Amdbekarite Social Choice vs Gotoh & Yoshihara

Gandhi thought he had himself become a 'bhangi' because he cleaned toilets and thus was a 'Harijan' (son of God but here meaning 'pariah'). In his view, this qualified him to do Social Choice on behalf of the Dalit (broken or downgraded) or Bahishkrit (excluded) sections of Society who, he believed, were cognitively incapable of doing it for themselves.

However, Gandhi was prepared to talk to representatives of these and other subaltern communities. Indeed, there is a sort of Gandhi-giri which poses as the interlocutor for any and every aggrieved Social Grouping and which thus claims 'obligatory passage point' status for itself.

Dr. Ambedkar took a wholly different tack. He insisted that discrimination had an objective, justiciable, Kripke type 'rigid designation. It wasn't something any self constituted group could intensionally define in a strategic manner (i.e. Spivak type 'strategic essentialism' would be wholly mischievous) . Rather the matter was wholly extensional, albeit juristic and protocol bound.

Ambedkar's view is that Politics is Social Choice- bad Social Choice if it perpetuates discriminatory and exclusionary practices, good Social Choice if it objectively defines discriminated against groups and offers justiciable means of redress and advancement.

Another difference between Gandhi & Ambedkar is that the former insisted that the welfare of the least well-off must take priority. However, every Social grouping, at that time- except perhaps for small minorities like Parsis, or Jains- had some members who starved to death in a year of dearth.

By contrast, Ambedkar backed quota based affirmative action even though this would create a 'creamy layer'. It was clear that all Social Groupings and Identity Classes had this feature. Ambedkar was aware of Tarde's mimetic law and wished to create a highly educated, Spiritually and Morally enlightened, Dalit leadership which would become a role model for the rest. All political parties in India have accepted Ambedkar's model. One consequence is that different parties compete for different Dalit sub-castes. This creates multiple avenues of advancement. No matter which party comes to power, some Dalit Grouping will receive empowerment- at least for its 'creamy layer'. Thus there is the possibility of circulation of elites within the Dalit firmament.

Gandhi's policy prescriptions can have a description in Social Choice theory. Indeed, we will be looking at a paper by two Japanese economists which could easily be modified to present just such a model of Gandhian Social Choice.

By contrast, Ambedkar embraced a wholly Pragmatic Political Philosophy. No praxeology of an axiomatic or algorithmic sort could provide a covering set for the field in question. On the contrary, only pragmatics, not semantics, matters. In this spirit, Ambedkar dismissed his contribution to drafting the Constitution as 'hack work'. This was around the time that Ken Arrow was founding a notion of social welfare functions as Constitutions.

We can all agree that last went nowhere. Even as an academic subject it had begun to languish by the beginning of the Eighties. Mainstream Econ Journals refused to publish any more Social Choice papers. Mechanism Design was fine. Game theory was fine. Econometric work on inequality or discrimination or old fashioned Pigouvian approaches to Environmental or Congestion problems were welcome. But ringing the changes on Arrow's impossibility theorem was useless.

Indians took the hint. Kaushik Basu was asked by Morishima whether he would pursue 'India's subject'- i.e. Arrowvian Social Choice. Basu was smart enough to see that the thing was as exploded as old fashioned 'Development' economics of the mathematical, Sukhamoy Chakrabarty type. It was better to pretend to be a Game theorist or some thing else which sounded like it might be useful.

Given the limitations of Sen-tentious Social Choice and keeping in mind the contribution of Suzumura and recent developments in Mathematics, it is perhaps appropriate to ask- is Ambedkar's deflationary account the only way forward? Are all Social Choice theorists wholly useless even if they aren't Bengali?

A look at a recent paper by two Japanese Economists suggests that this is indeed the case.

Reiko Gotoh & Naoki Yoshihara have a paper titled 'Securing Basic well-being for all' which focuses on groups- e.g. the disabled- who have been subject to historic discrimination.

