California Free Press

What the World Needs Now? - More Cooperation or More Competition?

by John Lawrence

When I was a graduate student at UCSD in the midst of the anti-war movement, protesting the war in Vietnam, I went to the library and pondered what would make the world a better place, what could I do to contribute something that might make war less likely and peace time activity more likely. I concluded that more cooperation was needed. More ways to resolve conflicts big and small. For example, democratic voting systems resolve conflicts in such a way that solutions are found that are acceptable to all parties for the most part. I took it for granted that institutions that provided for more cooperation and less competition were more desirable. I thought that this was what the Enlightenment was all about. My heroes were the Enlightenment superstars: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, John Locke.

As I sat there and went through the stacks, I discovered another field and another set of superstars. Social choice has a long history going back to the French Enlightenment philosophers, the Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda, and even further back than that. One of the 19th century superstars in this field was none other than the Rev. C. L. Dodgson otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland. These guys came up with voting systems which are essential to democracy and are essential to the whole notion of cooperation and conflict resolution. The most recent work in this field was by Kenneth Arrow who published a book Social Choice and Individual Values in the 1950s which attempted to generalize conflict resolution in society in both the political and economic spheres. Arrow concluded that this was impossible and came up with his famous Impossibility Theorem which was a generalization using sophisticated mathematics of the paradox of voting that was known to Condorcet hundreds of years ago. Therefore, Arrow concluded democracy was impossible and any economic system other than capitalism was impossible too. Hmmm, I thought, this is obviously a cop-out because some political and economic systems are more desirable than others and Arrow has done nothing except to throw cold water on any framework that could consider these. I took it as my self-assigned task to prove that Arrow was wrong, that social choice is possible. My work can be found on the website Social Choice and Beyond.

My latest work is "Politonomics: A Meta-Theory Encompassing Political and Economic Decision Making." This is from the Abstract:

In “Social Choice and Individual Values,” Kenneth Arrow said , “In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions.” This paper resolves that dichotomy by developing a meta-theory from which can be derived methods for both political and economic decision making. This theory overcomes Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in which he postulates that social choice is impossible and compensates for strategic voting, an undesirable aspect of decision making according to Gibbard and Satterthwaite. Thus the politonomics meta-theory spawns both political and economic systems which are indeed possible and which cannot be gamed. In a typical voting system the outcome of an election among several candidates results in one realized outcome – the winner of the election - which applies to all voters. In a typical economic system, a consumer may choose among a variety of possible baskets of consumer items and work programs with the result that multiple realized outcomes are possible with a unique or quasi-unique outcome for each worker/consumer. As the number of possible realized outcomes of a political-economic decision making process increases, the process becomes more economic and less political in nature and vice versa. We show that as the number of possible realized outcomes increases, voter/consumer/worker satisfaction or utility increases both individually and collectively.

I never considered, as I sat there pondering, that there would be people who would argue that what the world needed was not more cooperation but more competition, but, as I sit here today, I realize that the whole conservative right wing is in favor of just that. They want not more cooperation in either the political or economic realm but more competition believing that only winners should prevail and human progress is only possible when you give free reign to those among us who are the most talented, intelligent and ambitious. They believe that competition will result in the strongest among us winning just as Nietzsche believed that a good war hallows every cause. Their ethic is that the naturally gifted elite should prevail, and they are not concerned about what happens to the rest of us or of who is trampled in the process. This is also the philosophy of Ayn Rand as espoused in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

The debate today about increasing inequality in the world has to do with the prevalent conservative belief that only the strong should survive and be promoted and that freedom should preclude equality as a value. The rich should get more tax breaks because they are the true instigators of human progress and should be catered to at every turn. Perhaps a few crumbs will trickle down to the rest of us. This kind of thinking is counter to the Enlightenment and is fast returning us to a neo-Dark Age. No more is human progress to be measured in reduction of poverty and extension of basic services like health care to everyone. It is to be measured in terms of the great advances to human civilization like iPads, iPods and iPhones. People who are capable of coming up with these advances should be cut every break and none of the billions of dollars they make should be transferred by government to the least of these among us like the homeless, the poverty-stricken and the destitute because, well, they are the least among us, not the best among us who should be given every break.

Nevertheless, I remain in the camp of those who think that more cooperation in the political and economic spheres will do more for human progress than more competititon. I also have spent about 40 years in my spare time trying to prove that Arrow was wrong, that social choice is not impossible and that democracy in both the political and economic spheres is not only possible but desirable. This has a lot to do with voting systems, democratic institutions and constitutions but also with cooperative economic systems in which freedom is seen not as the freedom to make money at other people's expense (the losers in the competitive struggle) but the freedom to work as much or as little as one chooses and in accordance with one's preferences as much as possible. Freedom from work is for many people just as desirable a goal as the freedom to make billions of dollars, and wealthy people who don't have to work would be the first to tell you that. Economic democracy in my view is more desirable than cutthroat capitalism, and can be practiced not only at the national level, but at the enterprise level in the form of co-ops like the Mondragon Corporation.

Marx's famous definition of the "good society" was "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This of course was perverted in defining communism as a society where all the wealth created by those who had a lot of talent and ability as well as a strong work ethic combined with those who had not so much in those categories would be thrown into a pot and then divided up in equal portions and handed out by the government. Such need not be the case in achieving the "good society." The "needs" part is pretty basic and could probably be accomplished with abouit 10% of the wealth that exists in the world today. Most people can provide for their own needs - no transfer necessary. There are some who cannot and to transfer a small part of the wealth of the wealthy to provide for their basic needs seems to me to be no more than humane. That still leaves the vast amount of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. In other words if you total up how much it would cost to provide for all the basic needs of everyone in the world and tote up how much wealth there exists in the world, it would take a fraction of all that wealth to provide the basic needs for everyone who cannot provide for their basic needs themselves who turn out to be mainly children, seniors and handicapped (whether physically or mentally) people.

A recent documentary by German TV station Deutsche Welle pointed out that half the world's production of food is wasted because super markets only want perfect vegetables and ones with slight blemishes are thrown out even though they are perfectly edible. Shelves need to be fully stocked with bread right up till closing hours even though any bread left over at the end of day will be thrown out as "day old." All the food that is thrown out by advanced nations is enough to feed all the world's hungry three times over although no governments or other institutions, much less the supermarkets themselves, seem to be interested in organizing that effort. This is what I mean by the fact that the basic needs of all the world's people could be satisfied without subtracting much if anything from the world's wealthy although a lot of them would admit they do not need incomes of millions of dollars a day like the Fortune 400 billionaires have.

Another documentary noted that Finnish school children have the highest test scores in the world despite the fact that they have one of the world's shortest school days with 15 minutes intermissions between classes during which time they are encouraged to go outdoors and play. All grades have large amounts of music, art and self-defined projects. They don't teach to the test. They are concerned with the development of each student as an overall human being not just as some super competitive cog in a nationally competitive machine. The Chinese on the other hand have the opposite approach demanding that children learn by rote methods and extra hours in school and at study. The Finnish schools are all public and everyone is accepted into every class. There are no advanced classes or tracking of students into lesser classes if they are not among the elite intellectually. Everyone is thrown in together; yet they have the best outcomes of any country in the world on standardized international tests. Egalitariansim seems to gain the best results.

An egalitarian ethic in which the concern is for the development of the whole human being rather than a promotion of just those who have superior abilities in accordance with a competitive ethic seems to me to be the most humanitarian way to treat both children and adults. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights already provides for most of the "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" ethic. It calls for free health care which most advanced socierties, with the exception of the United States, already provide. It calls for free education and other public institutions and covers most basic human needs including food and shelter.

Here are Articles 25 and 26:

Article 25.

• (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
• (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

• (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
• (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
• (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

All the basic needs of everyone on the planet could be provided for without subtracting much of the wealth of the rich since most people can provide for at least their basic needs without any transfer of wealth whatsover being necessary. Interestingly, the US among other nations does provide food security for the poor through its food stamps program. And of course seniors are provided for through Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, programs which conservative free marketers are anxious to change or eliminate.

I am with the Enlightenment thinkers especially the English utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who thought about the happiness of society as a whole and concluded that everyone counted, not only the ones with exceptional talent, ability and other admirable qualities. A society should be judged by how it treats "the least of these my brethren" which is the core and essence of Jesus' teachings but, sad to say, not the core and essence of Christianity as it exists in the world today. Perhaps we should start thinking about an alternative constitution for the US which has the world's oldest constitution (236 years old!) while being the world's youngest advanced nation. Other societies including most European societies while being older than the US have newer constitutions. As far-sighted as the Founding Fathers were, a new and updated constitution incorporating not only political but also economic rights along the lines of the UN Declaration of Human Rights would do much to right the wrongs and shortcomings of present day America and the world.

