NANCY — A few days ago I promised a dispatch on the keynote, and here it is. The eighth International Conference in Philosophy and Economics met this week in Nancy, and the keynote was given by my closest collaborator, who is also my wife, Maggie Penn. Her title was “Three Paradoxes of Optimal Evaluation.” I … 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
LONDON — I came up out of the Underground this morning at the wrong station, a humbling way to begin a post about the meaning of position. The conference I am here for, the Warwick/Yale/Princeton meeting on political economy, takes its name, at one remove, from an English county whose old town lent its name … Read more
Justice Kagan opens her Callais dissent with a hypothetical. She knows it’s stylized, and she says so. Imagine a state shaped like a rectangle, with one of its six congressional districts a near-perfect circle in the middle. The circle is ninety percent Black. The other five districts, surrounding it, are ninety percent white. Voting is … Read more
A large strand of social network analysis treats triangles as special. Three people all connected to each other — a closed triad, a triangle in the graph-theoretic sense — show up in the literature as the minimum unit at which social structure is supposed to begin crystallizing. Triangles carry transitivity. They support trust. They coordinate … Read more
Last week’s post ended with a theorem. This one starts with a dashboard. The theorem — Arrow’s impossibility result, applied to the aggregation problem that Simpson’s paradox creates — is on the record in All Measurements Are Local if you want it. The short version: when subgroup results conflict with each other and with the … Read more