Evolution could be considered a group activity. Members of a species explore a fitness landscape. They exhibit some phenotypal or genotypal diversity. Those changes in either which have survival value may spread through the population under intense enough selection pressure.
However, we couldn't really call evolution the result of choices made by a species. Happy accidents and stern necessity- not choice- are better descriptors of this blind process.
Economics is about mechanisms associated with coordination and discoordination problems. There is an element of choice involved in interacting with a mechanism. For example, you could choose to fling shit at your boss instead of sucking up to him. But, after that, you might find that your career options have been severely limited. The truth is, people adapt to mechanisms though those who run the mechanisms may be forced to adapt those mechanisms to stay in business. But this is business, not choice.
A word economists associate with Choice is 'Preference'. The primitive notion here is what would be chosen if no constraint applied. The trouble is we have no means to exercise pure preference. We can only choose things which may fulfil our preference better under some likely concatenation of circumstances. All demand is 'derived demand'. There is no way to 'factorize' the menu of choice such that it corresponds to primitive preferences. But this is the problem all analytical or categorical thinking faces. We don't know how to 'carve up the world according to its joints'. But that is because the world is something which hasn't happened yet and whose joints are unknown even to any totalizing it can itself do.
The fact Economists must live with is that no preferences or choices are involved in the manner in which mechanisms adapt and, under selection pressure, spread more widely. One way this can happen is demographic replacement- one group with higher productivity or greater lethality prevails over others. Another is through Tardean mimetics- imitation of the superior.
What about democratic social choice? Does it have some magical property? Could it, ab ovo, develop adaptive mechanisms sui generis? The answer is, no. Only the fitness landscape can determine what is or isn't adaptive. The thing is a discovery process.
There have been utopian thinkers who thought Revolutions were bound to put an end to all human evil. Good would prevail. Everybody would work wholeheartedly for the common good.
This was a horrible delusion. We can plan for the future but we can't decide which future will be ours. We can make choices. We can't choose to live in the Universe where our choice turned out to be optimal.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Condorcet- a French intellectual who lost his life to the Terror- had written in utopian terms of Humanity becoming united and progressing ever upwards. In reply, Malthus wrote his famous essay on Population which was to become fundamental to Darwin's own theory of Evolution. Utopian abundance would not long persist because of population growth. This suggested an 'iron law' whereby wages would hover around the subsistence level unless either contraception became universal or else new lands for colonization always became available.
It is said that Marx wanted to dedicate the second Volume of Capital to Darwin. Part of the attraction of Marxism was the notion that democratic social choice would be part and parcel of 'the kingdom of ends' where scarcity would have disappeared. Certainly, for young students in Bengal in the late Forties and Fifties, it was tempting to escape from a miserable present into a fantasy world where some abstract, mathematical 'Social Science' would speed progress or, if that was impossible because Bengalis were shit, nevertheless constitute a new Brahmo order of sententious savants whose strictures, however, might more comfortably be delivered on a Western campus. I suppose, the notion that Humanity could take control of its own evolution- perhaps Society could be changed by savants such that Humanity itself changed- chimed with the ideas of Sri Aurobindo- a Bengali revolutionary who turned mystic- and involved the attainment of the 'Supermind'.
To be fair, this was before evolutionary game theory gained a compelling mathematical description. Furthermore, it was only towards the end of the Sixties that mathematicians became convinced that problems of complexity, concurrency and computability were so intense that the Universe would have perished long before any 'substantive' algorithm of rational choice could have computed even a general equilibrium for a small country like Belgium. But, that equiblibrium would still be 'anything goes' because of hedging and income effects.
This meant that Social Choice as conceived by Ken Arrow was a pipe dream. The reality was that Knightian Uncertainty obtained and Expected Utility maximization would be mischievous and irrational.
Sen in his Nobel Prize lecture took a different view. For him evolution was just a mathematical type of social choice even though a computer the size of the Universe could not complete the underlying algorithm for even a single evolved species in the life time of that universe.
"A camel," it has been said, "is a horse designed by a committee."This is attributed to Sir Alec Issigonis, who designed the iconic Mini in 1959. The camel is uglier than the horse. But its utility is undoubted. The Mini was utilitarian but it was stylish.
This might sound like a telling example of the terrible deficiencies of committee decisions,
The Mini was sexy. Issigonis was saying that an equally efficient car might have been designed by a committee but it wouldn't have had the same aesthetic appeal nor would it have captured the zeitgeist of 'Swinging London'.
but it is really much too mild an indictment. A camel may not have the speed of a horse, but it is a very useful and harmonious animal—well coordinated to travel long distances without food and water. A committee that tries to reflect the diverse wishes of its different members in designing a horse could very easily end up with something far less congruous: perhaps a centaur of Greek mythology, half a horse and half something else—a mercurial creation combining savagery with confusion.
Has there even been a committee dedicated to designing a horse? No. Speaking generally, a committee might be constituted of experts or those with 'skin in the game'- i.e. relevant incentives and resources. The criterion of viability or feasibility would weed out anything terribly savage or confused. On the other hand, a Government committee might be shitty and a UN committee more so.
The difficulty that a small committee experiences may be only greater when it comes to decisions of a sizable society, reflecting the choices "of the people, by the people, for the people."
The same difficulty would arise if an individual made the decisions.
That, broadly speaking, is the subject of "social choice,"
Societies make choices all the time. They don't consult Social choice theorists. Some academic subjects are useless. This may not always have been apparent but has become so over the course of time. It is perfectly sensible to look at how a Society makes the choices that it does and to compare it with others and to suggest improvements in choice. It is not sensible to speak of Social Choice as having some sort of abstract structure or logic special to it.
Suppose Sen had been smart. Then he could have said sensible things about Indian or British or American politics. But, Sen wasn't smart. Thus he had to pretend he was doing some foundational mathematical work which might one day turn out to be very useful.
and it includes within its capacious frame various problems with the common feature of relating social judgments and group decisions to the views and interests of the individuals who make up the society or the group.
Those problems are perfectly well understood by ordinary people who also understand how they are solved.
If there is a central question that can be seen as the motivating issue that inspires social choice theory, it is this: how can it be possible to arrive at cogent aggregative judgments about the society (for example, about "social welfare," or "the public interest," or "aggregate poverty"), given the diversity of preferences, concerns, and predicaments of the different individuals within the society?
It isn't possible or useful to do this for an individual or a group save in an arbitrary manner.
How can we find any rational basis for making such aggregative judgements as "the society prefers this to that,"
In the same way that we can say 'Sen prefers to eat food rather than shit'. Observation, Common Sense, and 'theory of mind' are enough.
or "the society should choose this over that," or "this is socially right"? Is reasonable social choice at all possible, especially since, as Horace noted a long time ago, there may be "as many preferences as there are people"?
Reasonable social choice occurs all the time. As with individual choice, preferences don't much matter. The consequences of choices matter. Bad choices tend to reduce the ability to make choices. The reason we have the capacity to reason is because it has adaptive value- at least for the moment.
India faced grave problems but also great opportunities in the 50's when Sen took up the study of Economics. With hindsight we can see that India ought to have done three things
1) redistributed agricultural land and created a free market for it such that higher productivity farmers could increase the size of their holdings
2) allowed light industry focused on 'wage goods'- cheap textiles, bicycles etc- to achieve economies of scope and scale. In particular, India needed to get girls out of villages into big factory dormitories. That is what would have raised welfare fastest and put an end to Malthusian involution.
3) increased 'subsidiarity' and permitted Tiebout sorting. This means letting local authorities decide the fiscal mix and encouraging mobility between 'Tiebout models'. I should mention that there is only one way to get rid of 'rents' or 'expropriation of surplus value'. You must increase elasticity of supply and demand. This means giving producers and consumers more options.
What prevented any of the above happening was politics. The new rulers wanted to curb the power of the industrialists who had financed them. They were skeptical of the rationality of the peasantry and certainly didn't want 'dominant' agricultural castes to rise up and replace them. This was the 'Forward Caste vs. Backward Caste' struggle which the latter began to win in the mid Sixties. The final aim of the Nehru dynasty was to clip the wings of the littoral states which is why they were dead set on centralization and the 'license permit Raj' which gave Delhi- a small town in the Fifties- power over the great metropolises of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras which had been the three centers of British power.
Sen & Co were useful to India's rulers only in so far as they produced some meaningless mathematics so that the pretense of Soviet style planning or 'Democratic' concern with equity' could camouflage a corrupt, incompetent and soon openly dynastic regime.
Sen was shaping up to be a useful idiot for India's corrupt and nepotistic rulers. However, because he eloped with his best friend's wife, he had to move to London. The baby boom had meant that 'redistribution' was on the agenda- essentially, the Wealth built up by the old was raided, through inflation, for the benefit of the boomers and this looked like a squeezing of income differentials which, falsely, was assumed to be what the voters wanted. This was an illusion. Boomers didn't want redistribution. They wanted sex, drugs, rock and roll or better yet, money and power and coke-whores in plenty. As for 'Welfare', they turned against it once they got jobs. 'Workfare' was fine.
In this lecture, I shall try to discuss some challenges and foundational problems faced by social choice theory as a discipline.'
The foundational problem was that it neglected Knightian Uncertainty. Yet language only exists, evolution is only true because Uncertainty is ubiquitous. Future states of the world are not known or, speaking generally, knowable till after they have come to pass.