The Future Commonwealth

by John Lawrence

I stumbled on a book a long time ago at a used book store with the title, "The Quest for Utopia," by Glen Negley and J. Max Patrick, copyright 1952. The subtitle was "An Anthology of Imaginary Societies." It is basically a collection of wrtings by nineteenth century utopists describing societies which they believe might exist some time in the future. A lot of these descriptions are fanciful and based on notions which, in my opinion, are pretty far-fetched like the notion that all human beings are basically good people and that they will all behave properly given the right conditions. I don't believe that any society predicated on the fact that good behavior will somehow be universally achieved is realistic.

Other utopias, however, are not only realistic but contain germs of ideas which could be manifested in reality. Some of these ideas have in fact already been implemented. Such a one is "The Future Commonwealth" by Albert Chavannes (1836-1903), a Swiss immigrant to the US. Chavannes became a successful businessman and devoted his last years to writing. In 1894 he established a lumber company in Knoxville, Tennessee of which his grandson became owner. The grandson, Edward Chavannes, also became Mayor of Knoxville. Albert wrote "The Future Commonwealth" in 1892. What is interesting about this tract is not that it is an all encompassing description of a society which could be implemented in toto, but that it contains many good ideas which could be implemented in any society and some that have already been implemented in certain societies.

Chavannes was in the tradition of the English utilitarians and believed that whatever promoted the general welfare would also promote personal happiness. Contrast this with the current prevailing notion in the US today that whatever promotes individual freedom promotes the general welfare - just the opposite. Chavannes writes, "We consider the distribution of products the most important question, and that its correct solution offers the best prospect of increasing human happiness. The rich have more than they can enjoy, while the poor have less. We made our new Commonwealth the great Capitalist, and thus prevented the undue accumulation of wealth in private hands.

"There is the whole secret of it. Cooperation on a large scale, not practised by a few, for the advantage of a few, as it exists among you, but carried by the Commonwealth, for the advantage of the whole population, for the rich as well as for the poor, for the women as well as for the men."

Chavannes goes on to say that his utopia is not "simply a Socialistic settlement, where the state controls everything" and is not antithetical to the "free and independent citizens " of the US. He reassures the reader that his utopia has not abridged personal freedom.

"We ... have entrusted the Commonwealth with the accumulation and use of a portion of our capital for the benefit of the people, while you only entrust your government with the spending of such capital as you raise by unequal taxation, or by borrowing from the wealthy class, thus increasing the burdens of the producers by compelling them to pay interest on the money your government spends."

Here Chavannes has put his finger on the difference between the US model and the models of many other countries of the world. The US government is run on debt or taxation instead of on the principle of capital generation and accumulation. Other countries such as Norway, for example, have Sovereign Wealth Funds which generate capital which is then distributed to the people in the form of old age pensions. Norway's government takes 50% of the monies derived from its natural resources, oil, for example, and uses it on behalf of its citizens to offset taxes and to supply social benefits such as social security. The US gives away its natural resources to private corporations which then accrue all the profits for themselves. The US then has to borrow money from other nations' Sovereign Wealth Funds and has become the world's largest debtor nation. The only way the US can pay its own way is to raise taxes which it has an aversion to doing. So while other countries accumulate wealth which not only provides for social programs but is also used to offset taxes, the US neither accumulates wealth as a nation nor raises taxes thereby going increasingly into debt.

Tom Friedman on Meet the Press, Sunday March 14 contrasted the efficiency of the Chinese government with the American:

Tom Friedman thinks Democracy is becoming a hindrance.

The media is wringing it’s hands over the political climate. It’s always sunny when Democrats get their way. The forecast is for stormy weather. All this opposition and people in the street, it’s not a good thing.

Tom Friedman was on Meet the Press today with Tom Brokaw and David Brooks. He thinks we’d be better off if we were more like the Chinese government.

Brokaw: Tom, are we at a kind of turning point in America in terms of being able to make this a functioning country again or are we dysfunctional?

Friedman: This is what worries me that I’ve been saying for a while there is only one thing worse than one party autocracy, the Chinese form of government, and that’s one party democracy. In china if the leadership can get around to an enlightened decision, it can order it from the top down. Here, when you have one party democracy, one party ruling, basically and the other party basically saying “no”, every solution is suboptimal. When your chief competitor can produce optimal and you can only produce suboptimal! Because what happens whether it’s health care or the energy bill, votes 1 through 50 cost a lot; votes 50 to 59 cost you a fortune and 60, his name is Ben Nelson. By the time you made those compromises you wind up with the description out of the health care bill, which is this Rube Goldberg contraption, I hope it passes but I can’t tell you I think it’s optimal.

It’s so much easier to get things done when there’s no opposition, no one to say “no”. Of course to achieve that you have to round up and imprison or kill dissidents and impose censorship. As long as something optimal comes out of it once in awhile, say universal health care, it’s well worth it or so the thinking goes in some circles. History is well acquainted with optimal solutions from unopposed governments.

So even Tom Friedman, the arch proponent of globalism, thinks the Chinese model is winning out over the American model, and he didn't even mention the fact that China has a Sovereign Wealth Fund that is accumulating monies as the American government pays interest on its debt owed largely to China.

Chavannes had the difference between the "socialist" economies of western Europe and the laissez-faire capitalism of the US pegged. On the one hand the socialist governments are in the business of accumulating monies which can then offset both taxes and social programs. On the other the US government is in the business of beggaring itself because it gives away profitable revenue sources to private interests.

Chavannes goes on:

"Whatever costs money to maintain, as the streets and the parks, the police and the fire departmen, etc., is placed in the hands of the government, and the people are taxed for its support, while those enterprises which offer oppoprtunities to make money, as the supply of light and water, the life and fire insurance companies, are allowed to fall into the hands of corporations and individuals. We are so far Socialists as to keep in the possession of the people many valuable privileges which you give away to men who use them for private benefit."

Chavannes goes on to outline the various profitable enterprises that the government controls , but makes clear that there is still plenty of room for private enterprise to flourish. The point here is that not only is the government well funded in order to provide the things that private enterprise won't like maintaining and improving infrastructure, but does so without taxing the people so low taxes,  improved infrastructure and social benefits go hand in hand.

Chavannes also makes a major point about apprenticeship programs in his utopia which is a subject we will go into on a future post.

Employee Cooperative Shift Choice

I have blogged before about employee shift bidding which has been used by hospitals to schedule shifts for nurses. This gives the nurses some choice over their preferred shifts and pay levels. Employees would usually be able to get a higher pay rate for working less desirable shifts such as the graveyard shift. Employees who want the more desirable shifts would usually have to work for less. From the hospital's viewpoint, they can choose the nurse with the lowest bid for any particular shift thus minimizing their total budget.

What I am proposing here is a cooperative shift choice arrangement which would be appropriate for a worker's cooperative such as the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. In this situation the goal would not be to minimize total workers' pay as it would be in a for profit corporation. The overall budget for worker/owners would be set by some procedure such as negotiations between management and labor. Then subject to the overall constraint, workers would input their preferences as to shift choice and pay level. A computer program (or algorithm) would then seek to maximize worker satisfaction within the overall budgetary constraint. A detailed paper, "Algorithm for Employment Cooperative Shift Choice," can be found here.

This process goes beyond shift bidding or mere first come, first served scheduling. In addition to shift choices and pay levels, other parameters could be taken into account such as job location and work assignment assuming that the employee is qualified for more than one kind of work. More flexible time commitments than fixed shifts could also be considered. There is no reason why an employee couldn't work a certain number of hours on a particular day in a time slot of his or her own preference and a different number on another day in a different time slot as long as the need for employee coverage of shifts was met. This might be considered a secondary constraint.

In general a society or entities within a society which give individuals as much choice as possible over their work/pay schedules would tend to maximize employee and worker satisfaction. I have called this preferensism. It is based on utilitarianism which seeks to maximizes societal satisfaction or happiness. Recently, there has been much interest in basing a society on Gross National Happiness rather than GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Consumer choice can also be taken into account in terms of what is produced or stocked. Computerized consumer choice is already widely available, but there is no direct link between consumer choice and what is produced. "Just-in-time" production scheduling tends to make production a function of consumer choice, but consumers are generally "pushed" into consuming by advertising rather than producers being pushed by consumers  so that only that which is really needed gets produced.

Application of Range-Approval Voting to Shift Bidding

Range-Approval Hybrid Voting has been previously discussed . It could be applied to more than just political voting scenarios e.g. to shift bidding . Shift bidding is something that is already happening in hospitals today. The way it works is nurses go to their computers and specify the hourly amounts they would be willing to work for based on the particular day and the shift. Obviously the midnight shift is less desirable so nurses will probably bid a higher amount to work it than for a daytime shift. Then the hospital takes the bids and minimizes its labor costs making sure all shifts are covered. So if Nurse A bid $40 an hour for Thursday's midnight shift and Nurse B bid $30. an hour, the hospital would take Nurse B's bid.

