Suppose a candidate for high office stood up and said “We face many difficult collective action problems. Here’s how I suggest we address them…” Suppose he was a Senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders.  He’d get looked at like he had three heads.  He’d get called a communist and worse.  Until there’s widespread acknowledgement that we face collective action problems we’re unlikely to make much progress towards resolving them. We’ve been subject to decades of propaganda that there’s no such thing as a collective action problem. Just getting to acknowledgement that there are is a major challenge.