"We have little idea what sort of organizations, or for that matter, technologies, would emerge if free people were unfettered to use their imagination to actually solve collective problems rather than to make them worse," he writes, which seems an odd admission for a deeply committed unfetterer.
In the United States, people can have a reasonable certainty of living their lives in peace while coming together to solve collective problems.
We still live with language and institutions and rules derived from a world in which people are either doing good or doing well, either solving collective problems or merely pursuing a buck.
Instead of recommending traditional welfare-state liberalism as a solvent for socioeconomic inequalities and dislocations, Goolsbee promotes programmes to essentially democratise the market, protecting and where possible expanding freedom of choice, while simultaneously creating rational, self-interested incentives for individuals to participate in solving collective problems.
But this doesn't mean that young women are not feminists or that they can't see the potential of politics to be about solving collective problems rather than the horserace-style coverage of electioneering.
Putnam and Coleman regard social capital as a way of solving collective problems through a sense of community and trust.
Likewise, Ullman-Margalit (1977) uses game theory to show that norms solve collective action problems, such as prisoner's dilemma-type situations; in her own words, "… a norm solving the problem inherent in a situation of this type is generated by it" (p. 22).
And each uses a different approach to solve collective action problems.
He claims that device networks will solve collective action problems, but there is little to show how this connectivity will empower the citizenry, as opposed to creating the greatest mass surveillance infrastructure ever conceived.
The function of the state, according to standard liberal theories, is to find a practical resolution to this central tension and solve collective action problems that otherwise won't get solved in order to provide public goods public order, military defence, public sanitation, environmental protection, etc that otherwise won't get provided.
Similarly, scholars in the pragmatist tradition of John Dewey have suggested that global democracy is required to generate compliance with international rules and thus solve collective action problems such as climate change (Bray 2013).
