Sublime

“interdependent decisions.”

it deals with the evolution of social

norms of behavior: decisions to abide by norms tend to strengthen those norms.

choices when the better choice among two possibilities, or the best choice among several possibilities, depends on the choices that others will make or are making.

Thomas Schelling in his wonderful essay “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

A second possibility, not the same thing, is that everybody wants to sit to the rear of everybody else—

An obvious possibility is that everybody likes to sit as close to the rear as possible.

behavior or the choices of other people, are the ones that usually don’t permit any simple summation or extrapolation to the aggregates.

(Schelling was well aware that the dynamics he described were, in all likelihood, less powerful than segregation’s other causes: organized discrimination, suppressed civil rights, and social inequity.)