Notice that this system works to the advantage of the hospital in that it minimizes labor costs, but it also works to the advantage of the nurses in that it allows them to pick and choose the slots that work for them and probably results in nurses who work less desirable shifts making more money. A refinement would be to allow the nurse to specify the maximum number of shifts she is willing to work in any given time period.

However, shift bidding does not maximize individual or social utility among the nurses. Visualize a system in which the nurses rate each shift and hourly pay rate according to its utility to them and the hospital tries to maximize social utility among the nurses. So each nurse would specify a series of hourly amounts and utility ratings for each shift. Range-Approval Hybrid Voting could be used which guarantees (I think) that each nurse could rate each shift according to its utility to her without fear of manipulation  (even with prior knowledge of other's proclivities)  or voting system anomalies and the hospital assigns shifts in such a way as to maximize social utility. This system would be subject to the restriction of an overall budget set by the hospital which would restrain the pay rates specified by the nurses. So a nurse who assigned a high utility to an outlandish pay rate would probably not be considered for that particular shift.

This would seem to me to be a great improvement over shift bidding for the nurses and also for the hospital in that it would set an overall budget whereas with shift bidding the hospital's budget would be variable and subject to manipulation because the hospital would have to make sure that all shifts were adequately covered regardless of labor costs.

A Districtless Congress

The US is divided up into political districts. Each voter gets to vote for one member of the House of Representatives and two members of the Senate in this bicameral national assembly. There are 435 voting members of the House so there are 435 congressional districts. The member from your district supposedly represents your interests, but none of the others do. In the Senate the political districts are the states. There are 100 senators, two from each state. The two senators from your state supposedly represent your interests but none of the other 98 do. So 1/435 or 0.22% of the members of the house represent your interests, and 2/100 or 2% of the members of the senate represent your interests.

This is a pathetic situation, and it's even worse if you did not vote for any of the congressman or senators who supposedly represent you. Say you're a Democrat and the congressman elected from your district (whom you didn't vote for) is a Republican. Then arguably you have no representation at all in the House. The same could be said of the Senate if you didn't vote for either of the senators who actually got elected. In other countries where they use other methods for making up the national assembly or congress like, for example, proportional representation, the percentage of the members representing each voter's interests is much higher. For example, if 28% of the electorate (including you) voted for the Green Party, then 28% of the seats in the national assembly would be Green Party members.

In a districtless congress each voter would vote for each representative, and each representaive would represent the interests of all voters. For example, if there are 300 seats in the congress and 500 candidates running for those seats there would be 500!/(300!)(200!) possible congresses or ways that this congress could be made up. In theory each voter could list each possible congress in order of his/her preferences, and then all the voters' specifications could be amalgamated to get the one congress that best represented the electorate as a whole. The problem is that it would be impractical for each voter to study the qualifications of each candidate and then come up with a list of all possible congresses. It would be too much work. However, there are ways to expedite this process as explained in more detail here. If each voter just listed the candidates (instead of the congresses) in order of preference, this list could be translated by software into an ordered list of congresses. Furthermore, the list of candidates could be simplified by using the recommend- ations of the voter's political party or other trusted experts in part or in whole. A customized list could be generated by taking eclectic recommend- ations cafeteria style. Or there could be different lists available to the voter depending on the voter's profile related to his/her political objectives. A simple questionnaire given to the voter could generate a list according to the voter's predilections. There are a lot of different ways any particular voter's list could be generated with the voter having complete control and the final say.

One way of amalgamating the list information is by range voting. Using this method each possible congress would be given a numerical rating, and the ratings for each congress would be added up over all the individual voters to determine the winner - the one with the highest overall social rating. There is no need to rank the possible congresses in order over the entire electorate since only the top rated one would be chosen. Therefore, Kenneth Arrow's model for social choice and his impossibility results as presented in Social Choice and Individual Values are invalid.  In fact Arrow's model which calls for a full social ranking doesn't apply to most political as well as most economic situations. The only thing it seems to apply to is combining judges' rankings in Olympic figure skating where it is important to know not only first place but also second and third. In political and economic situations it's necessary only to know the top rated or first place result.

Fractal Voting

Fractal Voting (FV) is a voting method I developed. It is one of a class of utilitarian methods similar to range voting (RV) in some respects. Other utilitarian methods are approval voting (AV) and Evaluative Voting (EV). RV, AV and EV are all special cases of FV. Utilitarian voting methods involve a ranking of candidates or alternatives from most preferred to least preferred. In general there are two types of rankings: ordinal and cardinal. Ordinal ranking involves a list such as ABCD where the position of the letter, for example, indicates its preference ranking in this case A is preferred to B is preferred to C etc. Cardinal ranking also indicates how much A is preferred to B and how much B is preferred to C etc. This "how much" is also referred to as preference intensity. With utilitarian methods  numbers are usually asssigned to the candidates and the differences between the numerical rankings of two candidates indicate the preference intensity. One of the differences between FV and RV is that voters don't assign numbers to the candidates but indicate  preference intensities graphically.

Fractal Voting consists of a graphical user interface (GUI) or we could call it a graphical voter (GVI) interface (we will use the terms voter and user interchangably) and underlying software which translates the voter's preferences into numerical values which can then be used to sum up the votes for  each candidate and  determine the winner. Range Voting involves a system defined scale such as 0-99, 0-9 etc. The voter assigns a number contained in this scale to each candidate, and then the numbers are summed for each candidate to determine the winner. With Fractal the voter determines the scale and the scale can be more finely determined or less finely determined in different segments as the voter wishes. For example, if the voter wants to differentiate among candidates near the top of the scale more finely, he or she can subdivide that portion of the scale more finely in order to make these distinctions. The fineness of the scale is called the sensitivity level.  The sensitivity level, in general, will differ for each voter depending on how finely a voter can distinguish between two candidates or alternatives. This concept can be generalized to include fine distinctions between tastes or smells for example. A person might be asked to distinguish and rank several wines. Some people would be able to distinguish them very finely and others would only be able to make rough distinctions, say between good and bad. With RV, the system defines the sensitivity level which is the same for all voters. RV with a scale 0-99 has a higher sensitivity level than RV with a scale 0-9 and allows finer distinctions among candidates to be made. For example, candidates A and B might each be given ratings of 5 with RV (0-9) but given ratings of 51 and 57 with range (0-99). So finer distinctions can be made the more levels are available. 

With Fractal, the user or voter has complete control over the sensitivity which is variable over the whole scale. For instance, at the beginning of the voting process, the first thing a voter would do is to choose the number of levels he or she would like to start out with. This might be just two - good and bad. So there would be two "buckets" if you will, the good bucket and the bad bucket. All candidates in the good bucket would be indistinguishable from or indifferent to each other. However, before choosing the number of levels or buckets, the voter would first choose their most preferred or favorite candidate or candidates and least preferred candidate or candidates. Then all others would be relative to those. So initially a screen would be presented to the voters with two buckets - one for most preferred and one for least preferred. The voter would drag appropriate candidates onto these buckets from a list arbitrarily located on the right side of the screen. Then the voter would choose how many buckets or levels to start with. Please note that, if the voter chose 100 buckets and didn't go any deeper or finer than that in terms of sensitivity level, the voting method would be the same as RV. After the initial choice of number of buckets, that number of buckets appears on the screen as well as the buckets at either end denoting most preferred and least preferred. Now the voter drags other candidates from the list onto the buckets. Then the voter has the option of clicking on any one of the buckets and further subdividing this segment of the  scale. Let's say that the voter started with 10 buckets, and, in all but one bucket, there is only one candidate. In one bucket there are 4 candidates. The voter may choose to click on that bucket and then choose to subdivide that bucket alone into, for instance, 4 finer levels. These buckets then appear on the screen along with the list of the candidates who were in the original bucket. The voter then drags candidates from this list onto one of the buckets that represent subdividions of the original bucket. This process can be repeated indefinitely leading to finer and finer distinctions. When the voter is satisfied he or she can terminate the process and submit his or her vote.

The final vote can be printed out as a paper ballot showing an overall scale subdivided as the voter has indicated and all candidates listed in order of preference, preference intensity and fineness of distinction or sensitivity. The underlying software can be implemented in terms of a push down stack where the first word in the stack contains the number of words in the stack. Initially, this would be 2 for most preferred and least preferred. These words might contain the numbers 1 and 0, respectively. As the voter adds levels or buckets, words are added to the stack.  The stack would be popped up to the level where the voter indicates that he or she wishes to add levels, and then the number of levels added that the voter has indicated. For instance, if the voter initially wants to order candidates just in terms of good and bad (a binary decision), two words would be added to the stack between the words corresponding to least preferred and most preferred. One might contain the number 1/4 (corresponding to the mid-point of the "bad" bucket) and one might contain 3/4 (corresponding to the mid-point of the "good" bucket). Continuing on in this way, the buckets are each defined in terms of a numerical value in a process that is totally transparent to the voter who just has to deal with a simple GUI and repeat the same process over and over to as many levels as he or she wishes. Then each candidate is associated with a pointer that points to the appropriate numerical value in the stack.

