Will Blog for Food

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.