TOKYO — No guidebook leads with this, but Tokyo spent much of the twentieth century as one of the world’s quiet capitals of a strange and beautiful science: the mathematics of collective choice, the study of what a group of people actually do when they try to decide something together. The founding puzzle is older … Read more
NANCY — I have come up out of the tunnel, across France, and into Lorraine, to a conference on economics and philosophy, and the first thing worth saying about the host city is that it is the birthplace of the man who discovered that three of anything is trouble. Henri Poincaré was born here in … Read more
Wednesday morning I posted “You Can Get There From Here, Or: The Theorem in the Tagline,” a piece I had been meaning to write for fourteen years. It is a short essay about why McKelvey-Schofield — the result that majority preference cycles can wander anywhere in the policy space once procedural constraints fall away — … Read more