Collective Action Problems

I've been back in the US now for about a week and there are some topics I've been meaning to blog about while in South Africa.  I just didn't get around to it.  This blog is mainly based on, yup, you guessed it, collective action problems.  We indirectly discussed this during the lecture by Professor Steyn.  She told us a little bit about herself.  She was born an Afrikaner in the middle of the Apartheid.  The question posed: what does it mean to be Afrikaner in Apartheid? For an Afrikaner born in the middle of Apartheid that was the way of life, a life where segregation was normal.  People outside of the situation cannot claim that those born during Apartheid are racist.  That generation didn't know there was any other option.  It was a way of life.  Looking back on it now, people are being called racist, but in this case it seems that racism is only relative.  If you didn't live during that period in history, it is difficult to understand the situation.  This is an explanation, not an excuse.  The excuse is that there were severe collective action problems.  There were white South Africans who did not support anti-Apartheid, but they were not well known.  The problems seemed to be that those that did know a different option (other than racism) didn't take the initiative to join black South Africans in the fight for freedom.  I can compared this situation to Nazi Germany, likely I almost always do.  Those born into Nazi Germany didn't know any other way of life.  The propaganda tactics Hitler used were extremely well carried out making it difficult for influences from outside of Germany to penetrate the minds of young Germans.

If you are a citizen of the United States today, and are currently living there, there should be absolutely no room for racism.  We are a highly developed society, one that as far as the constitution and the bill of rights claims is equal in every aspect. The problem is that it isn't completely true.  We still have a long way to go until we reach a point where blacks feel as equal in society as whites do, where latinos feel as equal as whites do, and where other minorities can feel as equal as well.  The question is, will we ever reach that point? I'm an optimist, so I'm going to say yes, but there has to be an initiative to get to that point. We need discussion.

Collective action problems are the norm.  They don't only happen at the macro level, but also on the micro level.  During our Peace Circle we discussed the problems we had with buying and cooking food.  Before the trip we had decided we would collaborate and alternate cooking food for the entire group.  When we got to Cape Town, that all kind of fell apart.  Everyone (minus me) went to the grocery store thinking we would buy things collectively and have meals planned out.  Well, it soon turned disastrous and people started reneging on the plan.  For one, we didn't even have a real list.  We didn't sit down before going shopping to discuss what we would eat for dinner.  This situation reminds me of a concept I learned in a class I had last semester: Rousseau's Stag Hunt.  The situation goes as follows.  A group of men gather to go hunt a stag for dinner.  While hunting, one of the hunters' spots a rabbit.  He thinks that if he can catch the rabbit he'll have dinner tonight guaranteed, but that means that the stag will get away and all the other hunters won't have dinner tonight.  Classic collective action problem.  One hunter benefits, while the rest suffer and go home empty handed.  Our grocery shopping situation seemed to fit perfectly in the Stag Hunt Scenario.  We never solved the problem either.  I think had we been there longer we would have eventually figured out a solution to our food problems.  From the beginning, though, we could have discussed the cooking plans before going to the store and even the optimal solution would have been for someone to cook for us every night....but that is getting a little carried away.  Nonetheless it is a solution.

So where do we go from here?

As a group, well, nowhere really.  We won't really all live under the same roof again, so we don't go anywhere.  Hopefully we just all stay friends.

As a country (US), we can only move forward, hopefully.  In order to move forward, though, we need to talk about these issues, instead of ignoring them.  Sidenote: one of our lectures addressed this notion of race and he said that race does not exist.  Race is a social construction.  I believe it 100%.  It has been proven that the origins of humans began in Africa.  We are all the same people, we may just have different color skin, but what does that matter if we are ALL the same?! So Whities, get off your high horses and stand among the real people on this planet.  But for the US that also means that black Americans need to be open to discussing this notion of race.  We need to talk about our past to get over it.

As a country (SA), they can only move forward as well, and they are doing a much better job at it than the US is.  Keep the optimism, the pride, strength and will power to reconcile and resolve the issues at hand.