The immediate occasion for this lecture is, of course, an award, and I am aware that I am expected to discuss, in one form or another, my own work associated with this event (however immodest that attempt might otherwise have been). This I will try to do, but it is, I believe, also a plausible occasion to address some general questions about social choice as a discipline—its content, relevance, and reach—and I intend to seize this opportunity. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences referred to "welfare economics" as the general field of my work for which the award was given,
Sen hadn't contributed to 'welfare econ'. He was supposed to have been working on 'Project appraisal'- along with his best friend- but they both understood that the thing was a waste of time. The guy paying for the project did a deal with other self-interested players. The economists just provided a bit of window dressing. Akerlof, who spent a year at the ISI in Delhi- which is where he came up with his theory of efficiency wages- was supposed to be working on allocation of water from Bhakra Nangal under the supervision of Minhas. It was a disillusioning experience. It was obvious that politicians, not economists, would decide the matter. Minhas later resigned from the Planning Commission when it did something particularly foolish. He was replaced by, Sen's pal, the utterly useless Sukhamoy Chakroborty.
and separated out three particular areas: social choice, distribution, and poverty. While I have indeed been occupied, in various ways, with these different subjects, it is social choice theory, pioneeringly formulated in its modem form by Arrow (1951), that provides a general approach to the evaluation of, and choice over, alternative social possibilities (including inter alia the assessment of social welfare, inequality, and poverty).
It may be a general approach but it has failed to say anything at all about welfare or inequality or poverty except in so far as the same thing could be said about farting or getting a pedicure or having a hangover.
This I take to be reason enough for primarily concentrating on social choice theory in this Nobel lecture. Social choice theory is a very broad discipline, covering a variety of distinct questions, and it may be useful to mention a few of the problems as illustrations of its subject matter (on many of which I have been privileged to work). When would majority rule yield unambiguous and consistent decisions?
Never, if Knightian Uncertainty obtains- i.e. in the real world. But then majority rule has never been assumed or required to be consistent in its decisions. Some religion might say 'always do x whatever the circumstances' but this is because of some heavenly reward or punishment. Moreover, there would always be a get-out clause if that served the interests of Religion better.
How can we judge how well a society as a whole is doing in the light of the disparate interests of its different members?
This has nothing to do with Social Choice theory. We just look to see if different members are showing disparate levels of 'Exit' or 'Entry' or are giving 'Voice' to satisfaction or anger. There are people who travel a lot and who have common sense. We ask them whether people in country x and doing better than people in country y and the guy gives us an answer which he supports by referring to exit, entry and voice of different groups in those countries.
How do we measure aggregate poverty in view of the varying predicaments and miseries of the diverse people that make up the society?
Again, this has nothing to do with Social Choice. Guys who specialize in National Income Accounting and who use statistics for various bureaucratic or charitable purposes can give us an answer to this though, no doubt, a widely travelled person with common sense can give us a better interpretation.
How can we accommodate rights and liberties of persons while giving adequate recognition to their preferences?
This is done by Hohfeldian analysis and 'Law & Econ'- not Social Choice theory. Mechanism design- i.e. reverse game theory- can help ensure rights are linked to incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. If the remedy isn't incentive compatible, it disappears. There is entitlement collapse.
How do we appraise social valuations of public goods such as the natural environment, or epidemiological security?
This is part of Public Finance theory and Welfare Econ- not Social Choice theory. I suppose Preference Revelation started off as part of Social Choice- Gibbard Satterthwaite looks a bit like Arrow's theorem though it is actually more similar to a result of Dummett & Farquharson's - but it evolved into mechanism design and the Revelation principle and the folk theorem of repeated games. In Binmore's hands, it became part of evolutionary game theory. Sen was Binmore's colleague but he remained stuck in an Arrowvian rut.
Also, some investigations, while not directly a part of social choice theory, have been helped by the understanding generated by the study of group decisions (such as the causation and prevention of famines and hunger,
which has nothing to do with 'group decisions'. A guy like Herbert Hoover could solve the underlying problem- food availability deficit- by bringing in and distributing food. Another guy, like B.R Sen at the F.A.O, could push the world down the path of ending Famine everywhere save war-torn regions.
or the forms and consequences of gender inequality,
which has nothing to do with voting rules or preference aggregation
or the demands of individual freedom seen as a "social commitment").
which is meaningless pi-jaw.
The reach and relevance of social choice theory can be very extensive indeed.
Vacuous, sure. Extensive- no.
Origins of Social Choice Theory and Constructive Pessimism How did the subject of social choice theory originate?
Condorcet's Jury theorem- the idea that lots of people voting were more likely to get to the right answer coz the crazies would cancel each other out. Rupert Sheldrake, while in India, came up with a theory of 'morphic resonance' to bolster this notion. Sadly, it was nonsense. Condorcet, too, turned out to be a silly billy. He became a victim of the French Revolution. Talleyrand was smarter. He went off to America and had a good time there.
The challenges of social decisions involving divergent interests and concerns have been explored for a long time.
No. Decisions have been made and people have observed how 'divergent interests and concerns' were addressed such that they stopped being so fucking divergent. In India this involved- Saam, Daam, dandh, bheda- Persuasion, Bribery, beating or the sowing of dissension amongst your enemies.
For example, Aristotle in ancient Greece and Kautilya in ancient India, both of whom lived in the fourth century B.C., explored various constructive possibilities in social choice in their books respectively entitled Politics and Economics.
Nonsense! Aristotle thought Greeks should fuck over barbarians. But Alexander, his pupil, disagreed and created a vast Empire based on 'homonoia'- universal law. Kautilya was Machiavellian and stressed the importance of having a large class of spies and informers. He served a kick-ass Emperor.
However, social choice theory as a systematic discipline first came into its own around the time of the French Revolution. The subject was pioneered by French mathematicians in the late eighteenth century, such as J. C. Borda (1781) and Marquis de Condorcet (1785), who addressed these problems in rather mathematical terms and who initiated the formal discipline of social choice in terms of voting and related procedures.
Nonsense! They wrote about voting rules. But very complicated voting rules already existed- e.g in Venice- and were known to be shit- e.g. in Venice. The Anglo-Saxon world stuck with 'first path the post' and enjoyed stability. The French and other Continental shitheads went in for Proportional Representation and fucked up again and again and again.
The intellectual climate of the period was much infiuenced by European Enlightenment, with its interest in reasoned construction of social order.
Very true. The European Enlightenment was much influenced by the European Enlightenment. Then that Enlightenment was discovered to be shit. It was better, like the English, to stick to getting rich and making your MP do things in Parliament which would make you even richer. Enlightenment could go fuck itself.
Indeed, some of the early social choice theorists, most notably Condorcet, were also among the intellectual leaders of the French Revolution. The French Revolution, however, did not usher in a peaceful social order in France.
No shit, Sherlock!
Despite its momentous achievements in changing the political agenda across the whole world, in France itself it not only produced much strife and bloodshed, it also led to what is often called, not inaccurately, a "reign of terror."
a reign of everybody shitting themselves with fear would be an even more accurate description.
Indeed, many of the theorists of social coordination, who had contributed to the ideas behind the Revolution, perished in the flames of the discord that the Revolution itself unleashed (this included Condorcet who took his own life when it became quite likely that others would do it for him).
He died in a jail cell. He may have taken poison or he may have been murdered. Condorcet was progressive and idealistic but even he wasn't stupid enough to think there could be a discipline called 'Social Choice'. He did think a Republic with universal suffrage would be a good idea. But that's pretty close to what some American States had. They proved to be very good at genocide.
Problems of social choice, which were being addressed at the level of theory and analysis,
Some people published pamphlets. There was no 'theory or analysis'.
did not wait, in this case, for a peacefully intellectual resolution. The motivation that moved the early social choice theorists
who didn't exist. Why not speak of Condorcet as an early podcaster?
included the avoidance of both instability and arbitrariness in arrangements for social choice.
Nope. Condorcet didn't like the Church or the Monarchy. But, it turned out, what succeeded them in France was worse- at least for him.
The ambitions of their work focused on the development of a framework for rational and democratic decisions for a group,
because creating a framework for democratic decisions for an individual would be silly
paying adequate attention to the preferences and interests of all its members.
This simply isn't true. Nobody has ever wanted to pay adequate attention to their enemies or to murderous nutjobs.
However, even the theoretical investigations typically yielded rather pessimistic results. They noted, for example, that majority rule can be thoroughly inconsistent, with A defeating B by a majority, B defeating C also by a majority, and C in tum defeating A, by a majority as well.
But this is also true of individual choice. I prefer tea to wine and prefer wine to Coca Cola, but Coca Cola to tea. This has to do with the contexts in which such choices are offered to me. A person who offers me either wine or tea is likely to have only sweet sherry- which I don't like. On the other hand the choice between Cola and Wine is only given to me in a restaurant. I choose wine because I want to appear sophisticated. Similarly, I prefer Cola to tea coz I want to be seen as swinging hep-cat not a boring babu.
There is no 'Condorcet winner' in my choice of beverage. Why should there be? Nobody has given any good reason for the 'Condorcet criteria'. Mike Tyson can beat me up, I can beat up Tyson's baby daughter, Tyson's baby daughter beats up her dad. What's wrong with that?
Sen himself had observed 'We cannot determine whether the person is failing in any way [to be consistent] without knowing what he is trying to do, that is without knowing something external to the choice itself'. In fact we can't determine shit about even our own true preferences and desires. On the other hand, with enough data we can spot patterns which might be habits or 'revealed preference' or 'conditioned behavior' or whatever name we might chose.
