point. If you are trying to teach about the history of the internment camps, then don't assign a fantasy novel about Walt Disney being Japanese: assign non-fiction. If you are trying to use the internment camps as an example to provoke thought, then, again, don't assign a novel that merely shows their bad side-- assign something that gives both sides (and the teacher should promote the side that our zeitgeist opposes-- in this case, that the internment camps were a good thing). In either case, the obvious first reading is the Supreme Court Korematsu opinion which upheld the constitutionality of the camps, together with the vigorous dissent (by Justice Jackson, I think) that said the camps were an outrageous violation of civil liberties.

  The Prisoner's Dilemma may well be another illustration, but I would not put it as strongly as the b-school professor. What we know about the novel is what Professor Berube tells us:

  I noted that Powers is asking whether it is right to fight a totalitarian enemy by employing totalitarian tactics, and I pointed to passages in which he adduces the internment camps as examples of the game-theory problem known as the prisoner's dilemma, hence the title of the novel. Two prisoners must decide whether to confess or trust each other not to squeal. Almost invariably, prisoners choose to confess, even though mutual trust in the other's steadfastness is clearly the way to go if they want to (a) stay alive and (b) keep their jail time to a minimum. Powers's point, of course, is that a world without mutual trust would be a world of unending world war.

  I'll actually look up this novel, because I'm a bit of an expert on game theory (for credentials/bragging/advertising, see Games and Information, Third Edition. Website at Mypage.iu.edu/~erasmuse/GI/index.html.

  Japanese translation by Moriki Hosoe, , Shozo Murata, and Yoshinobu Arisada, Kyushu University Press, Vol. I (1990), Vol. 2 (1991). Italian translation ( Teoria dei Giochi e Informazione ) by Alberto Bernardo, Milan: Ulrico Hoepli Editore (1993), ISBN: 8820320231. Spanish translation, Juegos e Informacion ) by Roberto Mazzoni, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica (1997). Chinese Complex Characters translation, Wu-Nan Book Company , Taipei (2003). (www.wunan.com.tw/) Korean rights sold to United Consulting Group Limited. French rights sold to Editions de Boeck & Larcier. Chinese translation by Yang Yao (CCER, Beijing University, ccer.pku.edu.cn/en/eyyao.htm). and Readings in Games and Information, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. ISBN's 0631215573 (paperback) and 0631215565 (hardback). The website is at Mypage.iu.edu/~erasmuse/GI/gireader.htm.) My original 1989 contract with Blackwell even, being boilerplate, gave me 50% of the revenue from the movie rights to the book, and I would joke with friends about my plot twist-- in the movie version, I'd make on the prisoners in The Prisoner's Dilemma a woman, and we'd see if true love triumphed (it wouldn't).

  I brought up the novel at lunch today with a few other economics professors who use game theory extensively, and none of us had heard of it. From the few sentences above that Professor Berube gives us, it does sound like the novel gets it wrong. Trust is indeed necessary to get a good outcome, but trust can be attained by things such as repetition of the game even if the two players are entirely selfish and opportunistic. But I'll have to take a look at the book. Maybe he has the nuances there. They aren't complicated, and if he had any sense, the author would have shown his novel to an economist before publishing something that might embarass him. Readers of the novel might well misunderstand, though--- after all, it takes a couple of classes to teach it to good-quality MBA students.

• A colleague questioned whether I (and Erin O'Connor fairly characterized Professor Berube as saying that conservatives are loonied-- that is, less hyperbolically, that conservative students and obnoxious students are pretty much equivalent classes. A good answer is at Update III of the Discriminations blog.

• Things are getting rather too unpleasant between Erin O'Connor and Michael Berube. They both are vigorous debaters, which is fine, but I hope they both pull back a little--- Berube by not being insulting and O'Connor by bending over backwards to send him notifications of what she's going to write and suchlike.

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