>I'm not sure if Herb Gintis ("Game Theory Evolving") is
> progressive, though his buddy Sam Bowles is.
>
> For an accessible progressive book that delves into game
> theory (and also uses micro theory), some might be
> interested in Tom Slee, "No One Makes You Shop at
> Wal-Mart." I liked it. He has a blog too.
Yanis has a book on game theory: http://bit.ly/qICngl
One of the papers of my doctoral dissertation offers a solution to a dynamic game. I set up, solved it, and played with it to examine the link between initial inequality and subsequent economic performance (e.g. in a household in which the spouses are endowed with different amounts of initial wealth, in an economy in which one class owns the bulk of the wealth and the other class lacks it, etc.). Game theory is math applied to "strategic interactions" between one and the economic environment, when the economic environment is not fixed but reacts and anticipates your moves. In other words, cases where it's not reasonable to assume that the earth is flat (as when you're building a house), but need to take into account the earth's curvature (as when you're sending a rocket to the moon and then need to bring it back). Unfortunately, analytical simplicity breaks down pretty quickly as a result of this "strategic interactions."
But, bottom line, game theory is math, i.e. logic, dialectics, aesthetics, etc. Math is a language, a framework, a lens through which you look at the world (outside and inside). Math makes you see things in the world that you cannot see with no math. Math symbols are abbreviations for words, but it's amazing how abbreviating something makes you say things in ways that are very hard to say unabbreviated. I guess like computing. In principle, we could do the same computations we do with electronic computers using lines on sand or with sticks or stones. Well, provided space, time, the mechanics of doing so many computations weren't constraints. Math is language (which is to say, a lot of congealed human labor) but incredibly economized. So, math is power. The more math we talk (to ourselves and with others), the more streamlined in form and enriched in content of people's communication become. If it were up to me to design the curriculum of kindergartens and elementary schools, game theory and other abstract math tools would be built in from the get-go.