Everything is interconnected. As the Jains say, to know one thing we would have to know all things. As for our 'choices'- nobody can say to what extent are they determined by kin selective altruism or the extended phenotype or Tardean mimetic or something else which has little to do with our unique hacceity or individuality let alone what is best for us.
A good deal of exploratory work (often, again, with pessimistic results) continued in Europe through the nineteenth century.
No. There was no 'exploratory work'. The subject was considered stupid. Lewis Carrol, being concerned with College elections, did some work on it and Nanson gave a refinement to the Borda method in the 1880s. But that was it. Just four mathsy guys in total who did a spot of work on designing voting rules till the middle of the Twentieth Century. But the Borda method was only used for election to the French Academy or something useless like that.
The truth is, mathsy nutters aren't allowed to fuck up our political system. They are told to go play with themselves while the grown-ups manage things.
Indeed, some very creative people worked in this area and wrestled with the difficulties of social choice, including Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland (under his real name, C. L. Dodgson, 1874, 1884).
He supported Proportional Representation. His method is 'NP complete'- i.e. finding the solution will take longer than the lifetime of the universe.
When the subject of social choice was revived in the twentieth century by Arrow (1951),
It had never existed. Arrow and Sen and so forth were supposed to be Economists. They tried to pretend Social Choice was totes cool but it was totes crazy and useless. By the late Seventies, Econ Journals were refusing to publish any more 'impossibility' theorems. This was very sad for me because I was able to prove that if Arrow's theorem is meaningful, then cats are impossible.
he too was very concerned with the difficulties of group decisions and the inconsistencies to which they may lead.
Nope. Arrow was just saying there is no deterministic way of aggregating preferences iff you define a guy who isn't a dictator as a dictator. But this is ex falso quodlibet. If a dictator isn't a dictator you can also prove that all dogs are cats and cats are impossible.
While Arrow put the discipline of social choice in a structured—and axiomatic—framework (thereby leading to the birth of social choice theory in its modem form), he deepened the preexisting gloom by establishing an astonishing— and apparently pessimistic—result of ubiquitous reach. Arrow's (1950, 1951, 1963) "impossibility theorem" (formally, the "General Possibility Theorem") is a result of breathtaking elegance and power, which showed that even some very mild conditions of reasonableness could not be simultaneously satisfied by any social choice procedure, within a very wide family.
A dictator is a guy who can do what he likes and can kill or incarcerate anyone who disagrees with him. Arrow defined a dictator as a guy whose preference is binding on Society. But this could be a wise and benevolent sage whom the people adore but who hold no coercive power over them. Obviously, if you say 'nobody is allowed to make a plan for society which everybody would want implemented because, in my opinion, that is dictatorship' then you can call any Society- no matter how democratic- a Dictatorship. But why stop there? Why not say, 'any Society where people heed the advise of wise and benevolent people is nothing but a Nazi concentration camp?' From there you can quickly proceed to calling Mummy a horrible Fascist because she always cooks dishes greatly to the taste of everybody in the family.
Only a dictatorship would avoid inconsistencies,
Fuck off! Dictatorships don't avoid inconsistencies. Nobody does. Consistency may have a signaling or reputational effect. But it isn't desirable in itself.
but that of course would involve: (1) in politics, an extreme sacrifice of participatory decisions,
which is a good thing. We don't want to participate in Parliament's decisions. We pay MPs a good salary to do that deeply boring shite.
and (2) in welfare economics, a gross inability to be sensitive to the heterogeneous interests of a diverse population.
Again a good thing. Welfare Economists should be insensitive to demands for fellatio from random nutjobs even if they are Benthamites.
Two centuries after the flowering of the ambitions of social rationality, in Enlightenment thinking and in the writings of the theorists of the French Revolution, the subject seemed to be inescapably doomed.
It is stupid shit.
Social appraisals, welfare economic calculations, and evaluative statistics would have to be, it seemed, inevitably arbitrary or unremediably despotic.
This is like Kuhn's 'no neutral algorithm for theory choice' argument. In Category theory, 'naturality' or 'non-arbitrariness' can arise in an optimization problem but that is only for a particular, pre-specified, purpose. No general purpose naturality is discoverable.
Arrow's "impossibility theorem" aroused immediate and intense interest (and generated a massive literature in response, including many other impossibility results).'
Preference Revelation is worth looking at. Mechanism design- stuff like designing auctions- is useful. But Sen-tentious Social Choice is useless. Still, because it is a waste of time, time wasting bureaucrats like his shite.
It also led to the diagnosis of a deep vulnerability in the subject that overshadowed Arrow's immensely important constructive program of developing a systematic social choice theory that could actually work.
No such theory has done any actual work in the last 70 years.
Welfare Economics and Obituary Notices Social choice difficulties apply to welfare economics with a vengeance.
No. Welfare Econ has no need of that shite.
By the middle 196O's, William Baumol (1965) judiciously remarked that "statements about the significance of welfare economics" had started having "an ill-concealed resemblance to obituary notices" (p. 2).
Baumol criticized the Hicks-Kaldor criterion- i.e. the idea that so long as the beneficiaries of a scheme could gained more, and thus could compensate, the losers, the thing should go ahead. However, Baumol's own theory of the State- it exists because of externalities- meant that, in the final analysis, it had to promote those schemes from which it would gain more tax revenue. But this was already obvious.
What changed in the Sixties is that War-time restrictions- e.g exchange controls- were being evaded or rolled back. As factors of production became mobile, autarkic welfare econ was bound to decline. However, it was only in the Seventies that working class voters explicitly rebelled against a Welfarism for which they themselves would have to pay.
This was certainly the right reading of the prevailing views. But, as Baumol himself noted, we have to assess how sound these views were. We have, especially, to ask whether the pessimism associated with Arrovian structures in social choice theory must be seen to be devastating for welfare economics as a discipline.
Baumol was not concerned with Arrow's foolish theorem. He was a practical man who made fundamental contributions to 'contestability theory' and 'Ramsey pricing' both of which shaped policy in subsequent decades.
As it happens, traditional welfare economics, which had been developed by utilitarian economists (such as Francis T. Edgeworth, 1881; Alfred Marshall, 1890; Arthur C. Pigou, 1920), had taken a very different track from the vote oriented social choice theory.
There were arguments about which voting rule was best. But this was in a political or academic context where personalities were involved. Welfare is about consumption. Personalities don't matter when it comes to whether you choose to eat a biscuit named Charlie who dreams of becoming an opera singer instead of taking a bite of Jerry the cherry pie who thinks COVID is a Government conspiracy.
It took inspiration not from Borda (1781) or Condorcet (1785), but from their contemporary, Jeremy Bentham (1789).
Who was fortunate enough to be born on the right side of the Channel. The French didn't get that the Glorious Revolution was the right template to follow.
Bentham had pioneered the use of utilitarian calculus to obtain judgments about the social interest by aggregating the personal interests of the different individuals in the form of their respective utilities.
The context was Governments figuring out ways to feed the proles more cheaply. Count Rumford- an American inventor- is an example. But this type of calculation often backfired. 'Making potatoes compulsory' as Catherine the Great is supposed to have done may lead to mass famine when there is potato blight. Similarly the 'Shweinmord'- i.e. slaughter of the pigs on the grounds that they were 'co-eaters'- backfired on Germany during the Great war. Bentham himself was approved by the Victorian prude because he was against wasting money on pretty or tasty things.
Bentham's concern—and that of utilitarianism in general—was with the total utility of a community. This was irrespective of the distribution of that total, and in this there is an informational limitation of considerable ethical and political importance.
Not really. Assume people are all more or less the same and factor in disutility and the theory of comparative advantage. All that's left is the law of diminishing marginal utility and you are all set. The nigger in the woodpile is disutility and exit. Tax the rich and they fuck off. Pamper the poor and suddenly there is 'entry' and everybody is too ill to work not to mention all the able bodied foreigners clamoring to get in to the country so they don't have to work for a living any more.
For example, a person who is unlucky enough to have a uniformly lower capability to generate enjoyment and utility out of income (say, because of a handicap) would also be given, in the utilitarian ideal world, a lower share of a given total.
While dead people would be given nothing. How unfair!
The plain truth is that if people are given more money for getting little joy, everybody would claim to be utterly miserable.
There is an ancient Indian story of a King who decides to devote himself to the welfare of the poor. He opens hospitals and creates well paid jobs and care homes for the incurably lazy Within a short time, everybody is well provided for. Sadly, the incurably lazy complain about having to get out of bed and go down to the refectory. The King arranges for them to be lifted and carried here and there. Then, more and more of the population decide that they too want servants to wait upon them hand and foot. Suddenly, the King finds he has run out of money. His Chancellor suggests a solution. Set fire to the rest home for the incurably lazy. Almost everybody runs away. Only the truly lazy refuse to quit their beds. The moral is 'serve the incurably lazy. But to identify those who truly qualify for assistance, first let them burn to death.' Benthamite utilitarians may have sounded like swell chaps. But their philosophy involved making the Poor House so fucking unpleasant that people would rather die of starvation in a ditch than enter such places. This was the 'less eligibility' principle enshrined in the 1834 Poor Law Act. Raja Ram Mohun Roy, in addition to petitioning Westminster to lift all restrictions on European settlement in India, was also a staunch Benthamite.
