Lloyd Shapley and the Bhagvad Gita

Shapley's well deserved Nobel win has been a long time coming. I know geniuses like him don't need Nobels but it is worth pausing a moment on an occasion like this to think about how India might have been different if people of my generation- or that of Gurcharan Das, for that matter- had not gone Gadarening after Amartya Sen and John Rawls and now Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam and so forth, rather than Coase and Tiebout and Shapley and Buchanan who, I think, are right about Wicksteed & Choice and thus immune to pointless palaver over what the word 'Cost' means- i.e. dining philosophers starving to death for caught in a concurrency deadlock.
Still maybe these hunger artists on Ivy League catwalks were doing Gandhian dharna so my Hindu instinct was to worship them.
My own antipathy to Shapley is summarized by this extract from my novel Samlee's daughter-

In other words, since Shapley's work is very useful and highly relevant to India, it must be 'Right Wing' and thus it is to be feared and denounced or, at any rate, studied in the abstract but never applied to Policy making. At the same time, I guess people like me were uneasily aware that every semi-literate dehati politician was a master of calculating the Shapley index of power for various interest groups, not to mention  the most computationally efficient collocation method for solving for correlated equilibria (we call it corruption)- indeed that sort of thing is virtually hard-wired in their brains- and that even if us City boys mastered the maths or wrote a Computer program to do the same thing, we'd simply be outclassed by them.

It was only later on, thinking about Game theory in the Gita, that I realized that the paleo-discrete maths tradition in ancient Tribal Republics would have been strongly focused on the sorts of things Shapley taught us guys to at least be aware of, if not actually do. Since the Mahabharata's own compositional heuristic- at least in my belief- is part and parcel of that wider paleo-mathematical politics Welt Bild- it follows that the Bhagvad Gita, as its Pyrrhonist epoche- tells us that it is our 'svadharma' (i.e. there is a 'public signal' telling us our strategy so that, in a manner more general than Nash, we come to Aumann correlated equilibrium) to do Shapley not for the sake of the fruits of Shapley (good stuff, like getting democracy to work properly) but in an Amartya Sen-tentious spirit of utterly abnegating constructive Politics in favor of cunt-queefing pi-jaw so Man remain a futile passion and God again slay himself in vain.
Shapley & Roth's approach to matching problems is, of course, something the Mahabharata does very well so as to show that all 'svadharmas' have a stable way of meshing within just a few iterations. But the central epochee of the Gita shows that one such match- that of Nar & Narayan- is thereby rendered both a Philosophical Situation Comedy as well as Occasionalism's Nightmare on Om Street.
So I'm sticking with slagging off Sen- virodha bhakti donchaknow- but, sure, you guys just go ahead and read the Gita with Shapley as its Smriti. Not everybody can be a pointless fuckwit you know. Me, I'm just lucky that way.