ck. He gives an opportunity to people to discuss society’s attitude to mental illness. So I chose A Beautiful Mind as an important human story behind the story of game theory.

And his contribution to economics is absolutely central, isn’t it? You use Nash equilibrium all the time.

Yes, but it is not that Nash was the first to use Nash equilibrium. People were using the concept before Nash. But he put it into an elegant framework and showed about it whatever he showed. He did a crucial move but I would be very careful not to say, “Without Nash game theory would not develop.” Without diminishing the importance of it, I don’t think Nash contributed much to the discussion of what Nash equilibrium is.


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So, your last book. You told me it was going to be a surprise.

Yes, I promised you a surprise as the fifth book. The fifth book is a book that has not been written yet. That’s the point. The fifth book is a lacuna, it’s a space that has to be filled. The book which, in my opinion, is so much waiting to be written is a book that will criticise game theory. Not from a sociological point of view, not a personality analysis of people like Aumann or Shapley or Schelling or whoever, but a purely intellectual analysis. There is a need for a book that counters the natural tendency of people to find in game theory solutions to problems that in my opinion game theory doesn’t say anything about. I’ve tried to do something small in this direction, in a book – Economic Fables. But my book is not more than a call for such a book.

I think people reading this interview would enjoy it a lot. It’s pretty funny – about the bar scene in A Beautiful Mind, for example, and how that’s got nothing to do with any idea of Nash’s. But also, your discussions of experiments, and how a knowledge of game theory would actually make you worse off if you were playing these games in real life.

Yes, many of the ideas that we talked about you’ll find in the book. But, again, I’m not recommending my book. The challenge is to take a chapter like my chapter two – which discusses game theory – and develop it into a full book, which will explain the limitations of game theory. This is the missing book.

You’ve spent so much of this interview talking about the limitations of game theory. It makes me wonder, what motivated you to become a game theorist in the first place? What attracted you to it?

I studied mathematics, though actually I wasn’t so interested in mathematics per se. I had this naive feeling that behind the symbols there was something more, which is connected with life. It’s a little bit like going to a zoo. You see animals, but you don’t think about the animals, you think about situations in life. You think, “Ah! The situation among the elephants is something that I recognise in my personal life.” That may not be the best analogy, but that’s the kind of feeling I had when I was a student. It’s not that I wanted to be practical – I never had the illusion that what I did had any practical value – but I wanted to understand argumentation better. Human argumentation was always something I was interested in. I wanted to be a lawyer. As a child I thought of a lawyer as someone who goes to court, makes arguments in favour of justice and wins over evil. My thinking was that formal models could help in this respect, from an intellectual point of view. And that’s all. If you ask me now whether I would repeat my life in this way, I don’t think so. If I could repeat my life, I would probably follow my unfulfilled dream to be a lawyer.