Who Survives and Who Dies After Shipwreck

COVID-19 fatalities
Days to hit
10k - 41 days
20k - 5
30k - 5
40k - 5
50k - 4
60k - 4


I still don't understand two things.
1. What makes people so confident that we don't hit 100k before mid-May?
2. What makes people think that - other than our fondness for groups of 10 (says the guy typing with 10 fingers) - this will pause or even slow down at 100k? Particularly if we loosen regulations.

I'd love to think that it will take 6 days to hit 70k, 10 more days to hit 80k, another 30 days to hit 90k and 100 more days to hit 100k. That is, I'd love to think this is slowing down.

But is there anything to support that expectation? Other than some combination of hope and fatigue? Am I missing something?

Meanwhile, a study of shipwrecks is revealing about which sort of communities thrive.
In 1864, two ships wrecked onto the same island near New Zealand within months of each other. Neither knew of the other.

The survivors of the first wreck found themselves at the base of a cliff that one was too weak to scale. The rest left him behind to die.

The survivors of the other wreck, by contrast, risked their lives to save the life of another in the effort to first get to shore.

One community was founded with the clear philosophy of, "We're all in this alone." The other with the clear philosophy of, "We're all in this together."

After being cut off from civilization for 12 months, only 3 of the original 19 shipwreck survivors from "we're in this alone" group were still alive. By contrast, every one of the "we're in this together" survivors were still alive 19 months later.

Willingness to sacrifice to help others made a difference. In another wreck from the mid-1800s, a crew member was bringing the captain's chest of gold to shore, an amount equal to $23 million today. The captain ordered him to leave the chest and rescue a girl instead. This visible sacrifice set the tone for how the survivors would look out for each other. The captain and many of the survivors were LDS and the whole group was cooperative and caring. 2 months later, all 51 of the 51 were still alive.
Cooperation and care for each other turns out to be a great predictor of how well these involuntary social experiments in shipwrecks do. There is probably a lesson there.

Why The Country Isn't Ready for President Elizabeth Warren (And Why Culture Matters More Than Policy)

There's a fascinating study on cooperation that has been done around the world. I think it reveals why Elizabeth Warren - a policy maker I love - is not ready to be president. Or, more to the point, why the country is not ready for her to be president.

The study measures cooperation and a sense of the common good. Bostonians demonstrate the highest ranking. Here's how the study (the game?) works.

You and 3 partners start out with $20 each. You can choose to put all, some, or none of your $20 into a central pile. Whatever you put in gets doubled and split between the four of you. So, here are a couple of scenarios.

Everybody Wins:
You start with $20.
You put in $20, they each put in $20, and this $80 gets doubled to $160, which you then split.
You end with $40. (So do they.)
The group gains $80.

You Win:
You start with $20.
You put in nothing, they each put in $20, and this $60 gets doubled to $120, which you then split.
You end up with $50. (They get just $30.)
The group gains $60.

Some Win:
You start with $20.
You put in nothing, two other people put in nothing, and one dupe puts in $20, which gets doubled to $40, which you all split.
You end up with $30. (The dupe gets just $10.)
The group gains $20.

Nobody Wins:
You start with $20.
You put in nothing, the same as everyone else. Your nothing is doubled.
You end up with $20. (So does everyone else.)
The group gains $0.

Now curiously, this game has been played in cities around the world. In some cities, people cooperate to create more wealth. In other cities they don't. The culture changes from place to place.

In Boston, the average contribution per round is close to $20. Massachusetts is one of the richest states (3rd as measured by per capita income) and as befits a region dependent on a highly developed market economy and a mix of public and private sector initiatives, people have developed high degrees of interdependence and trust. Copenhagen is close to Boston on this ranking.

On the other end of the spectrum is Athens. In Greece you're the dupe to put your money into the pot and the culture there suggests that people are trying to avoid becoming the dupe. The average contribution per round in Athens is closer to $6, meaning that game participants create about a third of the wealth. (It seems little wonder that Greece has such trouble with public financing and tax collection.)