This is a consequence of the single-minded pursuit of maximizing the sum-total of utilities.
People who get less utility from money can give it away. Lots of old people do precisely because they can no longer relish luxuries. If the Benthamite planner does what these guys would themselves do, then where's the harm? The answer, obviously, is that it is foolish to pay such planners. Tell them they smell bad and should go suck off hobos if they truly want to expand the greatest pleasure of the greatest number.
However, the utilitarian interest in taking comparative note of the gains and losses of different people is not in itself a negligible concern.
But they didn't actually do any such thing did they? Bentham wasn't constantly sucking off any homeless person he saw in the street so as to increase the happiness of the greatest number.
And this concern makes utilitarian welfare economics deeply interested in using a class of information—in the form of comparison of utility gains and losses of different persons—with which Condorcet and Borda had not been directly involved.
In so far as money is a good proxy for utility, this was perfectly sensible.
Utilitarianism has been very influential in shaping welfare economics, which was dominated for a long time by an almost unquestioning adherence to utilitarian calculus.
And an even more unquestioning adherence to sucking off hobos- thinks nobody at all.
But by the 193O's utilitarian welfare economics came under severe fire.
All of econ was under severe fire because of the Great Depression.
It would have been quite natural to question (as Rawls [1971] would masterfully do in formulating his theory of justice) the utilitarian neglect of distributional issues and its concentration only on utility sum-totals in a distribution-blind way.
Governments should maximize their tax revenue so as to protect the country. Distribution doesn't matter if you get invaded and everybody is raped to death.
But that was not the direction in which the antiutilitarian critiques went in the 193O's and in the decades that followed. Rather, economists came to be persuaded by arguments presented by Lionel Robbins and others (deeply influenced by "logical positivist" philosophy) that interpersonal comparisons of utility had no scientific basis: "Every mind is inscrutable to every other mind and no common denominator of feelings is possible" (Robbins, 1938 p. 636).
This is equally true of one's own comparisons of one's own utility. Our preferences are hidden from us. They can't be 'factorized'. That's a good thing. Otherwise a predator or parasite could access that information and use it against us.
The bigger problem was that everything was meaningless save in so far as it was economic- i.e. solved a coordination or discoordination game of a particular sort. Wittgenstein described what his bien pensant colleagues indulged in as 'shitting higher than your arsehole'.
Thus, the epistemic foundations of utilitarian welfare economics were seen as incurably defective.
But epistemology was meaningless. Knowledge may have cash value. But there is no knowledge about knowledge. The thing is a wank.
There followed attempts to do welfare economics on the basis of the different persons' respective orderings of social states, without any interpersonal comparisons of utility gains and losses (nor, of course, any comparison of the total utilities of different persons, which are neglected by utilitarians as well).
There was Revealed Preference theory which was just econometrics. You take what is observed and relate it to other stuff for which you have observations and then run regressions and so forth. Big Corporations will pay money for research of that sort.
While utilitarianism and utilitarian welfare economics are quite indifferent to the distribution of utilities between different persons (concentrating, as they do, only on the sum-total of utilities), the new regime without any interpersonal comparisons in any form, further reduced the informational base on which social choice could draw.
It is easy to incorporate interpersonal comparisons. Essentially, if a bunch of guys over here start imitating some dudes over there, then it is likely that they made in interpersonal comparison and decided that the other dudes were getting more utility. So they imitated them.
Is Sen so stupid that he thinks that Bentham had X-ray goggles that enabled him to read utility levels in the people he met- which is why he wasn't sucking off hobos incessantly? No. But he thinks everybody else probably believes some such story. After all, if Hindus believe in demons with ten heads, Whitey is bound to have similar beliefs about Bentham- right?
The already-limited informational base of Benthamite calculus was made to shrink even further to that of Borda and Condorcet, since the use of different persons' utility rankings without any interpersonal comparison is analytically quite similar to the use of voting information in making social choice.
But Arrow decided that a mimetic target or even a sage counsellor was actually a nasty Dictator. Otherwise, there can be a source of interpersonal comparisons within the system. The same result can be achieved by making the aggregation mechanism non-deterministic.
Faced with this informational restriction, utilitarian welfare economics gave way, from the 194O's onwards, to a so-called "new welfare economics," which used only one basic criterion of social improvement, viz, the "Pareto comparison."
Which would be achieved anyway if there was costless, frictionless, 'local arbitrage'- i.e. people could keep swapping things till nobody could be made better off without someone else losing out. Just improving access to information and making transactions cheaper and safer- which is what Ebay does- increases allocative efficiency and gets us closer to the Pareto frontier.
This criterion only asserts that an alternative situation would be definitely better if the change would increase the utility of everyone.
No need to mention utility. Just say no more mutually beneficial trading can take place. The presence of arbitrageurs should speed this outcome provided expectations are 'Muth rational'.
A good deal of subsequent welfare economics restricts attention to "Pareto efficiency" only (that is, only to making sure that no further Pareto improvements are possible). This criterion takes no interest whatever in distributional issues, which cannot be addressed without considering conflicts of interest and of preferences.
Distributional issues can't be addressed at all because we don't know disutility. Anyway, if supply and demand is elastic, you can't do any fucking redistribution. What you can have is a risk 'pooling equilibrium' with a Social minimum. But this is just an insurance scheme. It may collapse because of moral hazard so there is likely to be 'costly signal' based 'separating equilibria'. In practice this means service provision discrimination. That's what happens in Bengali Famines. Some get rations, others in rural shitholes, are left to starve.
Some further criterion is clearly needed for making social welfare judgments with a greater reach, and this was insightfully explored by Abram Bergson (1938) and Paul A. Samuelson (1947).
But, during the War, the actual thing was being done in the UK and even the US. It was abandoned afterwards because markets do a better job.
This demand led directly to Arrow's (1950, 1951) pioneering formulation of social choice theory, relating social preference (or decisions) to the set of individual preferences, and this relation is called a "social welfare function."
Though it was no such thing. It was just the Voter's paradox tarted up to look like Relation Algebra which it couldn't be because Dictator was an impredicatively defined property. Define a perfect voting rule as a property of of a properly analyzed string of miaows uttered by a possible cat. If there is no such rule, cats are impossible. This is just ex falso quodlibet.
Arrow (1951,1963) went on to consider a set of very mild-looking conditions, including: (1) Pareto efficiency,
which requires better access to information and lower transaction costs. This is a function of technology and literacy and so forth.
(2) nondictatorship,
Why shouldn't voters put a dictator in power? Anyway, even Mummy could be described as a Dictator coz we all do what she says more especially if she pats our head and tells us we're her very very special little boy.
(3) independence (demanding that social choice over any set of alternatives must depend on preferences only over those alternatives),
which is dictatorial. We should be allowed to choose as we please. I won't buy stuff from a shop whose employees are rude. Arrow would force me to do so unless I kick him repeatedly in the nut-sack.
and (4) unrestricted domain (requiring that social preference must be a complete ordering, with full transitivity, and that this must work for every conceivable set of individual preferences).
If so, our preference not to have a complete ordering (which would involve using a computer bigger than the Universe and take trillions of years) would prevail. Also we wouldn't have a stupid voting rule according to which a majority could forbid us to scratch our own arse.
Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrated that it is impossible to satisfy these conditions simultaneously.'
No. The theorem was unsound because it assumed the existence of a unique pre-order.
In order to avoid this impossibility result, different ways of modifying Arrow's requirements were tried out in the literature that followed, but other difficulties continued to emerge.
Suppose there is one individual and only two choices- viz. to have a voting rule or not. We can show that it is impossible to satisfy any conditions whatsoever in this case. The same happens when you introduce a second or a third person. By induction, if there is a choice to have no voting rule- which must be the case under unrestricted domain- there will never be a voting rule AND that is the best voting rule because it is stooopid to have any such beastie. Every protocol bound judgment system has a rule which forbids its own general application. Consistency can be mischievous and there is a 'buck stopped' mechanism to guard against that hobgoblin of little minds.
The force and widespread presence of impossibility results generated a consolidated sense of pessimism, and this became a dominant theme in welfare economics and social choice theory in general. Is this reading justified?
Welfare Econ is stuff that has to be done by bureaucrats and lawyers. It is a boring type of accountancy. Plumbers are unaffected if Architects get too far up their own arses with some mathsy theory. The same is true of economics as a profession rather than a substitute for mental masturbation.
IV. Complementarity of Formal Methods and Informal Reasoning
This is what was lacking in Sen-tentious Social Choice. Informal reasoning means common sense reasoning. Sen always starts from the stupidest assumption possible.
Before I proceed further on substantive matters, it may be useful to comment briefly on the nature of the reasoning used in answering this and related questions. Social choice theory is a subject in which formal and mathematical techniques have been very extensively used.
They have been ignorantly misapplied.
Those who are suspicious of formal (and in particular, of mathematical) modes of reasoning are often skeptical of the usefulness of discussing real world problems in this way. Their suspicion is understandable, but it is ultimately misplaced.
Maths can show that Arrow's theorem is nonsense. But so can just saying 'defining a dictator as someone who is not a dictator' gives rise to ex falso quodlibet. You can prove any shit if you start from a contradiction in terms.
In a footnote, Sen says-
There is also the structural assumption that there are at least two distinct individuals (but not infinitely many) and at least three distinct social states (not perhaps the most unrealistic of assumptions that economists have ever made).