Since the process is the same for the voter no matter how deeply he wishes to proceed in terms of sensitivity level, we call this method Fractal Voting. Think of it as branches on a tree some of which are subdivided into smaller branches which are further subdivided and so on. At each stage the voter performs the same steps so the process is simple and intuitive for the voter.  This is the essence of the fractal process: no matter what the depth, the procedure is the same. At completion each candidate will be asssociated with a pointer which represents his numerical rank. The pointer will point to a word in the stack which will contain a value between 0 and 1 which represents the intensity  of that rank. Note that, unlike RV, the voter never has to assign numerical values to candidates making the provess simpler and more intuitive akin to punching a hole on a ballot or putting a check mark next to a candidate. When all voters have submitted their ballots, the numerical values associated with each candidate are summed and the one(s) with the highest value win(s).

The advantages of Fractal over Range are the following:

1) There are no "partial strength" votes. A partial strength vote is submitted in Range when a voter does not pin his most (least) preferred candidates to the limits of the range.

2) The voter has a simpler and more intuitive while at the same time more sophisticated interface which allows him or her more options in the voting procedure.

3) The voter can choose his or her own sensitivity level and can continue to refine this as the voting process continues.

4) The voter can go into detail selectively in those parts of the overall ranking that concern him or her while doing a rough ranking in other parts of the overall scale.

5) The voter need not be concerned with numbers at all, but only with a visual on-screen representation of the preference rankings and intensities.

Fractal Voting lends itself to delegable proxies since various parts of the tree could be designated and filled in by trusted parties who have pre-voted and whose results are only a mouse click away. For instance, the voter could select certain candidates, indicate he wished to make a proxy vote and then select Ted Kennedy from a list of proxies. Then these candidates would be added to the screen in exactly the way that Ted Kennedy had previously indicated he would vote. This method would lend itself either to touch screen or computer screen voting. Security of the vote could be guaranteed by different methods, but this is really a separate issue. Issuance of a paper ballot and receipt would be a start.

In summary Fractal Voting is a generalization of AV, EV and RV and a voter could choose to vote in any of these styles if so desired. It is a utilitarian voting method since the placing of each candidate on a line in order of preference ranking and intensity reveals the voter's utility for each candidate in some sense. Social utility could be measured for each candidate by simply adding up the numerical values asssociated with that candidate in the stack over all voters. This would not represent a social utility in an absolute sense but in a relative sense. The voter is allowed to make either fine or rough distinctions among the candidates according to his or her sensitivity levels and/or knowledge of the candidates, and also to rely on the advice of trusted experts who have studied the issues and/or candidates more closely. Both the GUI and the underlying software are easily implemented.

Utopian Vision: Citizen Contractors Replace Corporations, Unions

Modern societal organization is composed of large scale institutions such as corporations and unions. The problem is that large corporations dominate the private economy sucking profits while minimizing labor costs. In other words their aim is to pay the people working for them as little as possible while enriching a few at the top. Hence you have outsourcing, hiring of illegals and obscene CEO pay among other maladies. Likewise, government workers are mainly unionized resulting in huge pension and health care costs and inefficient work performance since unions protect their workers from being fired regardless of their performance. This has put a stranglehold on many municipal governments which would be better off contracting out the work and firing city employees. The only problem is that the work would be contracted out to large corporations who would replace good paying jobs with low paid workers taking the difference in profits. What is the solution to this syndrome?

The idea is to set things up so that society serves and empowers the individual worker/citizen. The laws regarding corporations need to be changed. They should no longer be given the rights of personhood as they now are. The employer-employee relationship, which is basically a master- servant relationship, needs to be changed. Corporations, most  of which are now publicly owned via stock, should be set up in such a way that stock ownership is extended to all members of society and not just a select few. The corporation would still be publicly owned except now it would be owned by all members of the public and not just those who had the money to invest in stock, in other words not by just the investor class. Each citizen would have the rights of a contractor and not just the right to be hired as an employee. That means that various entities, government and corporate, would contract with citizens in such a way that the citizen and not the entity is empowered. Rating systems which monitor the citizen/contractor's performance would allow high performers to negotiate from a stronger position. Low performers would have an incentive to improve or else face the prospect of lower pay for their efforts.

Government would function in such  a way as to provide a giant  job search matching citizen/contractors to various openings that meet their requests for location, hours, working conditions, full or part time etc. Corporate power would be diminished to the individual level.  Corporate ownership would be society wide. Union membership would be society wide. That is each citizen (and not just a few union members) would benefit from union membership. A union member would be basically just a  citizen. For  example, unions ususally negotiate with corporations for health care benefits.  If health care is society wide such as in a universal health care system, then there is no need for a variety of unions to negotiate this benefit just for their members. In a democracy all the citizens should be able to vote for benefits that would apply to all members of society and not just to union members. By the same token, unions would not be in a position to protect "deadwood," non or low performing workers.  This would be reflected in each worker's job performance rating as an individual and in subsequent contracts. High performers would be able to command and  negotiate more money for the same contract than low performers. 

Small business enterprises could be started by individuals or groups and be privately owned. Once they reached a certain size, they would have to go public much as they "go public" today after they reach a  certain size.  The only difference would be that public ownership would be  extended to all members of  society. The  original owners of the business could be "bought out" by society mush as they are bought out today by the infusion of cash from an initial public offering (IPO).  So the essentials of entrepreneurship would  remain the same. The difference would be that corporations as entities in themselves would be disempowered and individuals would be empowered. Government and the corporate world would function in much the  same way in their relationships with individual workers. Government inefficiency is eliminated  by virtue of the fact that individual workers who didn't perform well would not be considered as seriously in the next round of contracts. There would be no need for firing someone. They just might not be given a subsequent contract or they wouldn't be given it on such favorable terms. However, non performance of a contract would be handled much the same as it is today. Managerial pay including that for CEOs need not be substantially higher than that for any other kind of work. Those qualified for any particular type of work would be taken into consideration for any openings. Their performance rating from previous contracts would be taken into account, and then the best person or persons would be chosen in such a way as to provide society with the best quality and quantity output for the monies expended in pay.

Just as huge amounts of money and power should be taken away from corporate management and ownership, the same should apply to government. Lobbying should be outlawed. Influence peddling should be eliminated. The revolving door between government and corporations should be  restricted. Political advertising should be curtailed.  It is by these means that relatively small groups of individuals seek to dominate the entire society for their own benefit and to the detriment of the vast majority. Their attempts at concentrating power and financial benefits in the hands of a relative few is something that should be severely restrained. Society should be self regulating and self organizing in such a way that each citizen has roughly the same power. Power and financial benefits need not be exactly the same for each individual; there can be a range of outcomes dependent on each individual's ability and performance, but no one individual or group should be able to dominate the entire society either politically or economically.

Preferensism is a philosphy of societal organization which accomplishes most of what is desirable in terms of the dispersion and distribution of power among all individual citizen voter/contractors. It enables the self organization and self regulation of society by providing a mechanism for linking financial rewards to quantity and quality of work performed. It empowers the individual by expanding the scope of available jobs, by providing a giant database of work available under a variety of working conditions. This is all integrated in such a way that all the desired work gets done as efficiently as possible. The individual is empowered. Equality of input to the system is guaranteed; equality of outcome is not. Dominant submissive work relationships such as employer-employee relationships are eliminated.

Range Voting

A little known or discussed fact of life in the US is that, while we are a younger nation than most European countries, our constitution and our voting system is older than any of theirs. Why? Because they have updated their constitutions and/or voting systems while ours have remained static since their inception over 200 years ago. While other countries have taken the pragmatic view that upgrading (taking into account advances in voting theory) might be a good idea, our voting system along with all other aspects of our constitution (not to mention our economic system) might as well have been set in stone. To even question their continued validity or possible improvement is considered by some to be unpatriotic.

