IT’S TIME TO PACK THE COURT—AGAIN
THE REPUBLICAN HIJACKING OF the Supreme Court may actually turn out to be a good thing, but not for the reason you think. First there will have to be a war over packing the Court that will leave the institution bloodied and diminished—and that’s not altogether bad, either. The battlefield will be not constitutional law but game theory. The salvation for the Court—for both conservatives and liberals in the long run—will not be this or that justice, or even the chief justice who at least for a few more weeks will be the ideologically swing justice. Instead, look to Anatol Rapoport and Robert Axelrod.
Forty years ago, Axelrod, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, organized a computer tournament involving the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Rapoport, a University of Toronto professor, signed up. The game-theory experiment worked like this: Two accomplices—let’s call them Mitch and Don—are arrested and separately interrogated. Each can remain silent, or implicate the other. If either Mitch or Don betrays but the other stays silent, the betrayer goes free and the mute gets a harsh sentence. If each betrays, both get a short sentence. If both stay silent, each goes free. Rapoport demonstrated that the best strategy was the unintuitive, exquisitely simple tit-for-tat. You keep quiet the first time you play, but then copy whatever your opponent did just before. So, initially, the other
