Although traditional game theory has a tendency to study games in isolation, strategic interaction in human society involves people engaged in numerous interrelated constellations over time. This chapter studies the role of sanctions and enforcement, and strategies not just to play the game that society presents us with but to change the game itself.

Describes the British government’s ‘Meade Mission’ to the island of Mauritius and its subsequent report.

I met Robert Aumann (*1930) in his office at the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The place has an interesting architecture; it is a square building with a large opening in the middle, so everyone could basically see everyone else’s office, enabling a lot of interaction. The green plants in the building nicely complemented the brown wood, together giving the feeling of comfort. Aumann’s office was located in a central spot in the building. When I entered, he sat behind his desk, surrounded by hundreds of books and papers. Rather small, but with a long white beard and a black suit, he nearly blended in with the shelves. Throughout the whole interview, Aumann remained friendly but at the same time notably affirmative, clearly having strong views – particularly on the status and relevance of game theory not only as a scholarly enterprise but also a basis for political advice and ultimately as a tool to support one’s political views.

Describes further work on postwar planning and discussions of the postwar world with the US administration.

Describes life and work at the League of Nations.

Continues the account of Meade’s life and work as Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge.

Describes progress towards GATT and Meade’s work before leaving government service.

The introduction describes the structure and rationale of the book. It argues that Keynes should be seen as neither villain nor hero and that while the left should appropriate his ideas with caution, he provides insights at a level of concreteness which Marx’s analysis largely ignored and which were concerned with issues of the modern world which Marx could not have foreseen. A critical Marxist engagement can simultaneously increase the power of Keynes’s insight and enrich Marxism. The introduction describes how, to understand Keynes, whose work is liberally invoked but seldom read, the book first puts Keynes in context, explaining his biography and the extraordinary times in which he lived, his philosophy and his politics. The book describes Keynes’s developing critique of ‘the classics’, of mainstream economics as he found it, and summarises the General Theory. It shows how Keynes provides an enduringly valuable critique of orthodoxy but vital insights rather than a genuinely general theory. The book then develops a Marxist appropriation of Keynes’s insights. It argues that Marxist analysis of unemployment, of money and interest, and of the role of the state can be enriched through such a critical engagement. The book addresses Keynesianism after Keynes, critically reviewing the practices that came to be known as ‘Keynesianism’ and different theoretical traditions that have claimed his legacy. It considers the crisis of the 1970s, the subsequent anti-Keynesian turn, the economic and ecological crises of the twenty-first century, and the prospects of returning to Keynes and Keynesianism.

Describes Meade’s family background and education at preparatory and public schools.

A pervasive assumption in game theory is that players’ utilities are concave, or at least quasiconcave, with respect to their own strategies. While mathematically instrumental, enabling the existence of many kinds of equilibria in many kinds of settings, (quasi)concavity of payoffs is too restrictive an assumption. For the same reasons that (quasi)concave utilities can only go so far in capturing single-agent optimization problems, they can only go so far in modeling the considerations of an agent in a strategic interaction. Besides, the study of games with nonconcave utilities is increasingly coming to the fore as deep learning ventures into multiagent learning applications. This chapter studies whcih types of equilibria exist in such games, and whether they are computationally tractable, proposing paths for game theory and multiagent learning in the next 100 years.

Chapter 9 demonstrates that there was a negative homestead effect on the development of homesteaded lands compared to lands that were sold. In other words, even after 100 years of the date of the initial homestead patent being issued, those lands were less likely developed. This finding is very robust and does not depend on any measure of land quality or particular measure of later development. The effect, however, is driven by the earliest homesteading, and our evidence shows that it stemmed from homesteaders “being in the way” of early commercial development.