The Laws of
Game Theory

Lessons from Professor Jiang

The game, not the players, determines the result.

Most explanations of world events start with people. This one starts with the board.

The four books The Method

Cover of The 20 Laws of Game Theory by D.K. Jarmell

Presidents change. Alliances shift. Technologies arrive and are absorbed. Underneath all of it sits something slower and far more predictable: who is playing, which rules are actually enforced, and what each player is genuinely rewarded for.

Over two semesters, Professor Jiang Xueqin taught a course built on that single claim. These four books are that course — compiled, edited and extended.

The method has one signature move. Take what an institution says it is for, then look at what it reliably produces. Where the two have diverged for decades, while remedies existed and were refused, stop calling it failure.

It is design.

Start with the method → · See all 27 laws →

The four books

Book One

The 20 Laws of Game Theory

The first semester. Twenty laws, built on situations you have lived through — schools, money, migration, work — then extended to banking, empire and war.

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Book Two

The Final Laws of Geopolitical Game Theory

Chokepoints, strangulation, grand strategy, machine intelligence. Seven further laws, and the framework that ties all twenty-seven together.

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Book Three

Nash Equilibrium

The mechanism underneath everything else: why intelligent people build outcomes that nobody wanted and nobody can escape alone.

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Book Four

The Rational Prophet

The method turned forward. Forty-five numbered predictions with mechanisms, time bands and confidence levels — and nineteen that say what would prove them wrong.

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The weekly analysis

Every Monday, one story from the week put through the same instrument: players, rules, incentives — and the outcome the structure is pushing toward.

No opinions about who is right. Only what each side is paid to do next.

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Why this exists. Reading the news by personality is entertaining and almost always wrong. Leaders are the least stable element of any system: they retire, lose elections, change their minds. Structures move at the speed of demographics and debt — slowly, visibly, and measurably. That is what makes them worth reading.