While American people are being put on a historical test, and Wall Street nimbly makes adjustments to its bet on the final answer, the nation’s capital looks quiet: there are few people on the streets in residential neighborhoods, and even George Washington University’s hospital is boarded up. The results all anxiously await however should not be read as binary – the numbers themselves are more revealing about where the nation stands today.

I fully understand and don’t blame people who are poor and have to assume a narrow focus on money in their bitter struggling for survival, but I cannot say the same for others who do so. After all, common decency is a key measure for human progress; America has come a long way since European settlers first came to this land, and the progress it has made is mostly associated with the rise of a progressive professional class.

For a postmodernism account of how things were like, you may read John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a satirical epic of the colonization of Maryland and perhaps the best American novel. Mr. Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland and had done tremendous research for his book. If you don’t trust novels, you can take a trip to St. Mary’s City, Maryland’s first colonial settlement and capital, to gain a real perspective. White Trash, a historian’s meticulous study on the 400-year untold history of class in America, would tell you how some had been behind from the very beginning, with their lives essentially unchanged for a hundred years, but have always been an important part of national politics. And you can easily find YouTube videos showing how hillbillies fix their broken things with broken things; you’d not know how you should feel: really sad about their living conditions but also so impressed by their creativities and could not help laughing.

John Nash earned a PhD in 1950 from Princeton with a 28-page dissertation, in which he illustrated a crucial concept in game theory, the Nash equilibrium. The Nash equilibrium is the epitome of elegant simplicity and deep insight, and for this work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Game theory offers a framework to analyze the strategic interactions of two or more decision-makers. In a game, the players choose a strategy that would give it the highest payoff based on what has happened so far; the outcome for each player depends on the decisions of the others as well. A Nash equilibrium is reached when no player can do better (further increase its own expected payoff) by unilaterally changing its own strategy. 

A well-known application of the Nash equilibrium is Prisoner’s Dilemma, which famously shows that the outcome based on individual choices made by self-interested parties when communications are impossible is not globally optimal.

The setup of the game is as follows. Two fellow criminals are detained and interrogated in separate prison cells. They each are offered lighter sentences if they defect and thus betray the other prisoner. Of course, they can choose to “cooperate” with the other by not saying anything. If both defect, they get a longer sentence than if neither defects. It turns out that the prisoner’s dilemma game has a single Nash equilibrium with both players choosing to defect, an outcome that is apparently inferior to both cooperating.

What has America lost in the past years? Soft power.

Here are answers from 15 opinion columnists.

Wintry weather smelt in the air; tree leaves turned brown and fell. Time to stock the pantry and fridge again.

Literally, it means to add the finishing touches – the eyes – to a drawing of a dragon; the dragon instantly becomes alive. Nature definitely knows how to Hua Long Dian Jing with its magical finger. By the way, such little effort that leads to great effects is called “lever point” in complex systems. Lever points are extremely useful for “smart” policy interventions – if you can find them.