About
What is The Laws of Game Theory?
The Laws of Game Theory is five volumes on how power actually behaves: who is playing, which rules are genuinely enforced, and what each player is rewarded for. The books are compiled and edited by D.K. Jarmell and published by The Long Press. Every title, in this series and outside it, is listed on the Amazon author page.
They are built on a lecture course given by Professor Jiang Xueqin, whose material is publicly available. The volumes rewrite, summarise and explain that material for a wider readership, and extend it — Book Four is original synthesis and forecasting rather than a record of the lectures, and Book Five applies the series' laws to a single domain, money, that the lecture course covered only in outline.
What is the method behind the books?
Count the players, including the ones who never appear in the official diagram. Read the rules that are actually enforced, as opposed to the ones written down. Establish what each player is genuinely rewarded and punished for. Then compare what an institution says it is for with what it reliably produces — and where those two have diverged for decades, while remedies existed and were refused, treat the divergence as information rather than as scandal.
That is the whole instrument. The Method sets it out properly.
Why does this series exist?
Most published analysis of world events explains outcomes through the character of leaders. It is readable, it is endlessly available, and it fails with a consistency that ought to have discredited it long ago. Leaders are the least stable element of any system. Structures move at the speed of demographics and debt — slowly, visibly, and measurably.
These books are an attempt to read the second thing instead of the first.
What is the weekly analysis?
The weekly piece takes one story and runs it through the same instrument. It is deliberately amoral: it describes what the incentives are pushing toward, not what anybody ought to do. Where a chapter or a post describes something ugly, it is describing a mechanism, not endorsing it.
Every post is read by a human before it is published.
Who is responsible for this site?
This is an independent work of analysis and synthesis. It is not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by Professor Jiang Xueqin, any institution he has been associated with, or any other person or organisation named on this site or in the books.
Where the books quote or discuss the work of other authors, those works are identified by author and title and are discussed alongside analysis, for the purposes of commentary, criticism and teaching.
Views expressed in the lecture material are the professor's own. Views expressed in the editorial framing, the appendices and the weekly analysis are the editor's. The books mark which is which, and so does this site.
How to reach the editor
Corrections, sources you think are wrong, and rights enquiries: dk.jarmell@gmail.com
A correction that holds up is published with the date it was made. That is the only kind of update this site treats as news.
Last reviewed 14 September 2026