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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @denlillaapan 14 Jan \ on: The Pleb Economist #2: Politics is Provably Hard econ
shiiiite, so happy to see this refresher.
It's been a while.
So, you mention at the end that, provided we can't guarantee enlightened monarch, what do you think that says relative to other systems of (political) rulership?
Saif has some witty phrase that monarchy is rule by random (genetics pretty randomly distributed), whereas democracy selects for less than that (i.e., the worst get on top, etc).
What do you think about that in regard to the impossibility theorem?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 14 Jan
Haha, Saif has a good point.
Saif is basically saying that only the worst people will seek out power (or have the capability of winning elections), and thus our democratic leaders are selected amongst the worst. There's two ways to relate this to Arrow's Theorem:
  1. Arrow's Theorem doesn't say anything about the candidate pool, which is taken as given. So it can't really speak to Saif's quip.
  2. But another way to look at it is that Arrow's Theorem generalizes to an exhaustive candidate pool (everyone in the country is a candidate), and the impossibility theorem still holds. So democracy is hard no matter the system or the process by which the candidate pool is generated.
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