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Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by lordnacho on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @12:59PM (#24483562)
I agree so much with this. The more I study economics, the more issues I run into that people ought to know but are unknown to everyone who hasn't studied it. Arrow's Impossibility theorem is another interesting one that perhaps ought to be more well known.
Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by yyyk on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @05:08PM (#24486724)
Arrow's theorem is nonsense that has set back election reform by decades. Because in any realistic scenario, "irrelevant" alternatives are never truly irrelevant. That is, Arrow's IIA assumption is simply not desirable or relevant.

Once IIA is relaxed to a sane axiom [read: abolished almost entirely], there are multiple methods that work like versions of STV. Besides, Arrow never applied to ordinal voting methods like Approval (which is OK) or Range (which I strongly dislike for other reasons).

Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by andybak on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @01:05PM (#24483635)
What's worse is when someone thinks they understand it and acts like a complete ass: https://forum.electionscience.org/t/arrows-theorem-mentioned...
Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by lordnacho on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @04:39PM (#24486443)
In the quoted context I'd agree it isn't a great use. However I do think it's something worth knowing about.

Another economic topic would perhaps be marginalism, so we don't keep getting flooded with "but why is water cheaper than diamonds, it must be injustice/bad values/conspiracy".

And perhaps some kind of history of thought on value, so we don't get the simple version of labour theory, or the Fisher-Price version of utility theory again and again.

Perhaps I sound like a snob, but I find a lot of economic discussions are derailed by having to clear up confusions that appear repeatedly.

Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by soVeryTired on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @04:46PM (#24486512)
Arrow's impossibility theorem has always seemed a little fishy to me: I think the axioms are too strong (if you pressed me on this, I'd wonder if the 'independence of irrelevant alternatives' axiom is problematic).

The fact that it holds when there are three or more options but not for two options just doesn't sit right with me.

Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by mjw1007 on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @04:57PM (#24486619)
It turns out that there is very little scope to relax the axioms: for almost any voting scheme, there are circumstances where you do better by not voting your true preferences.

See the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.

Pretty much the only scheme that avoids this is "choose a voter at random and elect the candidate they like best".

Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by yyyk on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @05:39PM (#24487027)
>for almost any voting scheme, there are circumstances where you do better by not voting your true preferences.

Which isn't a very important consideration compared to other attributes of election methods. Usually, coordination and signalling problems make tactical voting inadvisable. But even when tactical voting does work, it's not necessarily a problem.

The source of all of Arrow's nonsense is treating an election as a very large opinion poll on a single candidate. Of course pollsters hate liars, so everyone who takes Arrow seriously tries to eliminate tactical voting.

However, that's the completely wrong model. An election is an opportunity for a citizen to use their equal political weight to try to steer the polity. If some citizens managed to be smart and use their political weight smartly good for them. So what if their vote wasn't their true preference?

Tactical voting is only a problem when the election method allows a minority to win frequently - because political weight isn't really equal in that case - but one can imagine methods where tactical voting can happen yet the winning candidate always ends up with a majority (e.g. France's 2-stage Presidential elections). In those cases, tactical voting is not a problem to be eliminated.

Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by yyyk on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @07:48PM (#24488018)
Correction: "on a single candidate" should be "[electing] a single candidate".
Re:Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island by jbay808 on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:34PM (#24488693)
> Pretty much the only scheme that avoids this is "choose a voter at random and elect the candidate they like best".

And at this point we learn how many people's true preference is to vote themselves as president!