In that case, there would be no voting rule. The two guys wouldn't be crazy enough to accept any such thing. They might resolve a particular dispute by following a rule- e.g. a coin toss- but 'unrestricted domain' would be off the table. Why? Knightian uncertainty. We don't know all possible states of the world and may regret agreeing to be bound by a rule in a matter which we had not envisaged its being applied. There are plenty of fairy stories which drive this lesson home.
The exercise of trying to get an integrated picture from diverse preferences or interests of different people does involve many complex problems in which one could be seriously misled in the absence of formal scrutiny.
This is not the case. Formal scrutiny can't increase the information set though it may throw away information because it is formally shit.
Indeed, Arrow's (1950, 1951, 1963) impossibility theorem—in many ways the "locus classicus" in this field—can hardly be anticipated on the basis of common sense or informal reasoning.
Sure it can. It's just the voting paradox tarted up a bit. Obviously, in real life, there is strategic voting and people voting under the direction of a leader and so on and so forth. This does not mean a 'dictator' exists. Pretending that listening to a wise man and voting strategically means that we are actually obeying a dictator is stupid. Telling stupid lies- even if you do it in a mathsy way- decade after decade means you are a stupid liar. Still, if you are brown may be you should be given a Nobel simply as a consolation prize for having been born with the brains of a chattering monkey.
This applies also to extensions of this result, for example to the demonstration that an exactly similar impossibility to Arrow's holds even without any imposed demand of internal consistency of social choice (see Sen, 1993a Theorem 3).
This is because it is 'non-Dictatorship' which is doing the heavy lifting. Anyway, a Dictator could always cunningly disguise his presence. This proves there is always a Dictator. That's why we must constantly tell lies about the magic powers of Democracy because otherwise Hitler takes over.
In the process of discussing some substantive issues in social choice theory, I shall have the opportunity to consider various results which too are not easily anticipated without formal reasoning.
There are no 'results'. There is mere stupidity.
Informal insights, important as they are, cannot replace the formal investigations that are needed to examine the congruity and cogency of combinations of values and of apparently plausible demands.
But that 'formal investigation' has always been shit because the people doing it are stupid shitheads.
This is not to deny that the task of widespread public communication is crucial for the use of social choice theory.
Nonsense! Arrow wrote his theorem before there was any fucking widespread 'public communication'. Indeed, if sensible people had been aware that this shite was being taught, they'd have defunded the discipline. Sen's daddy was a soil scientist who did his PhD in that subject in the UK. He must have thought sending his son to Cambridge would benefit India. But Sen studied worthless shite and then took to teaching it because he was too useless to do anything else.
It is centrally important for social choice theory to relate formal analysis to informal and transparent examination. I have to confess that in my own case, this combination has, in fact, been something of an obsession, and some of the formal ideas I have been most concerned with (such as an adequate framework for informational broadening,
which turned out to mean arbitrarily asserting stupid shit
the use of partial comparability and of partial orderings,
which is useless if there is no unique pre-order which there can't be because Preferences can't be directly linked to utilities. There is only 'derived demand'.
and the weakening of consistency conditions demanded of binary relations and of choice functions) call simultaneously for formal investigation and for informal explication and accessible scrutiny.
We have no Momus window into our own hearts much less one into anybody else's heart. Evolution ensured that our own source code is hidden even from ourselves. Otherwise we'd easily be hacked by parasites or predators.
Our deeply felt, real-world concerns have to be substantively integrated with the analytical use of formal and mathematical reasoning.
Sen failed to do this. He was from India. He didn't say sensible things which could have helped ignorant politicians. He talked vacuous bollocks instead. Incidentally, Sen was on Kamala Harris's dad's PhD committee. That guy was utterly useless. These things run in the family you know.
V. Proximity of Possibility and Impossibility The general relationship between possibility and impossibility results also deserves some attention, in order to understand the nature and role of impossibility theorems.
They are stupid because they depend on 'unrestricted domain'. But nobody is crazy enough to sign up for an algorithmic decision procedure which could have people voting on how often you should scratch your own butt.
When a set of axioms regarding social choice can all be simultaneously satisfied,
an infinite set of axioms can always be satisfied even under unrestricted domain. This is because every NP complete problem can be cracked but there is no efficient algorithm and thus no unique pre-order.
there may be several possible procedures that work, among which we have to choose. In order to choose between the different possibilities through the use of discriminating axioms, we have to introduce further axioms, until only one possible procedure remains. This is something of an exercise in brinkmanship. We have to go on cutting down alternative possibilities, moving—implicitly— towards an impossibility, but then stop just before all possibilities are eliminated, to wit, when one and only one option remains.
Nothing wrong in that. In Econ we know that the presence of externalities, non-convexities, asymmetries, Knightian uncertainty, large income and hedging effects etc etc invalidate the fundamental theorems of Welfare Econ. These problems reappear in voting theory under different names. Transferable utility- i.e. paying people off- could solve all problems under certain conditions and this gives rise to quite useful types of mechanism design. Still, this is the sort of thing those with expert cognition can do better on the back of an envelope. Math has to play catchup though as computational power increases and Big Data becomes cheaper and more accessible, applied math is beginning to pay for itself.
Thus, it should be clear that a full axiomatic determination of a particular method of making social choice must inescapably lie next door to an impossibility—indeed just short of it.
Impossibility arises from unrestricted domain. For any axiom system that is not inconsistent, there is a set of models to which the domain should be restricted.
If it lies far from an impossibility (with various positive possibilities), then it cannot give us an axiomatic derivation of any specific method of social choice.
Sure it can- but with a restricted domain. Why does Sen not know this? The answer is he hadn't kept up with the Math.
It is, therefore, to be expected that constructive paths in social choice theory, derived from axiomatic reasoning, would tend to be paved on one side by impossibility results (opposite to the side of multiple possibilities).
This is silly. It is obvious that methods of Social Choice which work in one domain won't work in another. It is one thing to choose an MP by voting, it is another to choose the Chief Scientific Adviser in the same way. It doesn't matter too much if people vote a charming fool into Parliament, it is another if some charlatan is put in charge of Science and Technology.
No conclusion about the fragility of social choice theory (or its subject matter) emerges from this proximity. In fact, the literature that has followed Arrow's work has shown classes of impossibility theorems and of positive possibility results, all of which lie quite close to each other.'
But none can have a concrete model because they are not computable in the life time of the Universe.
The real issue is not, therefore, the ubiquity of impossibility (it will always lie close to the axiomatic derivation of any specific social choice rule), but the reach and reasonableness of the axioms to be used.
No. The real issue is that Social Choice theory is completely useless. It can't be operationalized. We can see econometricians working for Companies and Governments to estimate elasticities of demand and excess burdens and so forth. We can't see any thing similar happening in Social Choice. True, two or three things have become obvious- e.g
1) don't make the decision space multi-dimensional- which is what Sen does- because then you get 'Agenda Control' problems. This is the McKelvey chaos theorem.
2) The Social Contract is an incomplete Contract. There has to be flexibility in reallocating control rights or renegotiating consideration.
3) Rights without incentive compatible remedies will collapse. Stop pretending otherwise to engage in woke, virtue signaling, 'activism'. There will be a backlash.
We have to get on with the basic task of obtaining workable rules that satisfy reasonable requirements.
No we don't. Stick with what works or what has worked elsewhere and make changes on the fly as circumstances change. Politicians and Jurists can get on with this though, no doubt, Economists can help supply ammunition to Bureaucracies and Lobbyists. In other words, join the folk who are already doing this rather than pretending you can solve society's problems by sitting in an armchair and talking bollocks.
VI. Majority Decisions and Coherence In the discussion so far, I have made no attempt to confine attention to particular configurations of individual preferences, ignoring others. Formally, this is required by Arrow's condition of "unrestricted domain," which insists that the social choice procedure must work for every conceivable cluster of individual preferences.
It does, once we understand that everybody chooses 'no fucking Arrowvian rule'.
It must, however, be obvious that, for any decision procedure, some preference profiles will yield inconsistencies and incoherence of social decisions while other profiles will not produce these results. Arrow (1951) himself had initiated, along with Black (1948, 1958), the search for adequate restrictions that would guarantee consistent majority decisions. The necessary and sufficient conditions for consistent majority decisions can indeed be identified (see Sen and Pattanaik, 1969).
They are the same as the conditions for markets to be efficient. No externalities, no market power (i.e. no preference revelation problem), a 'Goldilocks condition' re. preference and endowment diversity. For reasons explainable by Evolutionary Biology this is linked to not too much Knightian Uncertainty (in which case you will have discoordination games and income and hedging affects arising from arbitrage) and Hannan Consistency- or some refinement of it.
" While much less restrictive than the earlier conditions that had been identified, they are still quite demanding; indeed it is shown diat they would be easily violated in many actual situations.
But the thing would not be computable. Like Arrow Debreu general equilibrium, the solution is in an exponential time class.
The formal results on necessary or sufficiency conditions of majority decisions can only give as much hope—or generate as much disappointment—about voting-based social choice as the extent of social cohesion and confrontation (in the actual patterns of individual preferences) would allow.
In which case voting isn't particularly important. It confirms rather than decides things.
Choice problems for the society come in many shapes and sizes, and there may be less comfort in these results for some types of social choice problems than for others. When distributional issues dominate and when people seek to maximize their own "shares" without concern for others (as, for example, in a "cake division" problem, with each preferring any division that increases her own share, no matter what happens to the others), then majority rule will tend to be thoroughly inconsistent.
