Con-E.3.6 — Game-Theoretic Barriers to “Put Earth in Escrow” Diplomacy (Schelling/Fearon)#

Severity: E (Moderate) | Sphere: Se4 | Target: ResearchCity

The proposal that all 10 nuclear nations dispatch permanent representatives to LLoL, with ResearchCity serving as peace-keeping infrastructure during a 7-year “Put Earth in Escrow” treaty, faces structural game-theoretic barriers:

  1. The participation problem. Nuclear states — the most powerful nations on Earth — have a dominant strategy to defect: they will not voluntarily submit to coordination by an institution they did not design, do not control, and whose mission includes redistributing their accumulated advantages.

  2. The credibility problem. Diplomatic credibility is built through decades of institutional track record, not through individual moral commitment. The UN Security Council and the IAEA have credibility through institutional histories, legal frameworks, and enforcement mechanisms. A new institution proposed by a single researcher has zero diplomatic credibility at the outset.

  3. The asymmetric information problem. Nuclear states hold classified information about arsenals, doctrine, and early-warning systems that they will not share with an external institution.

Schelling (1960) argued that credible commitment requires mechanisms making defection costly; ResearchCity has no enforcement mechanism. Fearon (1995) showed wars occur due to commitment problems and information asymmetries — the “Put Earth in Escrow” proposal addresses neither.

Connection to prior rounds: C3.6 scales the voluntariness paradox from Con-C.2.6 to the state level. C2.6 showed wealthy individuals have dominant strategies to defect; C3.6 shows nuclear states face the same incentive structure at far greater scale.

(Source: C3.6 from OOv1 Critique Round 3.)