The Dinosaur Risk : A Fable of Civilizational Collapse

This is a descriptive paper that shows how a game of life we are engaged in can slowly change, and even improve in the sense of the same actions resulting in higher payoffs as time progresses. However, while this society keeps growing, in terms of payoffs increasing over time, the slow drift of the underlying game takes it towards a collapse by changing the game's strategic character. This fable thus concerns our long-run survival and prompts us to do what dinosaurs were not capable of but we, in principle, are, which is to think about our own predicament and try to engineer changes in our own behavior and in market regulation to avert the risk of our own extinction