Our voting system is called plurality voting. This means that only one candidate out of however many are running for office is chosen by each individual voter, and then the votes are tallied and the one with the most votes wins providing he or she has a sizable enough percentage of the total votes cast. Otherwise there's a runoff. The literature is full of the pitfalls of this method of voting. Suffice it to say it practically eliminates more than two parties. Another disadvantage of our political system is that the US is divided up into districts with each district returning one representative to the bicameral House while each state returns two Senators to the Senate. So each voter is represented in Congress by only three people: one member of the House and two Senators. That's a very small proportion of the total number of lawmakers when you consider that there are 435 Congressmen and women in the House and 100 Senators. 3 out of 535? 0.5%? How does that make you feel, voters, to know that less than 1% of the lawmakers in Washington represent you or that you had anything to do with electing them? In addition there are the problems of the Electoral College (the President is not elected by a direct vote of the public) and gerrymandering which is an artificial way of dividing up political districts in such a way that favors one party or another. Of course, the party in power gets to do this in order to guarantee itself as many seats in perpetuity as possible. A more sensible way to choose a President is by a majority of all the votes cast eliminating the Electoral College altogether, and a more sensible way of choosing legislators would be a system in which each voters gets a chance to vote for more than three legislators.  

Fortunately, voting theorists have not been inactive. There are at least three methods which promise to be an improvement over the current state of affairs vying for the hearts and minds of the public - at least some members of the public, the cognoscenti, who have bothered to consider such things: range voting (RV - not to be confused with those behemoth gas guzzlers), instant runoff voting (IRV) and approval voting (AV). Each method has its supporters, defenders, detractors, protagonists, antagonists and critics. Approval voting is simple enough. Instead of voting for one out of however many candidates are running, you vote for all the  candidates you approve of. Instead of marking the ballot once in each race, you mark it multiple times. Obviously, it wouldn't make sense to mark it for every candidate who is running although I'm sure there are many who would. IRV is more complicated, but you can Google it and find out more than you really wanted to know. That leaves range voting.

You are already familiar with it as this is the method used to score Olympic athletes. You would rate each candidate on a scale from 1 to 10 or 0 to 20 or -99 to +99. The actual limits to the range are somewhat arbitrary as long as each voter can assign ratings over the same range. Then you tote up the score for each candidate and the one with the most points wins. Or you can take the average and the one with the highest average wins. There is one refinement, however, with reference to the above linked website. You do not have to actually vote for each candidate. If there are 100 running and you actually rate only 50 filling in an X for the remaining fifty, then the average is computed by dividing the total (over all voters) votes cast for a candidate divided by the sum of all the voters who actually cast a vote for that candidate (Xs excluded). A candidate needs a quorum of votes to win where a quorum is defined as half the total points of the highest point getter. So, theoretically, a candidate with half the total points of the highest total point getter could win the election if sufficiently few voters actually voted for him or her while sufficiently many voters put down an X for him or her. This seems to introduce a certain amount of arbitrariness to the method, but, obviously, something would have to be done to prevent a candidate whom only a handful of voters voted for (all presumably giving him the highest score) from winning. An alternative way of handling this situation would be to just use total point scores forcing each voter to make a decision regarding each candidate. For candidates unfamiliar to any particular voter, that voter could use a proxy rating. A proxy rating would be provided by an expert of the voter's own political persuasion or someone trusted by the voter who is familiar with the candidate. It could be a rating provided by the voter's political party. Without having done an extensive analysis, this seems somewhat less arbitrary to me. 

Donald Saari is a proponent of the Borda count. Steven Brams is a proponent of Approval Voting and Warren D Smith is a proponent of Range Voting. I also independently came up with a version of range voting which I called the Lawrence Count. Due to the serendipity of the internet, someone perusing my website, Social Choice and Beyond, brought to my attention that, unbeknownst to me at the time, there exists a major website promoting and expounding on a similar voting method. Thus are like-minded people all over the world brought into contact with one another thanks to the world wide web! This is truly amazing! As I said on my webpage: "The Lawrence Count is a modified Borda Count which seems so obvious that maybe someone has already discovered it. If so, I relinquish the name and any claim to being its progenitor." So I will change my webpage to indicate that I'm no longer pretentious enough to name something after myself especially if someone else has already discovered it. By the way Warren D Smith doesn't claim to have discovered it either so  I guess it was too obvious for anyone to have discovered it, and Smith claims that actually the ants and honey bees discovered it.

The three gentlemen named above go round and round trying to prove that their method is the best and showing the pitfalls of all the others. My opinion is that approval voting is a step above plurality voting but is too simple to take into account the range of expression a voter may wish to demonstrate. It's as if Olympic ice skaters were either approved or disapproved by the judges and then their scores computed. Would you be satisfied with that? The Borda count is too rigid. It has the anomaly that, if one candidate drops out of the race, point values must be reassigned with the result that someone could win who previously was ranked last. Range Voting, in my opinion, is a modified Borda count in that the underlying grid remains constant whether or not candidates enter or drop out of the election. Point values remain the same except for some strategic considerations which, again in my opinion, the voter has a right to take into consideration. There is maximum expressivenesss in that the voter not only gets to rank the candidates but also gets to indicate to an extent how much he or she favors one over another. If each voter gives his or her most favored candidate the highest possible score and his least favored the lowest posssible, then he or she will be getting the most strategic value out of his or her vote. If there is one candidate who is so horrible compared to all the others in the mind of a particular voter, it would not only be honest but strategically advantageous to give the horrible candidate a zero and all others the highest possible rating. Likewise, if there is one candidate who is far and away the most superior compared to the other candidates, it would be honest and strategic to give that candidate the highest rating and all others a zero. Another point is that the point spread from lowest to highest score (say 1 to 99) need only be as great as the sensitivity of the most sensitive voter where sensitivity is defined as the most perceptive voter's ability to make a one point distinction between two candidates. Presumably some voter would be able to rate some candidate in a meaningful way as a 53 and another as a 54, for example.

One reason for the lack of agreement regarding voting methods is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem which states in general terms that there is no democratic voting system which obeys certain rational and ethical criteria. This has given rise to the field of social choice theory. Not everyone would agree with Arrow's choice of rational and ethical criteria but, be that as it may, in over 60 years no one has been able to show that Arrow didn't know what he was talking about. So even if in some sense democratic voting systems are impossible, elections are still held and some voting methods are definitely better than others, and, even though there is no general agreement, there is still hope that we will be able to do better in the future than we have done in the past. Hope springs eternal!

Choice

A recent book, The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, argues that, as choices proliferate, people are less satisfied overall. He says that we would be better off and more satisfied if we had fewer choices. I think his analysis is fairly shallow and he misses the mark. A lot of the book is "filler" which one has come to expect from a best seller. This book claims to have been a "Business Week Top Ten Book of the Year." His book is long on pseudo-psychological psycho-babble and short on the analysis of social conditions such as advertising which distort the whole process of choosing and turn many choices into phony or false choices which benefit only the seller, not really the consumer.

A social system such as preferensism which is an outgrowth of social choice is predicated on the assumption that increased freedom is associated with increased choices, and, I would argue, that increased choices are increasingly satisfying provided that the choices are real and not distorted by advertising. In addition, there are methods and techniques (hardly mentioned by Barry Schwartz) for dealing with what might seem like a bewidering array of choices. For example, before I purchase a CD, I read reviews (hopefully more than one) to see what the critics have to say about the music. I know from experience that I'm particularly interested in only one genre of music so that eliminates a large number of choices that I don't even have to consider right there. Consumer Reports as well as a number of online services such as epinions rate and rank different products, and there are price comparison wesites such as shopping.com that do price comparisons.

Therefore, I feel there are intelligent ways of making a decision as to which product or service one wishes to consume which make the process rewarding if not enjoyable. The only depressing thing to me is having my programming interrupted by TV and radio advertising. That, not the number of choices available, is what is truly depressing. Schwartz walks into a store and notes that there are "285 varieties of cookies," "40 options for toothpaste" etc. Unfortunately, he never gets beyond a rather psychological analysis as to why there are such a bewildering number of options and are any of the options any good? I have been on a quest to find plain white toothpaste like used to be on store shelves when each manufacturer was represented by only one variety of toothpaste. Although there are 40 varieties of toothpaste, I have not been able to locate on the store shelves just plain white toothpaste. The question is why? I think the answer has to do with (of all things) the marketing clout of the large toothpaste producing corporations. Crest and Colgate are the two largest and they have the most varieties of toothpaste taking up the most shelf space real estate in the supermarket. Inside the boxes, which tout the different varieties, the toothpaste is remarkably similar. For the most part it is all an aqua color which leads me to believe that the only significant difference among the different varieties is the packaging.

Now the supermarket will not devote a large amount of shelf space to just one variety of toothpaste. For a company to dominate the supermarket shelves, they have to produce what seemingly is a large number of different kinds of toothpaste. The only problem is they're not really all that different. So these choices are false choices. They're not really giving consumers a large number of choices at all, just attempting to dominate supermarket real estate, and evidently, the supermarkets are happy to go along with this deception.