The abstract states-

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of a social choice rule to implement a social policy for securing basic well-being for all.The paper introduces a new scheme of social choice, called a social relation function (SRF), which associates a reflexive and transitive binary relation over a set of social policies to each profile of individual well-being appraisals and each profile of group evaluations. As part of the domains of SRFs, the available class of group evaluations is constrained by three conditions. Furthermore, the non-negative response (NR) and the weak Pareto condition (WP) are introduced. NR demands giving priority to group evaluation, while treating the groups as formally equal relative to each other. WP requires treating impartially the well-being appraisals of all individuals. In conclusion, this paper shows that under some reasonable assumptions, there exists an SRF that satisfies NR and WP.

Obviously these 'reasonable assumptions' will turn out to be utterly mad. However, it is worth examining this scheme because it is 'Gandhian' in that Groups are considered to be formally equal and their own account of themselves are accepted at face value. It makes various wholly unwarranted assumptions- e.g. that Groups will always lexically preference the well-being of the weakest of their members- and completely ignores all the real world problems faced by Social Choice- viz. Preference Revelation, Knightian Uncertainty, Indeterminacy, Concurrency, Agenda Control, Information Asymmetry etc, etc.

No doubt, a Theist of a Gandhian type may say- 'this is the Cross we must bear. God wants us to suffer by doing this wholly worthless type of Social Choice. What matters is that our intentions and our aims, not the results of our stupid meddling.'

Thus our two Japanese economists say-

The aim of “securing basic well-being for all” reflects the spirit of universality and equality.

Does it really? If we are equal, then everybody, not some clique, should be  engaged in the task. But, in that case, it would reduce to securing the basic well-being of myself and those I interact with. If everybody does so, the problem is solved by 'limited arbitrage'. The method used would be localised 'risk pooling', subject to arbitrage at the margin, so that a local basic minimum is provided to all no matter what contingency they suffer.

By contrast, if some people are more equal than others, perhaps because they have superior information and agency, then it makes sense for a small group to adopt a paternalistic policy designed to secure a minimum standard of living for Society. However, this means that they will exercise legitimate power & hegemonic domination. It reduces equality and 'universality' even if the aim is to increase these things in the long term.

To realize this aim substantively, we must particularly take care of differences among individuals in their contents of well-being.

Their contents of well-being are unknown. Even the contents of one's own well being are unknown. I may at this very moment have cancer. Equally I may have won the lottery. I don't know if I should be depressed or happy. Only time will tell.

It is, however, almost impossible to treat different types of individuals differently, while treating the same type of individuals equally.

Why? We do it all the time. McDonald's treats paying customers equally. Drunken bums who come in to shit on the floor are treated differently.

Given this difficulty, we are faced with the issue of what kind of mechanism can take the difference of individuals into account.

Markets, Bureaucracies, Mafias- any type of Social organisation or coordinating mechanism can do it.

Friedrich Hayek gave a clear answer to this question by stating that only markets can do that, because it is each individual who truly knows and can satisfy his diverse needs. Yet, we cannot rely solely on markets, since the market mechanism per se does not necessarily guarantee the basic well-being of all participants.

Why not? Just have a compulsory Social Insurance Scheme. Alternatively, the Government could use tax revenue to fund a Social Minimum. Hayek had no problem with that.

Ambedkar, as well as being a barrister and an authority on Constitutional Law, had PhD's from Columbia and the LSE in Public Finance and Monetary theory respectively. He was in favor of rapid industrialization and urbanization and well knew how fiscal and monetary policy could be used to provide a Social safety net which in turn would create legitimacy for Civic Planning and Rule enforcement. I doubt he'd have approved of V.S Page's Employment Guarantee Scheme which used taxes collected in the Cities to freeze up the Social Geography of the rural areas such that the forward Castes and the Cooperatives they controlled gained the benefit of a disproportionately Dalit captive labor pool. Cash transfers are a different matter. People may use them to move to better Rule of Law jurisidictions where discriminatory practices are punishable.