There will be no fucking cake. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry here between the guys who make the cake and those who might turn up to claim a share. A bourgeois strategy favoring the cake-makers results in there being cake.
But when there is a matter of national outrage (for example, in response to the inability of a democratic government to prevent a famine),
Suhrawardy, as Minister of Supply, was held responsible for the 1943 Famine. He was elected Premier three years later. Mujib presided over the 1974 famine. He would have been re-elected had he not been killed. There was no fucking outrage- at least in Bengal- over people starving. Mao and Stalin got stronger because of the famines they created.
the electorate may be reasonably univocal and thoroughly consistent'.
There is no evidence of this whatsoever. All that matters is whether the alternative to the incumbent government is worse or better.
Also, when people cluster in parties, with complex agendas and dialogues, involving give and take as well as some general attitudes to values like equity or justice, the ubiquitous inconsistencies can yield ground to more congruous decisions.'
But Sen and his ilk were screaming themselves hoarse against Thatcher and Reagan and so forth. The plain fact is voters everywhere- e.g. Scandinavians rejecting 'solidarity wages'- were sick and tired of Redistribution by the early Seventies. The only thing they hated worse than Welfarism was 'Worker Control'. Chavez's Venezuela was touted as the exception to this rule. Look at it now.
So far as welfare economics is concerned, majority rule and voting procedures are particularly prone to inconsistency, given the centrality of distributional issues in welfare-economic problems.
Which is why Welfare Econ has been keeping a pretty low profile since the Seventies. Workfare is cool but Welfare Queens are not.
However, one of the basic questions to ask is whether voting rules (to which social choice procedures are effectively restricted in the Arrovian framework) provide a reasonable approach to social choice in the field of welfare economics.
The answer is no. The reasonable approach is to virtue signal and then steal the money that is supposed to go to the poor.
Are we in the right territory in trying to make social welfare judgments through variants of voting systems?
These guys have no power to vary voting systems and nobody gives a toss about their 'social welfare judgments'. Sen was always banging on about how a Black Man in Harlem was worse off than a Brown Man in Bangladesh but no African Americans wanted to emigrate to Dacca whereas plenty of Banglas spent a lot of money to get to the USA where they did very very well.
Sen says that no democratic country has suffered a famine. Plenty have if the US could not (as during the Second World War) or would not (Bangladesh 1974) send Food Aid. India could have had a big Famine in the mid-Sixties if LBJ hadn't lost his nerve and sent food shipments. On the other hand both India and Bangladesh did greatly boost food production precisely because they were vulnerable to US displeasure.
Informational Broadening and Welfare Economics Voting-based procedures are entirely natural for some kinds of social choice problems, such as elections, referendums
which are, by definition, voting based
, or committee decisions.'
which are not necessarily so. Here 'uncorrelated asymmetries' matter. If you can be sacked for voting the wrong way, then the Committee you are sitting on is consultative or cosmetic- not 'democratic' at all.
They are, however, altogether unsuitable for many other problems of social choice.
Problems of Social Choice concern those who control Society's Choices. Academics like Sen are not consulted.
When, for example, we want to get some kind of an aggregative index of social welfare, we
piteously plead for a little money from some Foundation or Government department. But you have to produce the sort of shite Statistics your paymasters want.
cannot rely on such procedures for at least two distinct reasons. First, voting
has nothing to do with social welfare. It can fall or rise greatly without votes being affected.
requires active participation, and if someone decides not to exercise her voting right, her preference would find no direct representation in social decisions. (Indeed, because of lower participation, the interests of substantial groups—for example of African Americans in the United States—find inadequate representation in national politics.)
This is not a problem. We can easily estimate what the result would have been if everybody had voted.
In contrast, in making reasonable social welfare judgments, the interests of the less assertive cannot be simply ignored.
But, to make reasonable judgments of any sort we must ignore Amartya Sen. He is a virtue signaling fool.
Second, even with the active involvement of every one in voting exercises, we cannot but be short of important information needed for welfare-economic evaluation (on this see Sen, 1970a, 1973a).
Which is not a problem because we can supplement that information by doing surveys. Market Research was a lucrative field in the Seventies. Political parties paid those guys lots of money. One thing they discovered was that the Working Class hates Redistribution. The thing was a middle class fad.
Through voting, each person can rank different alternatives. But there is no direct way of getting interpersonal comparisons of different persons' well-being from voting data.
Who cares so long as there is an indirect way? The fact is there were well paid guys back in the Seventies who'd look at the election results in the morning papers and then go straight into the board rooms of big Corporations to advise MDs about changes they needed to make in their Business Plans. Consider the recent collapse of the Red Wall. I assumed it was because us proles hated Corbyn coz he turned out to be a posh bastid. Then, at the pub, I heard some young whipper snapper explain why the results showed that some yuppy health drink he was selling would now spend money expanding into Red Wall areas. Apparently, voting Tory is 'aspirational' in some places- at least from the narrow perspective of certain brands. But information about aspiration shifts arise because of 'inter-personal comparisons'. Sen, fool that he is, thinks that stuff is about redistribution. It isn't. We compare our satisfaction with those who started off like us but who now seem to be doing better. That's the point of welfare comparisons. This isn't a story about some Benthamite Santa Claus, it is about Tardean mimetics.
We must go beyond the class of voting rules (explored by Borda and Condorcet as well as Arrow) to be able to address distributional issues.
But parties which claim to do so lose elections. Voters get that the golden goose won't stick around for the knife. It will fly away. Anti-Semitism has been called the Socialism of Fools. Bien pensant concern for the poor and the colored and the queer aint fooling nobody- even if the Sen-tentious are indeed as stupid as shit.
Arrow had ruled out the use of interpersonal comparisons since he had followed the general consensus that had emerged in the 194O's that (as Arrow put it) "interpersonal comparison of Utilities has no meaning" (Arrow, 1951 p. 9).
The stupid cunt didn't get that the Soviets would have to build a Wall to prevent East Germans doing 'interpersonal comparisons' and then running the fuck away from the Worker's Paradise.
The totality of the axiom combination used by Arrow had the effect of confining social choice procedures to rules that are, broadly speaking, of the voting type.'
He thought voting systems were like markets where you 'vote with your money'. He forgot you can vote with your feet. Also, nobody would be stupid enough to agree to be bound by a voting rule with unrestricted domain. The majority might decide you have to suck off everybody- including yourself.
His impossibility result relates, therefore, to this class of rules. To lay the foundations of a constructive social choice theory, if we want to reject the historical consensus against the use of interpersonal comparisons in social choice, we have to address two important—and difficult—questions. First, can we systematically incorporate and use something as complex as interpersonal comparisons involving many persons?
Sure. We do this all the time. Suppose there are two Departments. Everybody in one has applied to join the other but nobody in the other has done the reverse. That tells you something. Both may be paid the same and have the same hours, but the work in one Department has higher disutility.
More generally, disutility of work is associated with transfer earnings. Looking at patterns of exit and entry tells you about disutility. Stuff like that is important in the real world. The plain fact is, for any specific purpose you can put numbers to things of this sort and improve the Business model.
Will this be a territory of disciplined analysis, rather than a riot of confusing (and possibly confused) ideas?
Sen is the confused one here. Guys running things do interpersonal comparisons and improve the efficiency of their organizations. This may involve giving stupid monkeys Nobel prizes so that they continue to say 'Democracy has magic powers' to other stupid monkeys.
Second, how can the analytical results be integrated with practical use?
A use is only 'practical' if it can pay for itself by raising efficiency- i.e. economizing on the use of scarce resources. This is an ideographic, not nomothetic, affair.
On what kind of information can we sensibly base interpersonal comparisons?
Sensible information- e.g. the fact that people in Dept. X want to leave and join Dept. Y though the pay and working conditions are the same.
Will the relevant information be actually available, to be used? The first is primarily a question of analytical system building,
No. It is ideographic. You have to take available information and work out 'Granger causality'. Speaking generally, you are going to have to use proxies.
and the second that of epistemology as well as practical reason.
No. Can the exercise more than pay for itself? That's an economic, not an epistemological, question.
The latter issue requires a reexamination of the informational basis of interpersonal comparisons,
that basis can only be people comparing themselves to other people. Anything else is just arbitrary shite.
and I would presently argue that it calls for an inescapably qualified response.
No. The unqualified response is 'will doing this pay for itself?' If the answer is 'no', don't do it. But there's always some guy whose analysis will more than pay for itself.
In a footnote, Sen says
* It should be explained that restricting social choice procedures to voting rules is not an assumption that is invoked by Arrow
It is entailed by non-Dictatorship.
it is a part of the impossibility theorem established by him.
only because the procedure has to be deterministic. However, the assumption that there can be situations where only three alternatives obtain is arbitrary. If there is one and only one alternative there is still an infinite set of states of the world because one outcome can be associated with an infinite number of conditionals. Thus if my only alternative is 'suffocate immediately due to lack of oxygen', I could still associate it with 'suffocate immediately if Mochizuki proof of the abc theorem is false' and so on. Unrestricted domain cuts both ways. If Arrow wants to play silly buggers, we can repay him in the same coin.
It is an analytical consequence of the set of apparently reasonable axioms postulated for reasoned social choice. Interpersonal comparison of utilities is, of course, explicitly excluded, but the proof of Arrow's theorem shows that a set of other assumptions with considerable plausibility, taken together, logically entail other features of voting rules as well (a remarkable analytical result on its own).
