The 20 Laws of Game Theory

Power, Conflict, and World Order — Lessons from Professor Jiang

Book One of The Laws of Game Theory

Twenty lectures. Twenty laws. And one instrument that you will not be able to put down once you have it.

The course begins where you live: the dating market, the school system, the difference between people who build wealth and people who work for it, and what actually determines whether a move to another country succeeds. Then it turns the same instrument on the machinery — banking, empire, escalation, and the point at which a conflict stops being negotiable.

What the book establishes

The opening lecture sets out the method: outcomes are produced by the structure of a game, not by the character of the players. A bad outcome that persists usually persists because nobody can improve their own position by moving alone.

The second lecture introduces the signature move, and it is the one readers report keeps working on them for years afterwards. Take any institution. Write down what it says it is for. Write down what it reliably produces, measured over years rather than in its own annual report. Where the two diverge for decades while remedies exist and are refused, that is not failure — it is design, arrived at by selection rather than by conspiracy.

From there the laws accumulate: why the weaker party has a structural advantage under three specific conditions, why control of the escalation ladder beats raw force, what happens when the end-times narratives of several traditions land on the same square mile, and why closeness to a dominant power is an asset in peace and a trap in conflict.

Inside this book

• Why what looks like weak character is usually an optimal strategy for the environment someone was trained in
• How the result of any move between arenas is fixed by the filter that selected who moved
• Why dominance itself dissolves the cohesion that produced it
• What owning the institution the world's capital must pass through is actually worth
• Why a bubble pops when insiders are positioned to profit from the collapse
• The three tests that separate genuine institutional failure from designed failure

Who it is for

Readers of geopolitics, strategy and contemporary history who want structure instead of commentary — and anyone who has noticed that explanations built on the personalities of leaders keep failing, and wants to know what to use instead.

Buy on Amazon Next: Book Two →