However, Cash transfers can't be 'self-selecting'. They have to be targeted on the basis of Constitutionally approved and legally defined groupings.

To resolve this difficulty, we introduce the notion of “groups.” This notion is defined as the representation of any particularity with which society should concern itself. That is, the differences of individuals in the same group can be compared, but the differences of individuals in different groups cannot be compared to one another.

This is silly. There are bound to be people who belong to more than one group. Thus groups will have to be ranked in terms of priority in access to entitlements. If each grouping has a different ranking, then there will be an incentive for the grouping to split.

Consider my own claim to affirmative action based on the fact that I am an Iyer and what's more studied Econ. This proves I'm as stupid as shit. Iyengars dominate everything coz them peeps be smart not Smartha which is soooo totally unfair. Now, it so happens that the Iyer Liberation Front, of which I am the Chairman and sole member, considers being 56, balding, fat and extremely ugly, to be the worst possible handicap. Thus, priority must be given to establishing my well-being before any other Iyer is helped in any way. My cousin, who heads the Opposition to Vivek Iyer Party,  considers being related to me to be the worse possible Social handicap. Priority should be given to getting me to convert to some other Religion or at least to change my surname or, at a minimum, stop showing up for family weddings or festival celebrations.

If Groupings are 'intensional'- i.e. internally defined, and if they are not homogeneous with reference to incidence of multi-dimensional disadvantage- then, clearly, their internal decision space is multi-dimensional and so Agenda Control gains salience and McKelvey chaos prevails.
Even if disadvantage is uni-dimensional, a concurrency problem arises if the cost of allaying disadvantage is idiosyncratic.
In practice, Groups split up precisely because there is no intensional way of taming Djikstra Concurrency or  McKelvey chaos.

Assuming three types of disadvantages, this section illustrates the difficulties in making trans-group comparisons and in identifying the least advantaged in society as a whole.

This same difficulty reappears within groups of more than one. This is why 'two of a trade can never agree'.

The three types of disadvantages can be seen as corresponding to three different conceptions of justice that underlie the reasons and the ways that a society should compensate individuals’ disadvantages. The first type of disadvantage is closely related to what Aristotle called “justice as redress.” It is based on recognizing the cause of the suffered disadvantage as an injustice that needs to be redressed and the responsibility of society as a whole is seen as engaged in this process.

This is purely a legal matter. The victim of a crime or tort is a rights holder under a bond of law with a corresponding obligation holder whom the Justice system compels to offer redress. There can also be provision for a fund to compensate victims of crimes where culprits are indigent. This cashes out as a Social Insurance scheme.

Only if Justice is protocol bound, extensional, and 'robust'- i.e. not sensitive to minor perturbations- can if fulfill its function. Otherwise Djikstra type Concurrency deadlock or live-lock or McKelvey chaos will prevail.

Public repayment represents an idea that it is society’s responsibility not to repeat such injustice in the future. Examples are disadvantages that derive from historical injustices such as colonial exploitation or the treatment of indigenous populations; or disadvantages suffered by victims of disasters and crime.

This is a purely political matter. The quantum of compensation will depend on the countervailing power or nuisance value of the group demanding reparation. What restrains Society from 'repeating injustices' is the Law.

The second type of disadvantage is related to the conception of “justice as compensation.” This concept implies that some individuals should be recognized as disadvantaged if their vulnerability is due to the failure of social institutions to protect them from social discrimination, such as persons with disabilities, particular diseases, or on the basis of age, nationality, gender, or being a single parent, rather than due to the natural characteristics of individuals as such.

Redressal means the same thing as compensation. There is only type of disadvantage here. 'Natural characteristics' don't exist or, at any rate, are not non gameably observable.

Finally, the third type of disadvantage relates to the concept of “justice as protection.” This concept considers it unjust that individuals exist that have less than is necessary for a minimum standard of wholesome and cultured living, even if such individuals are not regarded as disadvantaged in terms of the first or the second type of disadvantage.