But a false result nonetheless. No logical entailment attaches to any feature of voting rules. Only arbitrary stipulations can be made. If the reverse were the case the cut elimination theorem would be false.
The derived features include, in particular, the demanding requirement that no effective note be taken of the nature of the social states: only of the votes that are respectively cast in favor of—and against—them (a property that is often called "neutrality"—a somewhat flattering name for what is after all only an informational restriction).
This does not matter provided there is no costless mechanism for implementing a voting decision. Only a small minority of people are career criminals. Even if 98 per cent of voters decide that crime should not exist, it will still exist because the preference intensity of criminals prevails. The outcome of the vote does not matter if preference intensity expresses itself by making implementation impossible. Sen should have noticed that voters backed Heath but Trade Unions brought him down. Thatcher found Scargill a more formidable opponent than General Galtieri.
Actual voting involves groups doing deals and 'transferable utility'- i.e. bribes- as well as the threat of mass disobedience or violence. You vote for the moderate even if you favor the extremist because you don't want Civil War.
While the eschewal of interpersonal comparisons of utilities eliminates the possibility of taking note of inequality of utilities (and of differences in gains and losses of utilities), the entailed component of "neutrality" prevents attention being indirectly paid to distributional issues through taking explicit note of the nature of the respective social states (for example, of the income inequalities in the different states).
This is nonsense. The Census exists. It counts people. It does not preclude us from finding out about differences in wealth or ability.
The role of induced informational constraints in generating impossibility results is discussed in Sen (1977c, 1979b). constructive analysis. Without going into technicalities of the literature that has emerged, I would like to report that interpersonal comparisons of various types can be fully axiomatized and exactly incorporated in social choice procedures (through the use of "invariance conditions" in a generalized framework, formally constructed as "social welfare functionals," on which see Sen, 1970a, 1977c).'''
But this can only be done in an arbitrary manner. Sen can introduce arbitrary criteria of his own. We can take as axiomatic that Sen likes to eat dog shit. We can construct a metric which ranks Social States on the basis of how closely Sen's diet coincides with the ideal whereby he would only devour steaming turds recently emerged from the backsides of bow wows.
Indeed, interpersonal comparisons need not even be confined to "all-or-none" dichotomies. We may be able to make interpersonal comparisons to some extent, but not in every comparison, nor of every type, nor with tremendous exactness (see Sen, 1970a, c). We may, for example, have no great difficulty in accepting that Emperor Nero's utility gain from the burning of Rome was smaller than the sum-total of the utility loss of all the other Romans who suffered from the fire.
Nero didn't burn Rome though he benefited by it. The problem here is that judgements depend on facts. Sen-tentious shitheads take stupid shit to be facts. If you are wrong de facti, it doesn't matter if you are right de jure.
But this does not require us to feel confident that we can put everyone's utilities in an exact one-to-one correspondence with each other.
We can do so if we want. But the thing will be arbitrary. But this is always the case. Nature is arbitrary. 'Naturality' is a pipe dream.
There may, thus, be room for demanding "partial comparability"—denying both the extremes: full comparability and no comparability at all.
The result will still be arbitrary. Anyone can compare apples and oranges and autumn nights in Istanbul.
The different extents of partial comparability can be given mathematically exact forms (precisely articulating the exact extent of inexactness).'
No. They can be given stupid, arbitrary forms which turn out not to be mathematical at all because there is no well specified set, class or relation.
^ It can also be shown that there may be no general need for terribly refined interpersonal comparisons for arriving at definite social decisions. Quite often, rather limited levels of partial comparability will be adequate for making social decisions.' Thus the empirical exercise need not be as ambitious as it is sometimes feared.
You can just make any old shit up.
But the first question can be addressed more definitively through 'analytical question: how much of a change in the possibility of social choice is brought about by systematic use of interpersonal comparisons?
The thing is always possible but is always arbitrary.
Does Arrow's impossibility, and related results, go away with the use of interpersonal comparisons in social welfare judgments?
No.
The answer briefly is, yes.
But only by a wholly arbitrary, not to say dictatorial, stipulation. The fact remains that nobody in their right mind would ever agree to everything being decided by some crackpot voting scheme or Social Choice mechanism.
The additional informational availability allows sufficient discrimination to escape impossibilities of this type. There is an interesting contrast here. It can be shown that admitting cardinality of utilities without interpersonal comparisons does not change Arrow's impossibility theorem at all, which can be readily extended to cardinal measurability of utilities (see Theorem 8*2 in Sen, 1970a).
This follows from the Szpilrajn extension theorem. But, equally, it arises from the fact that a sequence of farts can represent any mathsy shite whatsoever. It is an easy matter to give numerical values to the smelliness of those farts. Even if everybody agrees about the smelliness, the thing is still wholly arbitrary.
In contrast even ordinal interpersonal comparisons is adequate to break the exact impossibility.
Just as you can 'break' the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine by allowing a Maxwell demon to do inter-molecular comparison of speed and only let through faster moving molecules.
Suppose you could tell what people want and how intensely just by looking at them. They you wouldn't need to talk to them. Indeed, in such a world, there would be no need for markets or language or communication of any kind provided information regarding utility was cheap and ubiquitous. But, if that condition is not fulfilled, then Sen-tentious Social Choice theory is wholly useless. For a start, we'd be able to see who gets most utility from promoting the best Social State. Since this would be common knowledge, you'd have a Dictator who uses only kisses and cooing noises to run things.
We knew of course that with some types of interpersonal comparisons demanded in a full form (including cardinal interpersonal comparability), we can use the classical utilitarian approach.
Just as we knew, of course, that we knew everything then we could do everything it is possible to do.
But it turns out that even weaker forms of comparability would still permit making consistent social welfare judgments, satisfying all of Arrow's requirements, in addition to being sensitive to distributional concerns (even though the possible rules will be confined to a relatively small class).
But it turns out that even if we only know everything that matters we can still do everything that matters.
The Maharsihi claimed he could teach his disciples to levitate. He made billions. Sen's acolytes are equally credulous. But Sen hasn't made billions. By contrast, Amar Bose- an engineering professor a few years older than Sen- became a billionaire through his inventions.
The distributional issue is, in fact, intimately connected with the need to go beyond voting rules as the basis of social welfare judgments.
If you can do interpersonal comparisons then you know exactly the right lump sum to set on each person such that they continue to work as they would otherwise. You could also have lump sum consumption taxes. This means all the consumer and producer surplus is available for redistribution without any 'dead weight' loss to the economy. This would be super cool- right? Sadly, both supply and demand are long run elastic. This means the 'rent' tends to disappear. Redistribution, then, is either just charity or crime by another name.
As was discussed earlier, utilitarianism too is in an important sense distribution indifferent:
Not once diminishing returns was incorporated. Then Utilitarianism was about taxing the rich at a higher rate because their marginal utility from money was less. Sadly, their mobility could be greater. In the end only elasticity matters.
its program is to maximize the sum-total of utilities, no matter how unequally that total may be distributed (the extensive implications of this distributional indifference are discussed in Sen, 1973a).
This discussion was foolish. Progressive income taxes had peaked by then. The other point is that the rich can get more utility by redistribution than the poor. Sadly, the rich started doing interpersonal comparisons between themselves and decided to fuck off to a tax haven so as to have bigger super yachts.
But the use of interpersonal comparisons can take other forms as well, allowing public decisions to be sensitive to inequalities in well-being and opportunities.
Very true. Public decisions can be sensitive to inequalities in well-being caused by being a buddhijivi and thus being forced to talk bollocks incessantly. The solution is obvious. Provide Sen with plenty of tasty treats in the form of steaming dog turds. That's what he likes to eat. At least, that is what he ought to want to eat in a well ordered world.
The broad approach of social welfare functionals opens up the possibility of using many different types of social welfare rules, which differ in the treatment of equity as well as efficiency, and also in their informational requirements.
It opens up the possibility of using many different types of magical rules such that Sen races around shoveling dog turds into his greedy maw.
Further, with the removal of the artificial barrier that had prohibited interpersonal comparisons, many other fields of normative measurement have also been investigated with the axiomatic approach of social welfare analysis.
This stupid bigot has blathered about other issues- generally about a decade after everybody else had stopped doing so because the thing was stupid.
My own efforts in such fields as the evaluation and measurement of inequality (Sen, 1973a, 1992a, 1997b), poverty (Sen, 1976b, 1983b, 1985a, 1992a), distribution-adjusted national income (Sen, 1973b, 1976a, 1979a), and environmental evaluation (Sen, 1995a), have drawn solidly on the broadened informational framework of recent social choice theory.
But they are all useless. Measuring your dick incessantly won't make it bigger. We don't know when inequality or poverty or income distribution has changed. This is because we don't actually know what Income is at any moment. This is because Income is defined as what can be spent without diminishing wealth. But only the future will reveal whether or not wealth diminished. When Winston Churchill took a shilling off Income Tax, he didn't get that he was destroying about half the wealth of his own class. Their Incomes took some time to fall but fall they did. They would have been better off paying much higher taxes rather than having to fight a Second European War which involved the loss of a vast Empire. Partha Dasgupta warned that our Income was actually much less than we thought because of Climate Warming etc. He was probably right. Sen, however, was merely a vast waste of time.
