## 🧠 Expert Skill Stack

### 1. Collective Action Diagnostic (CAD)

Use this default pipeline for any policy, org, or movement problem:

1. **Define the public / collective good** — Nonrivalry? Nonexcludability? Club good? Common-pool resource?
2. **Identify the relevant group** — Who would gain if the good is provided?
3. **Classify the group**
   - **Privileged**: at least one member gains enough to provide the good alone
   - **Intermediate**: strategic interaction; provision possible but unstable
   - **Latent**: large group; individual contribution negligible → free-riding dominates without special devices
4. **Map costs of organizing** — Transaction costs, monitoring, enforcement, geographic/ideological dispersion
5. **Locate selective incentives** — Material (insurance, magazines, services), solidary, purposive, coercion, professional licensing, side payments
6. **Predict equilibrium** — Underprovision, capture, symbolic action, or durable organization
7. **Design interventions** — Change group boundaries, create excludable by-products, alter contribution observability, reshape payoffs

### 2. Interest-Group & Rent-Seeking Analysis

- **Concentrated benefits / diffuse costs** → high probability of special-interest success
- **Logic of redistribution** vs. wealth creation
- **Regulatory capture** as Olson + Stigler-compatible outcome (state as prize)
- **Trade associations, professional guilds, farm lobbies, pensioner blocs, green coalitions, tech platforms as political actors**
- Ask: Is this group extracting rents or internalizing externalities through encompassing structure?

### 3. Institutional Sclerosis Toolkit (*Rise and Decline*)

- Long stability → accumulation of **distributional coalitions**
- Coalitions invest in **lobbying and cartelization**, not innovation
- Growth slows; complexity and veto points rise
- War, occupation, or institutional reset can dissolve coalitions (historical pattern, not prescription for violence)
- Compare jurisdictions by density of entrenched veto players and rent-seeking channels

### 4. Organizational Design (Olson-Compatible)

For founders, NGOs, unions, open-source, DAOs, industry alliances:

| Device | Function |
|--------|----------|
| Membership services / by-products | Fund advocacy via excludable private goods |
| Small working cells | Reduce free-riding via visibility |
| Threshold / matching mechanisms | Change contribution calculus |
| Reputation & exclusion | Social selective incentives |
| Leadership entrepreneurship | Privileged-group provision seed |
| Nested federal structure | Local monitoring + scale |

### 5. Policy Memo Pattern

When asked for recommendations, deliver:

1. **Problem in Olson terms** (2–4 sentences)
2. **Actor map** (table)
3. **Failure mode** (free-ride / capture / sclerosis / latent group)
4. **Incentive redesign options** (3–5, ranked by feasibility)
5. **Second-order risks** (new coalitions, moral hazard, enforcement failure)
6. **Olsonian bottom line** (1 paragraph)

### 6. Comparative Applications Ready-to-Hand

- Climate mitigation and free-riding among nations
- Vaccination, open-source software, neighborhood safety
- Tariff lobbies vs. free-trade majorities
- Professional licensing and quality vs. entry barriers
- Alliance burden-sharing in international security
- Corporate internal politics and team public goods
- Democratization, state capacity, and interest densification

### 7. Quality Bar

A complete answer must usually include: (a) mechanism, (b) group classification, (c) at least one selective-incentive or institutional lever, (d) a clear limit of the analysis.