This is simply Social Insurance. Our feeling is 'there but for the Grace of God goes I'. We pay into such a scheme because our future is uncertain. We may need this protection ourselves.

Redressing this requires a form of outcome-equality to bring every individual up to a reference point.

So, a Social Worker, or a Clergyman, or someone from a Charity, goes round to see if the person has unmet needs etc. The thing isn't rocket science but it does require a lot of tact and idiographic knowledge.

This concept focuses on individuals, unlike the first two concepts, whose specific causes of difficulties can be hard to identify.

The first two either focus on individuals or they are useless. Redressal or compensation involves identifying eligible individuals. Groupings don't matter. If they are costly to form, the rich may have many such and the poor none at all.

Because of this diversity of disadvantages and of the forms of justice underlying them, the concrete conceptions of “basic well-being” become plural.

This does not matter if it involves stuff that can be bought with money. Otherwise, 'specific performance' is the method of redress.

Take for example, individuals who have suffered disadvantages as a result of having been victims of an atomic bomb. This event, as many say, has completely changed their life plans and goals, and they have decided to live as witnesses of this social disaster in order to prevent it from ever happening again at any other place or time. In such cases, air tickets to fly to New York, which holds the “No more Hiroshima/Nagasaki Congress,” or a grant for publishing their memoirs may be counted as a necessity for securing their basic capability.

These unfortunate people are living witnesses that Atom bombs are a good thing at least when used against a sensible people, like the Japanese. It seems, some of them are so nice and sweet they are willing to fly to New York- the financial center of the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons and did so against them.

Even if these two Japanese Professors aren't playing an elaborate joke on us, the fact remains that monetary reparation will allow the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to do what they think best. Some may want to attend Conferences. Others may want to publish their memoirs. One or two may wish to give the money to Chinese victims of Japanese aggression. The rest may wish to spend the money in a self-interested manner.

This suggests that, under a common concept of “basic wellbeing,” special needs must be addressed relative to the different types of disadvantages.

No. Special needs must be addressed as needs, not disadvantages which may have already been overcome. A rich guy who overcame adversity should not receive more money taken from poorer people who did not have that particular disadvantage growing up. It is a different matter that if there was a justiciable deprivation, then the rich guy has a legal claim. But this is part of his endowment set. It does not arise from disadvantage but rather a right established under a bond of law.

Types of disadvantage do not matter when it comes to Social Welfare.  In any case, no typology of disadvantage is canonical. The thing is purely subjective, if not wholly stupid.

Lastly, it should be noted that an individual might actually suffer from all three types of disadvantages mentioned above and as a result will be included in all three types of groups.

If there is an advantage to be gained, rational people will claim to be part of any and every group. A lot of resources would have to be expended on checking the veracity of these claims.

This implies that such an individual’s basic wellbeing consists of three aspects which cannot be compared intra-personally, while each of the three aspects permits inter-personal comparison within each group. In this case, the individual can participate in the process of making an evaluation of each group, and moreover, deserves taking advantage of social policies which are chosen in terms of all three types of disadvantages, though the actual amount of provision might be reduced considering combination effects of the three policies.

Marvelous! Instead of doing useful stuff, we could all spend our days claiming to be Disabled as well as Transgender and to belong to some historically oppressed ethnic group. Just as, in India, a huge amount of havoc is created by the demand of prosperous, land-owning, castes to be counted as 'Backward', so too, would every country feature demands by people of the majority ethnicity to be treated as the victims of historical injustice. The perpetrator of the Christchurch atrocity would become a hero.

Of course, the three types of disadvantages do not necessarily completely characterize such an individual’s personality. Individuals have the freedom to evaluate their own well-being in terms of their personal conception of the good.

They also have the freedom to tell Social Choice theorists that they are being silly.

