The counterintuitive and powerful thing here is we can worsen every outcome—death on the one hand, taxes on the other—yet make everyone’s lives better by shifting the equilibrium. For the small-town shopkeepers, a verbal truce to take Sundays off would be unstable: as soon as either shopkeeper needed some extra cash he’d be liable to violate it, prompting the other to start working Sundays as well so as not to lose market share. This would land them right back in the bad equilibrium where they get the worst of both worlds—they’re exhausted and don’t get any competitive advantage for it. But
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