Intro to Collective Action
Six sessions on why cooperation fails, how we manage it anyway, and how it has been made to work at larger and larger scales.
Intro to Collective Action
An introduction to collective action problems and opportunities, with applications to AI governance, climate change, nuclear weapons and the information commons.
| Dates | Wednesday 7 to Wednesday 14 October 2026, weekdays only |
| Time | 15:30–17:00 CEST, six sessions of 90 minutes |
| Where | Online |
| Price | €20, refunded if you attend all six sessions |
| Led by | Rufus Pollock — Life Itself co-founder, Cambridge economist (PhD), co-initiator of the Second Renaissance project |
This is a prototype. The material is being developed as the course runs, and the outline below will change.
About
Collective action failure is the central pattern of dysfunction underneath the metacrisis. It's underneath climate change, the AI arms race, nuclear weapons and bioweapons. It's also underneath things like nihilism and loneliness that we don't usually associate with those.
To the extent we're interested in collective action problems it is because we want solutions. But we have to start with diagnosis: what is a collective action failure — and success — and what causes them. We then look at what could be done, and especially at what made cooperation work at larger and larger scales.
Every jump in the scale of human cooperation — band, village, chiefdom, city, nation — came from a cultural innovation: ritual, kinship, religion, law, money, the firm. Cultural evolution is how collective action gets solved at scale. The last two sessions are about what that implies for the jump we currently need to make: to planetary cooperation.
Course outline
Session 1: Metacrisis Motivation
Why should we care about collective action problems? How do they relate to climate change, runaway AI and the metacrisis in general?
- Introduction to collective action
- War and arms races
- Relation to the metacrisis and the big challenges like climate change and technology governance
- Why this matters so much now
Session 2: Stag & Moloch
Why do rational, decent people end up in outcomes none of them want? The basic dynamics of cooperation and defection with basic theoretical frameworks and key terminology.
- Prisoner's dilemma, stag hunt, tragedy of the commons, public goods and free riding
- Some basic game theory
- Reframing: a collective action problem is a collective action opportunity
- The many names — multipolar trap, race to the bottom, Moloch (and why Moloch is great branding but problematic conceptually)
Session 3: How Do We Ever Cooperate?
We do cooperate, constantly. What makes that possible, and why does it hold at village scale?
- The cooperative ape
- Olson on group size, selective incentives and privileged groups
- Repeated interaction and the folk theorem — observation, punishment, the shadow of the future
- Axelrod and Nowak on the evolution of cooperation
- Ostrom's design principles, and what real communities do to govern a commons
- Commons we can overuse, and commons we have to create
- Why this gets harder at scale
Session 4: Cooperation Among Strangers
How do you make cooperation work when the group is larger? What have we built, and what has actually worked?
- Coercion, Hobbes, and the state as a collective action technology
- Changing the payoffs: taxes, subsidies, property rights, Coase
- Schelling on commitment, focal points and arms races
- Polycentricity — stacking villages rather than scaling one
- The record: Montreal, Kyoto, non-proliferation, fisheries, and what the difference turned on
Session 5: Cultural Evolution
How did we get from bands of 150 to a planet of 8 billion? What innovations made each jump possible?
- Multi-level selection, cultural group selection, and the coevolution of the two
- Ilahita: ritual, initiation and manufactured kinship holding thousands together
- Turchin on war as the ratchet of cooperating group size
- Sosis and Norenzayan on costly signals and moralizing gods
- Henrich on kin networks, the Church, and trusting strangers
- The bill: cooperation scales by building in-groups, and in-groups need out-groups
Session 6: The Planetary Turn
What would cooperation at planetary scale require? Do we need a planetary religion?
- What modernity already achieved: human rights, international institutions
- Why nation-states and markets can't hold AI, climate and the biosphere
- Why this enlargement is unlike the previous ones: there is no outside
- Enlarging the sphere of moral concern at each cultural paradigm shift
- Thich Nhat Hanh and a new religion of Interbeing
Who it's for
Anyone interested in what lies beneath some of the greatest challenges and opportunities of our time, from AI governance to climate change.
You might be interested if you work on or care about the commons, institutional design, cultural evolution, community-building, or technology governance.
No prior game theory needed.