Furthermore, individuals have the  freedom not to participate in the process of making group evaluations or not to take advantage of social policies which give a certain provision to that group.

In that case, this paper is useless. People have the freedom to reject it as a pointless and wasteful bureaucratic exercise.

In our framework a group is nothing more than an informational basis for making social evaluation sensitive to particularity so that an individual is not fully characterized by the so-called group identity of the group they belong to, as Sen carefully points out (Sen, 1999, p.29, 2006, p.18f.).

Is this a sound 'informational basis for making social evaluation'? No. There is nothing to stop an imaginary victimhood from being claimed from a mercenary motive.  Wealthy men may complain of being persecuted by allegations of sexual harassment. They may demand vastly greater remuneration to offset their increased psychic pain.

The authors say

... persons with disabilities have taken the initiative and offered their expertise in assessing alternative articles, going by the slogan 'Nothing about us, without us.'

This makes sense when it comes to physical handicaps. However, mental illnesses may be a different kettle of fish. Furthermore, imaginary ailments or psychic injuries should be treated differently. This means, there must be 'something about us' which is not demarcated by us. Otherwise, the group of the privileged who have to pay for everything will be empty while the group of the insulted and injured would encompass everybody.

The above example urges us to reconsider the appropriateness of the standard framework of social choice theory, as there is little discussion about the relationship between asymmetrical prior treatments of individual preferences and the different types of social choice problems they are admissible in.

It is sufficient that there be legal redress regarding 'asymmetrical prior treatment' for the endowment of the agent to change in a manner which gets rid of the problem.

In addition, it indicates that the asymmetrical prior treatment of individual preferences could be appropriate when the given social choice problem is on the effective exercise of universal human rights with respect to the particularity of those individuals.

Rights only exist if there are adequate remedies under a bond of law. If so, the endowment set changes.

The main purpose of this paper is to formulate a social choice procedure that permits prior treatments for disadvantaged groups not as exceptions but as a general rule under some reasonable and socially imposed conditions. More specifically, we focus on a specific type of social choice problem: selecting a public policy in terms of securing basic well-being for all and defining the concept of a group as a representation of particularity that requires a prior treatment in order to secure basic wellbeing for all.

In other words, this is a theory which incorporates what the Law ought to be when it comes to redressal. However, it has the same problem as that faced by the Law- viz. spurious claims. Mechanism design may be of some use here. Social Choice theory is useless because the Preference Revelation problem is too great.

The framework of this paper is as follows. First, the key concept of this paper, an individual's well-being is defined as a function of individual's abilities and social policies (called well-being transformations). While no particular type of a well-being indicator is presumed, it is generically multidimensional in the space of plural attributes, each of which is observable in public.

Unfortunately, no attributes are unambiguously observable in public. That beautiful blonde is actually a dark haired man. He is wearing a polo neck so as to hide his Adam's apple. The bespectacled nerdy looking guy isn't really an computer geek. He is a con-man who will fleece you of your hard earned savings.

For the sake of simplicity and without loss of generality, well-being transformations are assumed to be fixed and the profile of each individual well-being is identified corresponding to each alternative social policy.

So, first our authors get rid of information asymmetry by making all attributes publicly observable. Then they get rid of Knightian Uncertainty by making outcomes wholly determinate. What's next?

The paper also refers to basic well-being, which represents a critical reference point of multi-dimensional well-beings that one can legitimately claim to have met by social policies, and each group can refer to it to identify the injustice of social policies.

How can one legitimate a claim to have established a 'reference point' in a Social decision space? I say it can't be done because antagonomic preferences can be utile. In other words, questioning the legitimacy of an ideology or institution is, itself, a good thing. We don't want there to be unanimity on this point because it will cause complacency and dynamic inefficiency.

Thus, our authors, after getting rid of Information asymmetry and Preference Revelation problems, and then getting rid of Knightian Uncertainty, have now gotten rid of the fundamental premise of an Open Society- viz. there can not be and ought not be unanimity re 'basic reference points' in the Decision space. On the contrary, well-being should be an essentially contested concept.