The good people of Boston demonstrate the highest levels of cooperation and trust in creating a common good of any city studied. And without that sort of culture, two things are difficult to create: economic progress and, more broadly, a progressive agenda. It's not clear that Elizabeth's policies would seem credible outside of certain areas like Boston, California's Bay Area, Austin, North Carolina's Research Triangle ... essentially places with highly educated work forces working in technologies and industries where cooperation is key. It's one thing to articulate policies that create a common good; it's more difficult to know how to create a culture supportive of such policies. It's easier to know what policy initiatives would help the folks in Boston than it is to know how to change Athen's culture.

There is nothing absolute about the efficacy of policy. Whether particular policy works "depends." A policy rarely works in any condition or culture. Curiously, culture change gets talked to quite a lot within corporations but rarely within nations or neighborhoods. Maybe it's time we changed that.

Abstract Notion of the Day - Let Systems Compete and People Cooperate

Competition and cooperation play together in nature. Some like to emphasize the competition that pits the gazelles against each other, the loser becoming lion lunch. Others like to emphasize the cooperation that enables the lions to bring down the gazelle or that prompts the mother to raise the child.


So which should we bring into our social and economic life? Should we emphasize competition or cooperation?


I'd like to offer this suggestion: competition between systems and cooperation between people.


Let companies go bankrupt, political parties, ideologies, and administrations lose power, and educational approaches go out of favor. Let systems compete to win or lose based on how well they do. Meanwhile, ensure cooperation between people, doing what we can to ensure that everyone thrives.


To reverse this - to have no competition between religious or political or educational systems (essentially some kind of a monopoly) while forcing competition between people is to create a system that arrests progress and makes even the winners miserable, worried as they are that they might lose their place.


One of the problems with this goal, though, is that people become the system they are a part of. It is hard to become intimate enough with a system to use it and yet not become defined by it. "I am a Stanford grad ... a mechanical engineer ... a Pentecostal ... a Republican ... a Jungian ..." we say and these systems we've adopted become less our tools than our selves. With such a belief, it is hard to casually accept the failure of systems and not see it as, somehow, a threat to ourselves.

The religious martyr may be the most extreme example of someone who no longer holds the system loosely in hand but, instead, is held tightly by the system. For them, Islam or Christianity or the cult has become more important than life itself and they will die for it.


This might be the biggest challenge we have in our education system: raising children to learn how to use systems without becoming defined by those systems. I'm convinced that we're not going to make much progress with our current definitions of liberal or conservative, for instance, and as long as major swaths of the polity or politicians define themselves this way, progress will be slow. And yet people need some orientation, even if it is one they'll abandon as goals or processes change. As long as people define themselves rigidly by these systems, competition between systems will equal competition between people.

Collaboration and Entrepreneurship in a Post-Institutional World

Clay Shirky claims that the problem of coordination and collaboration need not depend on institutions. New technology actually enables groups and individuals to collaborate without an institutional construct in which to operate. He claims that this is revolutionary and says that a revolution doesn’t take you from point A to point B but, rather, takes you from point A to chaos. The printing press took the West away from the organization that came from church rule into chaos that was not resolved until the treaty of Westphalia defining the nation-state as the newly dominant institution about 200 years later. He suspects that the emergence of social networks and peer to peer technology will do something similar to institutions today, particularly to corporations. But this time he thinks it is less likely to take 200 years and will likely play out in about 50.

I’ve talked for quite some time about the popularization of entrepreneurship and what that means for the corporation. I have basically said that the role of entrepreneur will become more widespread during the next 30 to 50 years, sweeping up an increasing percentage of employees into its net, just as knowledge work became so prevalent in the last century.

Shirky seems to challenge even the notion of what it would mean to be an entrepreneur, shedding light on how entrepreneurship might become so common. If collaboration and cooperation no longer requires an institutional overlay, or construct, entrepreneurship becomes an act of catalyzing behaviors and activities rather than focusing on creating the context or container for such activities.

This suggests that community itself may be the container for the actions and behaviors of individuals, with no need for creating institutions. It does suggest that the very notion of, or need for, institution is set to transform along with the definition of entrepreneur.

Here is Shirky's talk: