For Theists, all creatures are chosen by the Creator to be as they are and to become what they can become. I suppose, in the West, we might also choose to speak of certain peoples as 'chosen'. The Greeks were chosen to open our eyes to Science and Mathematics and the advisability of having statues of naked dudes all over the place, while the Romans were chosen to bring Law & Civilization to Celtic and Teutonic tribes and to endow the Near East with aqueducts and crucified dudes. But, for more than half of humanity, it was the Jews- who created the template for Christianity and Islam- who were God's original chosen people.
As an Indian, I must admit that I consider devotional piety to be God's gift to those He chooses. However, European wars of the seventeenth century changed the fitness landscape. Piety might be a handicap. God, it turned out, was on the side of- not the big battalions necessarily- but the battalions with the better guns. General intelligence- more particularly such as could be applied to mathematics, science- but also the law, commerce or even the world of entertainment- became increasingly important. There could now be an 'intelligentsia' which might flatter itself that it had a 'formula' that applied to not just the choices Societies make but the sort of Society its Science's 'chosen' people might want to erect. One such formula was C-M-C (Commodity-Money-Commodity) turning into M-C-M (Money-Commodity-Money). This became the foundation of a great Secular Religion whose Prophet was Karl Marx.
In 1985, one third of the world's people lived under Marxist rule. Add in avowedly Socialist regimes, like that of India, and the figure would have risen to half. Clearly the type of Society Marx chose as the ideal had affected billions of lives. Why did Marx choose as he did? The answer has to do with David Ricardo- a Sephardic Jew who converted to Unitarianism- who might be considered the first modern economist (Adam Smith was a moral philosopher) who identified social classes with factors of production. The aristocrat owned the land. The merchants (burghers or bourgeoisie) owned financial Capital and acted as entrepreneurs. The proletariat served the State by producing babies who were doomed to provide labor at subsistence wages. Ricardo wanted the 'Capitalists' to take power from the Aristocracy who got richer by being able to extract more and more rent without doing anything productive. Malthus, however, suggested that the thriftless nobleman was necessary to avert an under-consumption crisis. Marx's solution was to firstly predict that Capitalist competition would drive the profit rate down to zero- the bourgeoise was digging its own grave- and that once a 'final crisis' brought down the market system, the proletariat would rise up and establish a dictatorship which, by some magic, would turn into a Utopia where there was no scarcity. People would produce goods and services because they felt like it and just give stuff away to whoever needed it.
The fly in the ointment, when it comes to choosing what type of Society we should establish, is that Societies have to compete with each other for territory and resources. If they can't defend themselves, they may be conquered. Smaller countries may become protectorates or join a particular alliance. But this, by itself, may constrain what type of socio-economic regime they can have. But similar considerations arose even absent any existential threat. Almost as bad as being defeated in battle, is being considered uncouth or uncool. Thus, Tardean mimetics prevails such that what is chosen converges irrespective of heterogeneity in preferences and endowments. Back in the Sixties and early Seventies, there was a 'convergence' thesis which predicted that the Soviet Union and the USA would become more and more alike. They would be run by technocrats on the basis of complicated computer programs which embodied the mathematical models of either Samuelson or Kantorovich. Capitalism would have 'market prices'. Communism would have 'shadow prices'. But substance and shadow would be the same. This was a benign version of the crazy anti-Semitic notion that the Jews controlled both Wall Street and the Kremlin. Things didn't work out that way. A mathematical economist who advised Gorbachev helped tank the Soviet Union. Meanwhile Arrow-Debreu securities- once described as 'weapons of financial mass destruction'- precipitated the 'final crisis' only of bien pensant 'ordoliberalism'.
There is a different sort of Social Choice which has to do with committees deciding what to spend money on. Under 'Corporatism', industrial unrest is avoided by decisions being made by committees which include capitalists, trade unionists, and representatives of civil society. Here there is preference diversity and some sort of calculus whereby weights are assigned to different types of identifiable costs and benefits. But such committees soon become corrupt. 'Transferable utility'- bribes of various sorts- not some sophisticated mathematical calculus is what prevails. Rent seeking, not some topological quest for the 'Pareto frontier' obtains.