Another problem in the "bewildering array of choices" that Schawarz notices is that in many cases hardly any of them are of high quality. I've noticed time and again a product, that I had been a regular purchaser of because I really liked the product, disappearing from store shelves only to be replaced by a similar but less desirable product. Why do you suppose this is and how does this affect Schwartz' rather depressing analysis that more choices produce less satisfaction? My analysis is that the store manager only wants to devote shelf space to products for which there are the highest profit margins. Therefore, a lower quality product which costs less to produce may have a higher profit margin than a high quality product whose ingredients cost more. Such a product may have a lower profit margin. And through advertising, corporations can increase demand for low quality products which have high profit margins. This is why independent testing and rating agencies are so important. Expert opinion and criticism can defeat the purpose of advertising which is to increase corporate profit margins, not to educate or inform the consumer, let alone provide him or her with a quality product.

Companies which put out a high quality product can take market share from companies who have established a "brand" but continue to market the lowest quality the consumer will buy. Take coffee, for instance. The coffee industry has known for years that there are two kinds of coffee beans: the low quality and cheaper Robustico and the higher quality and more expensive Arabica. Naturally they sold the lower quality coffee and made hefty profits for years. Then along came Starbucks and their goal was to deliver a superior product. They, therefore, used the higher quality and more expensive ingredients. Their profit margin per cup might have been lower, but they gained enormous market share because consumers, once they had been exposed to a superior product, came to be willing to spend more to get an excellent cup of coffee rather than the swill they had been used to. The same thing could be said for bread. People who were fortunate enough to travel to Europe where the quality of bread and coffee was superior saw the opportunity for emulating those operations and establishing high quality niche markets.

So I think Mr. Schwarz totally misses the mark. Instead of an analysis of the false choices that are so depressing, he tells us that more choice in general is depressing. His agent must have told him to include the psycho-babble in order to sell books. But it's basically bullshit. Most people that are at all sophisticated or experienced make choices based on their experience and rely on expert opinions from knowledgable sources. Smart people today can avail themselves of resources widely available on the web to make choices. There are quality comparison sites and price comparison sites. Instead of giving an intelligent method for culling the bad choices and narrrowing down to the good quality choices, Mr. Schwarz just says that we should have fewer choices in general and then we would be better off. I disagree. I think we are better off when we have an increasing number of high quality choices.

In a society based on preferensism, choice is fundamental. A citizen has to make choices which are both political and economic in nature. The educational system in any society needs to teach people how to make intelligent choices. For instance, in a political system in which all candidates for the Senate are voted on by all voters instead of just voting on a district by district basis, obviously there would be many more choices to consider than if one were just voting for one senator from one district. Such a system could still make sense and increase the freedom of each citizen if citizens allowed themselves to be guided in making choices the way they are guided by critics and experts in making consumer choices. A party or publication might make recommendations based on their way of thinking and each voter might take the recommendations of the party or publication they felt an affinity with.

There are other ways to make choice manageable in a preferensist society or one based on individual and social choice. A good review of some of these ideas can be found here.

Arrow's R Notation

Arrow's R Notation

In the arcane world of social choice, a man by the name of Kenneth Arrow looms large. In 1951 he published a book, "Social Choice and Individual Values," in which he supposedly proved that social choice is impossible. But what is social choice? Let us say we have a society composed of N individuals numbered 1,2,3, ... . Those individuals have to order a set of M alternatives with their most preferred alternative being their first choice etc. Let's indicate the alternatives as a, b, c, ... . Then a social welfare function accepts the individual orderings as inputs and produces as output the social ordering which is an ordering of the alternatives that applies to the whole society.

If individual 1 prefers a to b, we write aP1b. If society prefers a to b, we write aPb. So far so good. But we also want to provide for the case in which an individual is indifferent between a and b. We write this aI1b and aIb, respectively. Arrow's analysis then combines these two relationships into a relationship he denotes as R which means "prefers or is indifferent to" so aR1b means individual 1 prefers a to b or is indifferent between a and b. Arrow's rationale for this is the following: "Instead of working with two relations, it will be slightly more convenient to use a single relation, 'preferred or indifferent.'" (p. 12) (emphasis added)

Arrow then goes on to postulate two axioms. Axiom 1 states that either xRy or yRx and he notes that this does not exclude the possibility that both xRy AND yRx. Axiom 2 has to do with transitivity which will not concern us here. Again Arrow states (p. 13): "Axioms 1 and 2 do not exclude the possibility that for some distinct x and y, both xRy and yRx. A strong ordering on the other hand, [one with only preferences and without indifferences] is a ranking in which no ties are possible." This is blatant nonsense. One could have half the population with xPy and half with yPx [strong orderings] and that certainly would represent a tie so a tie is possible. What Arrow is implying without coming out and saying it directly is that in his world a tie between two alternatives is to be represented as a social indifference. This is completely arbitrary and limits his entire analysis.

One must assume that in Arrow's world each individual will submit his input in terms of R. That is individual 1 would submit aR1b, aR1c etc. until all pairwise comparisons have been made. For now we will go along with Arrow's demand that only pairwise comparisons need to be submitted. It can be assumed that individuals are not permitted to submit a comparison using the indifference relation since then what would be the purpose of introducing R to make the analysis "slightly more convenient." The whole idea of "slightly more convenient" is to reduce the number of relations from 2 (P and I) to 1 (R). However, Arrow proposes (without saying so) to use the I relation in the social choice to cover the case of a tie. Therefore, the social choice could be aRb, bRa or aIb.

Now the idea of the social welfare function (or of any function for that matter) is to connect each element of the domain (consisting of all possible combinations of individual choices) to an element of the range (consisting of all possible social choices). There are a great number of possible functions. Each function will hook up elements of the domain with elements of the range differently. The important thing is that each possible element of the domain is hooked up to one and only one element of the range. Arrow implies that any element of the domain that represents a tie (such as half the population having aRb and half having bRa) should be hooked up with the range element aIb. Respectfully, I disagree with this approach for the following reason: the half of the population that has aRb could actually prefer a to b (no one is indifferent), and the half of the population that has bRa could actually prefer b to a. That represents a tie to be sure, but society is hardly indifferent between the two alternatives. Arrow has confused a tie with an indifference! By so doing he has guaranteed that his analysis will yield the result that no social choice is possible.

Secondly, I would like to point out that individual information is lost when an individual submits his input as aR1b or "I prefer a to b or I'm indifferent between a and b." The system does not know which, and this introduces ambiguity at the outset. Not only that, but say an individual is indifferent between a and b. He has two ways to express it! He can submit either aR1b or bR1a. The resulting analysis becomes meaningless as the system knows not how many of the individual aRb's represent indifferences and how many of them represent preferences. Ditto for the individual bRa's! There can be no meaningful social welfare function given these kinds of inputs.

Therefore, I suggest that Arrow's approach is not acceptable and that his conclusion that social choice is impossible is invalid. A more rigorous approach is necessary involving the possibility of ties between orderings as elements of the range.

Here's a link to a blog which quotes from my website Social Choice and Beyond:  Solving the Tyranny of Choice.

Shift Bidding

Shift bidding is a relatively new phenomenon found only in hospitals as far as I can determine. It has come about due to the nursing shortage, and was instituted primarily to save hospitals money although it has the additional effect of giving nurses a sense of empowerment over their work schedules and wages. The way it works is this: nurses go to their computers, and, after logging in to the hospital's web page, view the shifts that are still available for the coming week. They then decide what shifts they would like to work and place a bid for their hourly wage for that shift. The hospital administrator then surveys the total number of bids and accepts the lowest bid informing that nurse by email that the shift is hers.

Typically, bids will start above the nurse's regular hourly wage. For example, if a regular shift wage is $35. an hour, nurses will bid on unfilled shifts with rates of $40. to $50. an hour. This works out good for the hospital since, if they have to call the agency to fill unfilled shifts, it will charge $60. an hour. Part of that is the agency's fee, so the nurse they supply will typically make $45. an hour. Therefore, if the hospital can fill the shift with one of their own nurses, they can save $10. or $15. an hour, and the nurse will make approximately what the agency nurse would make. It's a win-win situation for the hospital and the nurses.

Nurses like the flexibility of being able to pick and choose their shifts as well as the possibility of making more money than they would on a regular shift. They can work part time if they so desire. They can also pick the department or area of the hospital in which they would like to work thereby expanding their skills and experience. Of course they must have the necessary qualifications for any assignment. As it got closer to the time, if there were any unfilled shifts, the maximum rate at which nurses could bid might be raised in order to avoid having to go to the agency. Hospitals prefer their own nurses to agency nurses since they consider them to be more dedicated. For more information on how shift bidding works, you can go here and here and here and here and here and here.