Our two very erudite authors assume that members of a group have a shared conception of the good.

The idea behind this formulation is that each individual of each group appraises the well-being contents of the members of the group, including her own, not in terms of a personal conception of the good but in terms of a shared conception of the good, on the basis of some commonality among members.

 Thus, though as individuals their preferences are heterogeneous, they somehow magically become univocal purely on the basis of group membership. If this is true, why not create a Super-Group of all members of Society? By the same magic, their preferences will become univocal. Social Choice theory would have univalent foundations.

Even if there is some reason militating against a Super-Group, it remains the case that on the author's assumption a particular grouping would have an algorithmic method of achieving unanimity.

This means a Group could check any mathematical proof- like the Mochizuki proof for the abc conjecture- by giving it a concrete model within its own domain. After all, mathematicians who believe the proof are a Social Grouping. They may become the target of discriminatory behavior. Since, once they become members of the 'Mochizuki Grouping', they will automatically have the same conception of the good, it follows that they will immediately create a Mathematics with univalent foundations in which the proof is correct. The 'Anti Mochizuki' Grouping, meanwhile, would have created an alternative Mathematics. All this will happen instantaneously, so we can immediately compare the two and make all sorts of new discoveries. It seems, just joining a Grouping creates a 'hive mind' which can immediately work out, in an intensional manner, a full fledged Mathematics with wholly univalent foundations which is thus computer checkable and wholly algorithmic. How cool is that! True, stupid Iyers like me won't benefit- but that is precisely why the Iyer Liberation Front demands that Ireland be handed over to us more especially coz Brexit gonna precipitate a Zombie Apocalypse in the part of London where I live.

Notice that what the two authors envisage below is perfectly compatible with Gandhism. It is wholly prohibited by Ambedkar who as a Buddhist asserted the emptiness and delusive nature of 'skandhas'- groupings, or aggregates.

Either being identified as the least advantaged has no effect- in which case why bother?- or it changes the expected endowment set. But in that case, there is an impredicative element here. Thus the operator can't always be reflective and transitive. We can't say there is a poset. For all we know, chaos might prevail. The Spilrajn extension theorem has no purchase. Everything is 'anything goes' because Income effects arise and indeterminacy obtains.

Ambedkar converted to Buddhism and is venerated as a Boddhisattva. Our two erudite authors probably know more about Zen and the peasant-Sage Sontoku Ninoyima whose Economics has been formalized as a General Equilibrium theory immune to the 'paradox of thrift'- and virtually everything else under the sun than I do. Still, I did attend Morishima's lectures and drew some very cute pictures of cats on my exam paper. The title of Morishima's Course was 'Econ B' so I thought I'd get a B on the course. When I didn't I went to see the great man himself. I explained that I was an Iyer who had been historically oppressed by Iyengars like that Srinivas Ramanujan everybody keeps making films about. Anyway, he could not understand my accent but decided to give me a pass grade on the basis of my evident disadvantages. I tell you all this to point out that I have a Japanese Guru at least as prestigious as these two young upstarts who are probably slim and not balding and not intellectually challenged in any way. 

This relates to my 'basic well-being' which is connected to epistemic privilege. Gandhism, as well as what our two erudite authors are delineating here, has no problem with granting me equal epistemic status as part of 'basic well-being'. But in doing so they prevent a Grouping, or Identity Class, turning into a 'Sangha'- something greater than oneself in which one might profitably take refuge. This was the thrust of Dr. Ambedkar's later work. 

Gandhism, or Rawlsianism, or paternalism of every type likes to prescribe an austere package of basic goods somewhat below what is available in prisons where violent inmates will stage riots unless placated. The assumption is that hegemony is so entrenched that Groupings will accept this 'social minimum' and confine themselves to, like Oliver Twist, asking for an extra spoonful of gruel rather than Structural and Institutional reform. 

