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The Game Theory of Everythingsee the game you are already in
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The words people actually use at work and in the news.

Domain 09

School and Education

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Credentials function partly as signals, which makes education partly a positional arms race with no ceiling.

The signalling component is what produces the ratchet. If a qualification is partly a screen, then when more people obtain it its screening value falls, so the bar rises, so more investment is needed for the same position — an escalation with no natural stopping point. Meanwhile the teaching component is genuine and is precisely the part that measurement handles worst, so multitask agency predicts what league tables actually do: measurable outputs improve, unmeasured ones decay, and everybody reports success.

An empty classroom with chairs stacked on the desks and light through high windows.
The player this field leaves off the list

The students who are the product of the arrangement rather than parties to it. Also the employers whose requirements set the whole race and who are never in the room when education policy is decided.

What to look for

  • Is this qualification teaching something, or sorting people? Usually both — in what proportion?
  • If everybody did more of this, would anybody be better off?
  • What does the league table measure, and what has quietly stopped being done?
  • Who set the requirement, and are they anywhere in this conversation?

The shapes that run this field

Shape 12

Costly Signalling

A costly, observable action that reveals private information because faking it would not pay.

Shape 16

Escalation

A sequence in which each response justifies the next, and no step is individually unreasonable.

Shape 14

Principal and Agent

A delegated task with unobservable effort and imperfectly aligned interests.

Shape 04

Pure Coordination

Multiple equilibria, no conflict of interest — the whole problem is agreeing which one.

Shape 01

The Prisoner's Dilemma

Mutual cooperation beats mutual defection, but defecting is the better move whatever the other side does.

In practice

Costly Signalling

A degree required for a job that does not use it, because everyone has one.

Escalation

Tutoring spend rising across a cohort with no change in who gets the places.

Principal and Agent

Test scores rising while the things the tests stood in for do not.

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