The Ashkenazi Jews of Poland and Lithuania were subject to the misrule arising from the 'Golden Liberties' of the Polish aristocracy. But their own Rabbis were guilty of an equally anarchic indulgence in a hypertrophy of 'halachic' rules. Solomon Maimon, escaping the shtetl and pursuing European Enlightenment, is a representative figure of what may be called the lumpen Askhenazi Aufklarung. He stands at the opposite pole from Moses Mendelhsonn who is the towering figure of a bourgeois, reformed, assimilationist, Nationalist and Liberal, Judaism which however was buried once and for all by the rise of Hitler. Theodor Herzl's Zionism was one alternative and Israel did become a reality- but it was poor and vulnerable. Communism was an alternative and Bolshevik Jews did play a big role in Poland till the end of the Sixties when many were exiled. Hungarian Jews, perhaps because they were considered loyal by the Magyars, were less vulnerable to infantile Leftism. Michael Polanyi is a case in point- though, I suppose, his idiot younger brother cancels him out. Britain, finding the Atlee's administration perfectly dull and respectable, was turning to the Left- at least in the Academy- because the Welfare State, as Julian Le Grand pointed out, subsidized the middle class 'clerisy'.
In America, however, there were anti-communist Jews- Barry Goldwater, though losing the Presidential election, is credited with sparking off a conservative revolution- some of whom incorporated mathematical ideas of a Hayekian stripe. In this context, Arrow's impossibility theorem- published by the RAND Corp- was a useful counterblast to Samuelson's left-liberal Social Welfare Function. Arrow had simply rejigged a voting paradox to show that the thing was not democratic. Arrow was wrong. It was obvious that if voters can 'transfer utility'- i.e. cut deals- then no paradox obtains. In any case, 'transitivity' is not a desirable property for preferences over the means to producing utility rather than utility itself.
Voting theory would, in any case, have been important because proportional representation had obvious flaws. It could help extreme parties when it wasn't just the tool of a corrupt coalition. But 'first past the post' posed a problem where there were significant ethnic or religious fault lines. There was a 'mechanism design' problem whereby Democratic aspirations were reconciled with economic and geopolitical imperatives to preserve national integrity and existing treaty commitments. But this was a purely political problem of an ideographic type.
By the Sixties, the Americans had a useful theory of rent seeking and a game theoretic analysis of coalition stability. The problem of 'preference revelation' too could be tackled by the 'reverse game theory' of mechanism design. This meant that academics need not talk virtue signaling nonsense. They could recast ideographic information in nomothetic terms. But this merely meant that Professors were in the same game, not that they were truly playing catch-up, with cigar chomping operators who decided things in smoke filled rooms. In America, in the early Seventies, 'the Fink', found a way to 'unbundle' issues of concern to the money-bags by inventing the Political Action Committee. This meant that Political Parties could be disintermediated. The PAC concentrated on getting its servants elected regardless of party. This put an end to the notion that 'government by discussion' would be a feature of democratic politics. It didn't matter what the eggheads in a particular party agreed on, policy would be decided by those paying for campaign.
Jews lost interest in Social Choice Theory because Israel had turned into a success story simply through hard work and sacrifice regardless of its shambolic politics. In America, the Evangelicals had become more Zionist than the Jews. There was some scope for self-hating Jewish virtue signaling but it wasn't fooling anybody. I recall telling one such lady the sorry tale of how I lost my mother at Belsen. Apparently she had sloped off to the gift shop. Anyway, that's why I feel it important to say 'Never again!' when some bleeding heart tries to bite my ear off about the rising threat of Fascism as represented by Modi or BoJo or whatever.
The fact that Social Choice theory is shit is amply demonstrated by the fact that India's chosen people- chosen for us to despise- Bengali mathematical economists chose to devote themselves to it. Having been kicked out of East Bengal, people like Sen, quite naturally, wanted to make India unlivable for Hindus. They failed. Sad.
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