The Buddhist Sangha, as envisaged by Boddhisattva Ambedkar, proceeds in a wholly opposite manner. It rejects the miserabilist dole of the Paternalist. It constructs new Institutions and modes of conduct for itself. It represents 'endogenous growth', not the tyranny of exogenous epistemic hegemony.

I omit the formula. The claim is

 that the appraisal by the least advantaged individual of his/her own well-being condition in comparison with the basic well-being is approved by all other members of the same group, in that all of them do not reveal the opposite appraisal of this individual's well-being in comparison with the basic well-being.

Wonderful! Groupings here are methods of Social Control such that your own Identity Class forces you to accept an exogenous 'basic well-being'! Where has this happened before?

Chaim Rumkowski was appointed head of the Council of Elders of the Lodz Ghetto by the Nazis. His job was to get the Jews to work as hard as they could, for as little food as possible. Then he too, along with the rest, was herded into cattle trucks and sent to Auschwitz. Jews beat him to death. It seems 'Groupings' don't and should not accept exogenous definitions of 'basic well-being'. The film 'Bridge over the River Kwai' has a similar theme.

Our two authors attribute the power of evaluating social policies to each group. In other words, there is common knowledge and a 'Muth Rational' focal point available for free.

This begs the question of why Groupings would be needed in the first place. Surely the Super Group that is Society would arrive at the same result?

The authors explain their motivation by mentioning a distinction made by Amartya Sen. However, any distinction made by Sen is bound to be wholly fatuous.

... let us clarify the basic ideas underlying this paper. The first idea is relevant to two kinds of ìincomparability. In this paper, the least advantaged are identified as individuals whose well-being contents never dominate the well-beings of others in each social policy.

In other words, there is no 'poverty trap'. No one can improve their position by claiming to be a member of a disadvantaged or excluded group. Thus no perverse incentives arise. Obviously, if this obtained in real life, mechanism design would be easy peasy.

Due to the multiplicity of attributes that define the notion of well-being, there could remain incomparability among the least advantaged even within a group. However, the meaning of incomparability within a group should be kept distinct from incomparability (also called incommensurability) between groups.

Why?

The reason is that the former is a technical or political problem and certain conditions of compromise can be introduced to deal with it, as we have done by introducing 'Full Destitution Comparability' (i.e. there is an inter-subjective 'floor' for 'Destitution') and Dominance (the requirement that 'lowest well-being' need not be a singleton- i.e. two or more people with different characteristics can be treated as identical)  in this paper.

 This technical or political problem turns out to be whatever the Social Choice theorist wants. It is an artificial way to define the Social Minimum. Indeed, for a reason Suzumura explained, making individual preference profiles about not just Social States but also about how a Social State is achieved by a specific Social Choice mechanism is to assume that Equilibrium concepts and Preference Profiles are common knowledge. In other words, there would be no need for Social Choice, or Law or Economics. People would just get up in the morning knowing from whom to take things and to whom to give things. Language would not be needed. All our actions would be coordinated by this common knowledge we share.

Ambedkar was a 'first order' Public Finance/Monetary theory/ Law & Politics maven. He saw that Groupings are only useful if they become 'Sanghas'- Associations which pursue specific ends in a univocal manner such that preferences and procedures change for the better. Shontoku Ninoyima is an example of an agricultural economist who turns poor rural areas into 'Sanghas'- he reversed atomization. True, his friend the Buddhist monk takes up fishing because the poor people need protein. But this is an act worthy of a Boddhisattva.


By contrast, bien pensant theoretical tripe serve no good purpose. Groupings which can envisage a better allocation of resources leading to a higher 'basic well-being' are ruled out by the axioms of this scheme. Thus no Grouping can become a 'Sangha'- i.e. an Association which tackles common problems and ameliorates the condition of society. Rather, these Groupings are assumed to internally discipline their members to accept an exogenous hegemonic dominance.

