---
type: claim
domain: grand-strategy
description: "The price of anarchy from algorithmic game theory measures how much value humanity destroys through inability to coordinate — turning abstract coordination failure into a quantitative framework, though operationalizing it at civilizational scale remains unproven"
confidence: speculative
source: "Abdalla manuscript 'Architectural Investing' Preface (lines 20-26), Koutsoupias & Papadimitriou 1999 'Worst-case Equilibria'"
created: 2026-04-03
related:
  - "AI accelerates existing Molochian dynamics by removing bottlenecks not creating new misalignment because the competitive equilibrium was always catastrophic and friction was the only thing preventing convergence"
  - "AI alignment is a coordination problem not a technical problem"
---

# The price of anarchy quantifies the gap between cooperative optimum and competitive equilibrium and applying this framework to civilizational coordination failures offers a quantitative lens though operationalizing it at scale remains unproven

The price of anarchy, from algorithmic game theory (Koutsoupias & Papadimitriou 1999), measures the ratio between the outcome a coordinated group would achieve and the outcome produced by self-interested actors in Nash equilibrium. Applied at civilizational scale, this gap offers a framework for quantifying how much value humanity destroys through inability to coordinate.

The manuscript makes this concrete through a thought experiment: if a rational optimizer inherited humanity's full productive capacity, it would immediately prioritize species-level survival — existential risk reduction, planetary redundancy, coordination infrastructure. The difference between what it would do and what we actually do is the price of anarchy applied at civilizational scale.

The framing offers two things competing frameworks don't:

1. **A quantitative lens.** Moloch (Alexander 2014) and metacrisis (Schmachtenberger 2019) name the same phenomenon but leave it qualitative. The price of anarchy provides a ratio — theoretically measurable in bounded domains (routing, auctions, congestion games), though the leap from bounded games to civilizational coordination is enormous and unproven.

2. **Diagnostic specificity.** Different domains have different prices of anarchy. Healthcare coordination failures destroy different amounts of value than energy coordination failures. The framework allows domain-specific measurement rather than a single "civilizational risk" number — if the cooperative optimum can be defined for each domain, which is itself a hard problem.

The concept bridges game theory (Alexander's Moloch), systems theory (Schmachtenberger's metacrisis), and mechanism design into a shared quantitative frame. Whether this bridge produces actionable measurement or merely elegant analogy is the open question.

## Challenges

- Computing the price of anarchy at civilizational scale requires knowing the cooperative optimum, which is itself unknowable. In bounded games (routing, auctions), the optimum is well-defined. At civilizational scale, there is no agreed-upon objective function — disagreement about objectives IS the coordination problem. The framework may be conceptually clarifying but practically unmeasurable where it matters most.
- The investment framing ("value waiting to be captured") risks instrumentalizing coordination. Some coordination goods may not be capturable as private returns without distorting them. Public health, ecosystem integrity, and epistemic commons may require non-market coordination that the PoA framework doesn't capture.
- The "rational optimizer" thought experiment assumes a single coherent objective function for humanity. This is a feature of the model, not a feature of reality — and collapsing value pluralism into a single metric may reproduce exactly the reductionist error that Schmachtenberger diagnoses.
- The PoA has been successfully operationalized only in bounded, well-defined domains. The claim that it scales to civilizational coordination is a conjecture, not a demonstrated result.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[AI accelerates existing Molochian dynamics by removing bottlenecks not creating new misalignment because the competitive equilibrium was always catastrophic and friction was the only thing preventing convergence]] — the mechanism by which the gap widens
- [[AI alignment is a coordination problem not a technical problem]] — AI alignment is a specific instance where the PoA framework could apply

Topics:
- [[_map]]
