Jonah Wilberg

Meditations on Moloch (MoM) is great but it’s not super clear: specifically, it’s not super clear what Moloch actually is. In this post I’ll propose a new way of modelling Moloch using evolutionary game theory that I hope makes things clearer. Moloch is usually explained in terms of well-known economic concepts, like prisoner’s dilemmas, nash equilibria, negative sum games or collective action problems[1]. MoM on this view is a vivid and accessible introduction to these concepts, helping us think through how widely these concepts apply, as well as providing a rousing metaphor - “defeating Moloch” - for the challenge of solving collective action problems. I think there’s a lot that’s right about this view. But what doesn’t sit right with me is that it implies that MoM doesn’t actually bring anything conceptually new to the table. And this means that it doesn’t quite seem to capture the feeling of insight many people have had reading MoM. I suggest there’s a way of modelling Moloch that doesn’t just reduce it to standard collective action problems, and so captures what’s new and exciting in MoM. Specifically, I argue that we need to look to evolutionary game theory to find a model that 1. Fits MoM’s description of, and examples of, multipolar traps 2. Fits the big picture arguments made in the later sections of MoM and 3. Explains why it makes sense to name the idea after a Canaanite God Introducing Evolutionary Prisoner’s Dilemma (EPD) Evolutionary game theory (EGT) emerged in the 1970s as the application of game theory to biology, specifically questions around evolving populations. And it then turned out to be a useful model to apply in economics and social sciences as well, in part because it avoided the need to attribute hyper-rational beliefs to the agents in the model. I won’t try and give any more of an introduction to EGT here, particularly as someone has recently done that. Instead I’ll outline one specific model in EGT that helps us get clear