The Good Fight Janice Stein on When Being Rational Is Irrational
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Feb 24, 2026 
Janice Gross Stein, a conflict management scholar and founding director at the Munk School, discusses the limits of rational-choice thinking in politics. She explores why cooperation and norms often beat pure calculation. Short, vivid conversations cover nuclear strategy, trust in leaders, communication failures during COVID, and practical ways to build resilient coalitions.
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Nuclear Fear Was Driven By Story Not Margins
- Nuclear strategy shows how narrative, not marginal calculus, can make using nuclear weapons seem irrational.
- Khrushchev and Kennedy feared the unpredictability and catastrophic cost, so the story of uncontrollable devastation constrained action more than fine-grained game-theory.
Institutions Are The Fix For Prisoner Problems
- Prisoner's Dilemma illustrates how individually rational choices can produce collectively worse outcomes.
- Institutions and background social norms are necessary to align private incentives with collective goods; economists' training can shift people toward defecting.
Don't Let Bad Models Become Self Fulfilling
- Abstract models are useful maps but dangerous if their assumptions systematically misdescribe the world.
- Stein warns against 'as-if' defenses that let models persist despite empirical contradictions and narrative power that shapes behavior.