Shift bidding is a rudimentary form of Preferensism. If the concept of shift bidding is extended in such a way that each nurse can submit a range of preferences for work and wage schedules instead of submitting just one wage per shift, then nurses can be matched to shifts in such a way as to give, insofar as is possible, every nurse their highest preference. In a Preferensist approach a total budget would be set over all shifts instead of the hospitals' trying to minimize the outlay per shift. Then the final assignment of nurses to shifts would have to be brought in under budget rather than each shift's budget being minimized. There would be a constraint on the overall process instead of each shift.

A more in depth analysis of shift bidding and an extended example with regard to preferensism can be found here

Be Careful What You Wish For

Finally!! Democracy has come to the Middle East. Hamas has been democratically elected to become the government of Palestine. Why isn't everybody celebrating - particularly the Bush administration which has been so fervent in its quest to bring democracy to the Middle East? Why? Because the wrong party was democratically elected. That's why. Democracy has a way of doing that. Before Bush is done bringing democracy to the Middle East, we will have a Shiite controlled (they're the majority after all) government in Iraq aligned with Iran. Oh, the irony of it. Bush delivers the Middle East into the hands of extremists in the name of democracy! There's this little thing about majority rule that goes along with democracy. And guess what? The majority of people in the Middle East are poor, ignorant, religious fundamentalists and extremists. Maybe those Saudi princes knew something Bush didn't know after all.

Democratically elected governments will not necessarily be aligned with US interests. Oh, irony of ironies. Maybe Bush shouldn't try so hard bringing democracy. A few well placed dictators in the pocket of the US keeping the oil spigots flowing would actually be preferable to those rabble oriented democratic governments. The Founding Fathers didn't trust the rabble after all. That's why they made the US a republic and not a democracy. And the Republicans, of all people, should know that! But Bush and his high flown rhetoric. Now we're committed to a policy which is not in US interests which is exactly what "democracy in the Middle East" is all about. And to think we're throwing $200 billion per year down the drain and an untold countless number of lives to do it!

The problem with democracy is exactly that it's rule by the majority. The majority often are not right. The majority often are stupid. There was a headline in a British paper after Bush was re-elected: "How could 259 million people be so stupid?" A majority of the American people elected and then re-elected Bush. It just goes to show the failings of democracy.

Would a system such as Preferensism do any better? Not necessarily. Any social system that is democratically based will reflect the will of the majority. If they are a bunch of selfish, corrupt, greedy bastards, the best social system in the world won't be any better and probably far worse than a benign dictatorship. There's something to be said for the philosopher king. Where is Louis XIV and Henry VIII when we need them? For more on Preferensism see my website Social Choice and Beyond.

What I Learned from General Rosecrans

One of my distant relatives, William S. Rosecrans, was a General in the American Civil War. My Grandmother's maiden name was Rosenkrans, but one branch of the family changed the spelling of the name to "Rosecrans" supposedly so it "wouldn't sound so German." I found all this out from a book I got out of the UCSD library entitled something like "Rosecrans: The Edge of Glory." After graduating from West Point before the Civil War, Rosecrans became a General and a rival of Ulysses S. Grant. After not showing up for a battle where the two of them were supposed to fight together, Grant was criticized by Rosecrans and the two of them became lifelong enemies.

Rosecrans was ordered to go behind Confederate lines in Tennessee where the Confederates massed their troops against him. Rosecrans' requests for reinforcements and more supplies were ignored by a power structure that had taken sides in favor of Grant. Consequently, he got his butt kicked at the Battle of Chickamauga. What I learned from him though, which I think is one of life's most important lessons, is that as Rosecrans' options diminished, he always took the best option that was available at any point in time. I think this is what a rational person does. At any point one has a set of available options. This set is time-varying. The set may be augmented with better options or it may be diminished with the good options vanishing. The important thing is to always take the best option even as the available options are getting worse. This is precisely what Rosecrans did!

After he lost the Battle of Chickamauga, he was sent to the Boonies in Missouri or somewhere for the duration of the war, a sort of demotion, on orders signed by none other than U. S. Grant, his nemesis. After the war, Rosecrans moved to California where he had a 14,000 acre ranch in Redondo Beach. Still a major thoroughfare, Rosecrans Blvd. is now located in the heart of LA. Rosecrans was involved in various railroad and mining ventures in Mexico and elsewhere. He was twice elected to Congress. When U.S. Grant went broke after his term as President, Rosecrans rose from the floor of Congress to speak against providing him with a pension.

Garfield was Rosecrans' friend, and, when he was President and under other friendly Presidents, Rosecrans was named Ambassador to Mexico and Secretary of the Treasury. A military installation in San Diego was named Fort Rosecrans and Rosecrans Blvd. is still a major street in San Diego as well as LA. The U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego was built by one of Grant's sons or grandsons so the Civil War presence of these two rivals exists side by side in this great city.

Rosecrans's various ventures were none too successful, and he cut a rather sad figure at Civil War reunions, apparently never having recovered from his loss at Chickamauga and criticism that was directed at him for leaving the field of battle, a fact that still is in dispute, although Rosecrans had his defenders as well as detractors. General Thomas, on the other hand, became known as the "Rock of Chickamauga" for holding his part of the line as the rest collapsed. I think the book was entitled "The Edge of Glory" since Rosecrans came so close to being the winning Civil War General. His skills were probably superior to Grant's. However, "politics" and Rosecrans' tendency to criticize his superiors combined to convey the glory on Grant not Rosecrans.

What does this have to do with Preferensism and Social Choice? The basis of these fields is the individual's forming a preference list over a set of options ranking his preferences from top to bottom or from first to last. It would seem fundamental that this set is time varying although this basic fact is the cause of Arrow proving that Social Choice is impossible. However, as I've said before, "the difficult we do right away, the impossible will take a little longer." For why I think Social Choice is possible, please see my website, Social Choice and Beyond.

Utilitarianism and Social Choice

Preferensism is a combination of Social Choice and Utilitarianism. Both fields present difficulties for building a societal architecture. First, according to Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice is impossible. See Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. That is the amalgamation of individual preference profiles in order to form an overall social decision is impossible. Well, all I can say to that is "The difficult we can do right away; the impossible will take a little longer." We have dealt with a number of ways around this difficulty both in this blog and in Social Choice and Beyond. Probably the biggest difficulty, before the advent of high speed computers and voluminous hard drives, was just dealing with the overwhelming amount of data that would be generated. This shouldn't be a problem in the 21st Century.

Utilitarianism was developed by 19th century English philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. That's him in the picture. Their slogan was "the greatest good for the greatest number." This too has come in for a lot of criticism by folks who say "you can't maximize two dependent variables simultaneously." This may be literally true. However, as I have pointed out, you can maximize "the greatest good" and, subject to that condition, if there are a number of tied ways to do this, you can choose the one that minimizes some measure of inequality. So all is not lost.

If we assume for a minute that Social Choice is possible and Utilitarianism is not oxymoronish, we can see that it is necessary to choose what type of Social Choice function, out of the many available, we want to implement. That's where Utilitarianism comes in. It gives us the moral and ethical guidance we need in order to choose one Social Choice function. Essentially what we want to do in Preferensism is to allow each individual citizen one vote consisting of a list of preferences. The individual's utility or happiness or satisfaction depends on which preference the individual ends up getting as assigned by the Social Choice function. Without loss of generality, we can assume that the individual gets a maximum utility of 1 if he gets his first choice and 0 if he gets his last choice. If he gets assigned a preference somewhere between his first and last, he would have a utility somewhere between 0 and 1.

Now of all the ways that the Social Choice function, also known as the Social Decision Function (SDF), could assign individual outcomes such that the overall social outcome makes sense, we can compute the overall utility or satisfaction of the whole society by adding up all the individual utilities or satisfactions. Then we can choose the SDF that maximizes social utility. Assuming that there are a number of tied solutions or a number of different ways of doing this, we can choose the one that minimizes inequality where inequality is defined as the sum of the differences between the average utility and the individual utilities.

Therefore, we have created a method which combines social choice and utilitarianism in such a way as to combine individual inputs, treating each in an equal manner, to produce a social solution which maximizes social satisfaction or utility and, subject to that condition, minimizes social inequality.

The individual preference profiles could be either political or economic in nature. They could be a list of candidates standing for election or they could be a list of work-consumption bundles. That is each entry might represent the amount of work the individual is willing to do in return for the corresponding bundle of consumer items. On the one hand the social outcome (such as the election of a President) could apply to every individual; on the other hand the social outcome could assign a different work-consumption bundle to each individual.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

In his book Social Choice and Individual Values Arrow supposedly proves that it is impossible to take a group of individual preference profiles and amalgamate them to form a social preference profile or social choice. Each individual profile would consist of the ordering of, for instance, 10 alternatives in order of preference from first to last, and the social profile would consist of the same alternatives in some order from first to last. Of course, the number of alternatives is arbitrary. Now first of all this is an artifical problem. In the real world voting situation we would be concerned about selecting one winner given individual preference profiles as inputs - not an ordering. In the economic problem, we would be concerned about assigning individual outcomes given individual preference profiles where each item to be ranked would consist of a work - consumption bundle. That is each preference would be an amount an individual would be willing to work in exchange for that bundle of consumption items indicated in that preference. In general most individuals would probably want to work less and consume more and that would be indicated in their ranking of various work - consumption bundles.