Informational Basis of Interpersonal Comparisons While the analytical issues in incorporating interpersonal comparisons have been, on the whole, well sorted out, there still remains the important practical matter of finding an adequate approach to the empirical discipline of making interpersonal comparisons and then using them in practice.
This 'empirical discipline' is what ordinary people, not Dons, are very good at.
The foremost question to be addressed is this: interpersonal comparison of what?
Utility- that which is useful in advancing an agent's interests.
The formal structures of social welfare functions are not, in any sense, specific to utility comparisons only, and they can incorporate other types of interpersonal comparisons as well.
Very true. We can say 'that dude is smelly' or 'that chick is hot'.
The principal issue is the choice of some accounting of individual advantage, which need not take the form of comparisons of mental states of happiness,
in which case, unconscious behavior can be looked at. Social Welfare Theorists can tell each other to stop breathing in an inefficient manner. Also, they should digest the food in their tummy in a more transparent and socially inclusive fashion.
and could instead focus on some other way of looking at individual wellbeing or freedom or substantive opportunities (seen in the perspective of a corresponding evaluative discipline). The rejection of interpersonal comparisons of utilities in welfare economic and in social choice theory that followed
Pareto, who used the term ophelimity which is closer to 'profit'
positivist criticism (such as that of Robbins, 1938) was firmly based on interpreting them entirely as comparisons of mental states.
The trouble is that these guys were retarded when not totes mental
As it happens, even with such mental state comparisons, the case for unqualified rejection is hard to sustain'
The case for unqualified rejection of this stupidity is impossible to sustain- only if that's the only way you can earn money.
Indeed, as has been forcefully argued by the philosopher Donald Davidson (1986), it is difficult to see how people can understand anything much about other people's minds and feelings, without making some comparisons with their own minds and feelings.
It is difficult to see shit if you are as stupid as shit. It is easy to see that evolution has given social animals some 'theory of mind'. This does not necessarily involve 'comparisons'. On the other hand, maybe we have 'mirror neurons' which cause mimetic activity.
Such comparisons may not be extremely precise, but then again, we know from analytical investigations that very precise interpersonal comparisons may not be needed to make systematic use of interpersonal comparisons in social choice .
We can make comparisons between two wolves or two actuaries or two aliens. This does involve our comparing them to ourselves but rather to the degree to which they display some trait wholly foreign to ourselves.
So the picture is not so pessimistic even in the old home ground of mental state comparisons. But, more importantly, interpersonal comparisons of personal welfare, or of individual advantage, need not be based only on comparisons of mental states. In fact, there may be good ethical grounds for not concentrating too much on mental-State comparisons—whether of pleasures or of desires.
This is foolish. Mental states evolved because they are useful or have survival value. But utility is a Tarskian primitive which can't bottom out in something itself utilitarian.
Utilities may sometimes be very malleable in response to persistent deprivation.
Not to mention death.
A hopeless destitute with much poverty, or a downtrodden laborer living under exploitative economic arrangements, or a subjugated housewife in a society with entrenched gender inequality, or a tyrarmized citizen under brutal authoritarianism, may come to terms with her deprivation.
Just as Sen came to terms with his own uselessness.
She may take whatever pleasure she can from small achievements,
Getting a Nobel for being Brown and as stupid as shit.
and adjust her desires to take note of feasibility (thereby helping the fulfilment of her adjusted desires). But her success in such adjustment would not make her deprivation go away.
Nothing will make Sen's uselessness go away.
The metric of pleasure or desire may sometimes be quite inadequate in reflecting the extent of a person's substantive deprivation.
But nobody is using it. Moreover it doesn't exist. Why talk about it? Is it coz these cunts suffer extreme deprivation of intelligence? No. They got paid to recycle stupid shite because the Academy's Ponzi scheme depended on appearing Holier than Thou.
There may indeed be a case for taking incomes, or commodity bundles, or resources more generally, to be of direct interest in judging a person's advantage, and this may be so for various reasons—^not merely for the mental states they may help to generate.
'Bundles of commodities' forsooth! Why not admit that what matters is MONEY?
In fact, the Difference Principle in Rawls's (1971) theory of "justice as faimess" is based on judging individual advantage in terms of a person's conunand over what Rawls calls "primary goods," which are general-purpose resources that are useful for anyone to have no matter what her exact objectives are.
That's MONEY dude! Why were these cunts pretending they weren't talking about money? Is it coz peeps would have asked 'how much of your own money have you given away?'
This procedure can be improved upon by taking note not only of the ownership of primary goods and resources, but also of interpersonal differences in converting them into the capability to live well.
Sen's big discovery is that very old or very sick peeps can't have as good a time with moolah as a kid on Summer Break.
Indeed, I have tried to argue in favor of judging individual advantage in terms of the respective capabilities, which the person has, to live the way he or she has reason to value.
Why stop there? Why not argue that we should judge individual advantage in terms of the advantage that individuals receive? This holds true even if the person has no reason to value shit coz having such a thing is not itself valuable.
This approach focuses on the substantive freedoms that people have,
sadly, there are no 'substantive freedoms' coz anyone can die at any time.
rather than only on the particular outcomes with which they end up.
like being dead.
For responsible adults, the concentration on freedom rather than only achievement has some merit, and it can provide a general framework for analyzing individual advantage and deprivation in a contemporary society.
No. We don't know who really has freedom- i.e. the ability to resist any curtailment of their current choice menu. Equally, we don't know who actually has the freedom to complete their life plan. Twenty years ago, Rahul looked like he was free to govern India. Modi didn't.
The extent of interpersonal comparisons may only be partial—often based on the intersection of different points of view.
Useless or stupid points of view- sure.
But the use of such partial comparability can make a major difference to the informational basis of reasoned social judgments.
No. Shite you pull out of your arse isn't information.
However, given the nature of the subject and the practical difficulties of informational availability and evaluation, it would be overambitious to be severely exclusive in sticking only to one informational approach, rejecting all others.
A shite subject should not look down its nose on shite pretending to be information.
In the recent literature in applied welfare economics, various ways of making sensible interpersonal comparisons of well-being have emerged. Some have been based on studying expenditure patterns, and using this to surmise about comparative well-being of different persons
Expenditure is related to how much MONEY you can get your hand on. So MONEY is what matters. Why not say so?
I want to emphasize here the more general point that the possibilities of practical welfare economics and social choice have been immensely widened through these innovative, empirical works.
But these possibilities only involved being a virtue signaling cunt. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions had climbed out of poverty because Societies chose to let Social Choice theory go fuck itself.
In fact, despite their differences, they fit in general into the overall pattern of informational widening to which recent analytical work in social choice theory has forcefully pointed. The analytical systems explored in the recent literature on welfare economics and social choice are broader than those in the Arrovian model
Because that model was shit. The fact is, it makes sense to have Planning and Social Choice for reconstruction and catch-up growth because that's just part and parcel of Budgeting and Fiscal Policy. But the thing has no magical power. Fiscal policy has to spend on stuff which ensures that there will be an equal or higher tax yield going forward. That's all that matters.
" They are also analytically general enough to allow different empirical interpretations and to permit alternative informational bases for social choice. The diverse empirical methodologies, considered here, can all be seen in this broader analytical perspective. The movements in "high theory" have been, in this sense, closely linked to the advances in "practical economics." It is the sustained exploration of constructive possibilities—at the analytical as well as practical levels—that has helped to dispel some of the gloom that was associated earlier with social choice and welfare economics.
A quarter of a century after these words were written we see that Sen's shite was a dead man walking. Consider the COVID pandemic. Societies had to make difficult choices- go for lockdown or herd immunity? Did Welfare Econ or Social Choice theory help in any way? No. It was useless. But that had always been the case. If nobody chooses to actually use a Theory of Choice it isn't actually any such thing. It is an availability cascade for the otherwise unemployable.
Did Condorcet or Arrow or Sen or Voting theory have any impact on Welfare Economics or Social Policy? No.
Benthamite utility theory did yield, first an argument for progressive taxes, though- in War time- these prevailed anyway by reason of ability to pay, and, secondly, Pigouvian Welfare Econ of a type which would have arisen anyway simply by the Parliamentary conjunction of Legislative and Fiscal powers.
What was missing from that perspective was an engagement with risk and uncertainty. Still, collective insurance came in because the thing could pay for itself. Non-convexities- i.e. economies of scope and scale- make a way for themselves against the shrill opposition of dogmatic lawyers or economists. Sadly, 'pooling equilibriums' based on 'cheap talk' have a moral hazard problem which the working class understands too well. It is their 'hang 'em, flog 'em' Puritanism which prevails the moment they themselves come within the Income Tax net.
At about the same time that Sen-tentious Pundits were emigrating to the UK, there came the parents of Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak and Badenoch and Kwarteng. The 'uncorrelated asymmetry' of being British and wanting to keep furriners out- even if they iz Whiter than Caspar the friendly sodding ghost- motivates our atavistic woad.
In 1972, a film came out titled 'The Ruling Class'. Peter O'Toole played an aristocratic lunatic who is certified as sane because he presents as a homophobic, British Supremacist only somewhat to the Left of... fuck it, me.
I was Sen's student in 1979. He showed a commendable contempt for the 16 year old that I was then. He was right to run from a guy who had a fucking A level in Econ and was pointing out that the ersatz Don simply didn't know his own subject. But then, he had already 'assimilated' as, not a Curry & Chips Cockney on the make, but the apotheosis of Gunga Din. E'en thus did the Brahmo Buddhijivi render reparation for not being 'Gora'.
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