Not to be pedantic, but the choice here is not strictly a real PD, even a many-person PD, because it's not a question of actors rationally pursuing self-interest and accordingly ending up with an alternative that is less advantageous to them than if they'd acted on cooperative or altruistic motives. A classic two person PD is also not a binary but a matrix of four options:
You Cooperate, I Defect --> My 1st choice, your 4th You Cooperate, I Cooperate --> Both our 2d choice You Defect, I Cooperate --> My 4th choice, your first I Defect, You Defect --> Both our 3rd choices
The PD is that it is rational for each of us to Defect, but we'd be better off if we Cooperated.
What you have presented here is a false rather than a prisoner's dilemma -- the complaint is that we don't have to choose the lesser evil, there are other options. The problem is that the range of alternatives to which the choice presented limits itself rather than a rational choice among the available alternatives leads to suboptimal outcomes. The latter is the PD theorem.
Btw, and this _is_ pedantry, von Neumann & Morgenstern's Theory Of Games & Economic Behavior(1944) antedates the formulation of the PD matrix by Albert Tucker in 1950.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2740/dilemma.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
--- Charles Turner <vze26m98 at optonline.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:49:58 -0400, Michael Smith
> wrote:
> > Maybe Yoshie's whole mission on this list can
> > be summed up as: "Bollinger vs Ahmadinejad -- take
>
> > your pick. No, don't evade. You have to choose.
> > This is actually existing reality, with a genuine
> > social basis, not some contrivance of legislation
> > or institutional bylaws. You really have to take
> > your pick."
>
> Dabashi may indeed be engaging in some liberal
> conceit, but I don't
> understand why the situation has to be reduced to
> the binary of a
> Prisoner's Dilemma?
>
> Best, C
>
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