About
The series
The Laws of Game Theory is four 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.
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 in particular is original synthesis and forecasting rather than a record of the lectures.
The method, in one paragraph
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 the books 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.
About the analysis published here
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.
A note on attribution
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.