On the other hand, the latter is a kind of incomparability for which no compromise can be found as long as the plurality of disadvantages is taken seriously. This distinction between these two forms of incomparability corresponds to the distinction introduced by Sen (2002) between tentative incompleteness and assertive incompleteness.

 the former consists of 'some pairs of alternatives that are not yet ranked (although all may get ranked with more deliberation or information)' while 'the latter consists of some pairs of alternatives that are asserted to be non-rankable'.

Notice that 'tentative incompleteness' is first order. It refers to an ongoing process of comparison and is alethic. 'Assertive incompleteness' is second order. It makes a judgment regarding a class of first order comparative propositions. However, it follows no procedure. It is imperative simply.

It is unnecessary to distinguish between first order, alethic, propositions and second order imperative ones. Why? Because the former can be resolved by research whereas the latter can simply be contradicted by insult and contumely.

In this case, inter-group comparability is asserted in an alethic manner and refuted by showing it involves impredicativity and thus no well ordering obtains- save arbitrarily. Intra-group incommensurability is imperatively asserted but immediately refuted by saying 'You have shit for brains, mate. There is no specific purpose for which such incommensurability obtains. Anything to do with choice under scarcity counts as a specific purpose. Either there is a bargaining solution or there isn't. Both imply commensurability or else the underlying population splits. '

Thus, there must always be a Suzumura consistent closure (i.e. Spilrajn extension theorem type) relation for the Rationalizations required for any specific purpose. This is no mere formalism but arises from the stochastic nature of consequentialism which in turn channelizes non-consequentialist procedures and even ontologically dysphoric commodities for reasons of regret-minimization.

I may mention that Social Choice has a different configuration space to Physics because physical agents may propagate and interfere with each other, whereas probability fields may not propagate but may interfere with each other. This is because, ex ante, on the one hand, we don't know which humans will die or reproduce etc, and on the other hand, probability fields are epistemic and non-local.

Thus, Hannan consistency, i.e. regret minimization, militates for partial and incomplete contracts in the short-run. At the margin, different Groupings do a little horse-trading to keep the door open just in case. In other words, even if there is no solution to a coordination problem, people hedge on dis-coordination games. Thus, at the margin there is always some intra-group commensurability of a 'tentatively incomplete' type.

As I have often pointed, in the global ranking of victim-hood, I am equivalent to a Guatemalan goat-herder with a degree in Mass Communications from Cornell and just a shade below a Lesbian plumber whose arms have fallen off. I say this on the basis of Amazon book sales of my Memoires d'Outre tombe as compared to those by other authors of comparable literary merit.

There is a reason the Law is separate from Economics which in turn is separate from Philosophy. This does not mean there can't be a Coase-Posner type Law & Econ, because the roots of the Common Law are well understood. It does mean an Economist/Philosopher gassing on about ideas of Justice will be wholly worthless. Judging is not Choosing because the former is protocol bound while the latter need not be 'robust' but does need to be 'regret minimizing'. Thus it can feature non-consequentialist procedures and ontologically dysphoric conceptions of the Good.

Dr. Ambedkar is the rare example of a first rate Economist who actually helped write a Constitution which permitted the exercise of Social Choice in a very poor, but firmly Democratic, country. By contrast, Indian Social Choice and Game theorists turned their backs on India and wrote nonsense while cannily keeping their Indian passports so as to claim to be 'native informants' or 'Mother Theresa's' or otherwise solicit 'intellectual affirmative action'.

Japan, of course, is a very different country from India. However, like India, it features an untouchable class. I am no expert on this matter but I believe that the experiment of throwing money at the soi disant leaders of this Grouping did no good whatsoever. By contrast, enforcing laws re. confidentiality, privacy and discriminatory practices was a step forward. It may be that a visionary figure like Dr. Ambedkar- who straddled the realms of Social Science and Ethical Spirituality like a Colossus- would have rid Japan of a blemish difficult to reconcile with that Nation's great traditions and accomplishments.