Well, neither of these situations represent the model that Arrow used to prove social choice is impossible. Secondly, any actual social choice rule had to meet Arrow's 5 Conditions at least one of which is completely arbitrary. Anyone could set up their own group of conditions and demand that a rational social choice rule must meet them. The suspect condition is Condition 3 - Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. Basically this demands that, if there were 10 candidates, for instance, and 100 voters, and the voters all ranked the candidates in order of preference, and then one candidate died, the social choice rule should be able to cross out the dead candidate's name in each individual list and the result would be the same as if you crossed out the dead candidate's name in the original social choice profile. Of course, if everyone just revoted on the new candidate list, this problem would cease to exist.

And actually this is what we propose in preferensism: a continual revoting. Let me say right off the bat that this wouldn't be possible without the technology of computers we have today in the year 2006. I assume that everyone has access to a PC and a secure account, and then the data is processed by a centralized computer to come up with the social choice. For instance, let's consider the economic situation. Everyone inputs their data consisting of work and consumption preferences. Now we assume that each individual can change his or her mind as often as he or she wishes. That is data inputs can vary in real time. Some individuals might change their input on a daily basis. Others might be satisfied with the same input for a lengthy period of time. At each instant, the centralized computer (the one that is figuring out the social choice which consists of work assignments and consumption bundles for all individuals) comes up with a social choice which maximizes utility or "happiness" based on giving each individual as close to his first preference as possible while considering each individual equally. That is no one gets special consideration in determining the social outcome. For this scenario, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is entirely irrelevant. Why? Because there are never any irrelevant alternatives. Why? because there is a continual revoting, and, by definition, you can only have an irrelevant alternative when some alternative has been eliminated from the alternative set and then the social choice is made with the original individual input data but with a changed alternative set.

Another thing to consider is that each individual does not even know the full set of alternatives because each individual is concerned only with his or her individual work-consumption preferences and not his or her neighbor's. So the central computer has to take all this data and integrate it not only in a coherent way (the totality of work assignments produce all the requisite consumption bundles) but also in a way as to maximize utility. Is this fair? Yes, because each individual's input is given the same consideration. Furthermore, if there are more ways than one to maximize utility, preferensism picks the one that reduces a measure of inequality over the whole society.

Therefore the central computer takes the individual inputs, considers all possible work assignments and corresponding consumption bundles, figures the social utility for each assigment based on how close to first preference each individual achieves and then chooses that set of assigments that maximizes social utility and with that constraint minimizes inequality. For instance, if there are 11 alternatives and an individual gets his first choice, we could say his individual utility is 1. If he gets assigned his last place preference we could say his utility is 0. Second place would be an individual utility of 0.9 etc. The central computer would seek to maximize utility over all individuals or for society as a whole. In this scheme could someone end up very dissatisfied? Yes, if he or she were assigned an outcome which represented his or her last choice or a choice near the last choice. It's a logical possibility. In practice, as long as there is a large set of available alternatives, it should be possible to work things out so that everyone gets close to the top end of his or her preference list.

For more on this please see my website Social Choice and Beyond

A Half-Way Decent Society

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by John Lawrence

What would it take before American society would approximate something that was half way decent? I'm not suggesting anything in this entry that would add to it only some institutions which, if taken away, would make the society better without losing anything essential to its functioning. I would suggest these three institutions: the stock market, advertising and lobbying. I will proceed to show how the elimination of these institutions will improve the society without losing any essential functions.

First the stock market. What is it's basic purpose? To allow someone to raise money in order to start a company, right? Well it doesn't do that any more. That purpose has been superseded by venture capital which is given to a company in exchange for ownership rights the way the stock market is supposed to work. By the time of an IPO (Initial Public Offering) the company is already successful. Otherwise there would be no IPO. So what does the IPO do? It makes the owners of the company fabulously wealthy. That's it's main purpose. There is also an infusion of money into the company which, however, could be raised by other means such as floating bonds or borrowing from the bank. If IPOs were eliminated companies could function just find. They could borrow money instead of selling equity. CEOs and other corporate founders would not become instant billionaires, but they still would be on the road to becoming wealthy so there would be plenty of incentive for them to continue what they're doing.

But wait, you say. The stock market provides a repository of value for pension funds and saving for old age. Yeah sure. Why then are so many pension funds in so much trouble? The stock market is basically a casino. It's not much different than betting your money in Las Vegas. People can lose everything as they did in the bust of 2000. So we all (except corporate founders) would be better off without it. So the stock market is redundant with respect to the legitimate functions it provides.

Secondly, advertising's original function was to inform people as to products and services that are available. At this point there's no need for that. Any information about any product or service can be found on the internet complete with product manuals, photos etc. Comparison shopping sites will even find you the best price and it's a cinch to order and take delivery. So there's no need for advertising with it's negative consequence of polluting the airwaves and TV screens with useless garbage. It's so offensive that people are starting to gladly pay for services such as satellite radio and premium TV channels on which there is no advertising. It's a total insult to people's intelligence. Billions of dollars are wasted trying to get people to buy some company's product instead of letting people be proactive and take the initiative in finding and buying their own products. Here is where the educational system could be of some value: educating people to be good consumers which would mean the following. Resist advertising and do your own research. The information is freely available. Make an informed decision.

Thirdly, lobbying is one of the worst systems devised by mankind. It's legalized corruption and bribery. It guarantees that the society will be run by the rich and powerful and for the rich and powerful. It subverts democracy. Society becomes a combination of a plutocracy and a kleptocracy. The  distinctions of whether something is a quid pro quo or legal lobbying are ridiculous. American society would be much more democratic if this institution were eliminated and nothing would be lost Congressmen would just have to do more work. That's all. Instead of lobbyists writing the bills, they would have to write their own bills. We would all be better off.

What is Preferensism?

by John Lawrence

Preferensism is a name I coined to describe a society based on individual preferences. The motto is "from each according to his preferences, to each according to her preferences." It is based on social choice, which amalgamates individual preferences in order to formulate an overall societal preference, and utilitarianism, which is based on the greatest good for the greatest number. Pundits have pooh-poohed utilitarianism because "you cannot maximize two independent variables simultaneously." What do they know? It turns out (as mathematicians like to say) that you can maximize the greatest good of a society according to some reasonable measure. Then assuming there are many ways to do this, which would be the case in any imaginable society, you could choose that way which minimizes inequality. Hence you would have the greatest good, and given that accomplishment, the greatest good for the greatest number.

Given a set of individual preferences by each individual in society, the algorithm or method for combining them would try to get each individual an individualized solution as close to his first preference as possible consistent with maximizing satisfaction, utility or happiness (whatever you want to call it) over the whole society. Imagine a society based on the Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH) as opposed to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Preferensism would generalize the concept of voting and merge the political and economic systems. Just as proportional representation is a generalized voting scheme which guarantees that each minority is represented in parliament according to its percentage in the general population, preferensism would obtain economic and political solutions tailored to each individual insofar as is possible. For instance, a set of preferences might entail 100 work -consumption scenarios. First preference might be to work 10 hours a week and receive the equivalent of $10,000.00 worth of purchasing power. Last preference might be to work 60 hours a week and receive the equivalent of $500.00 worth of purchasing power. When amalgamated over the whole society the individual might end up with a solution in which he worked 30 hours a week in return for $2000.00 worth of purchasing power.

Each set of preferences would be treated democratically. That is to say that each would have one unit of voting power. But instead of voting for a solution that applied to the whole society such as the election of a President, the individual would be voting for a solution that applied only to himself insofar as economic issues were concerned. Politically, which is to say for issues for which an individualized solution is not possible, Preferensism would obtain a solution as close to an individualized solution as possible. That is the same solution might apply to all the individuals in a certain geographical area, for example, while a different solution would apply to individuals living ion a different geographical area. Also the society would approach a direct as opposed to a representational democracy since citizens would be "voting" on goods and services consumed collectively as well as those consumed individually. Finally, if only one outcome is feasible and there are only two possible alternatives, voting would resemble the typical election we're all familiar with such as the election of a President.

Therefore, as the "voting" became more political and less economic, outcomes or solutions would apply to larger and larger minorities, and, as the voting became more economic and less political, it would apply to smaller and smaller minorities and ultimately to the individual when it concerned his or her work-consumption situation.

For more information on Preferensism, see my website: Social Choice and Beyond.