We came to Montreal for a talk — Maggie‘s, at a conference I’ll get to next time — and I did what I always do in a city that predates the automobile, which is walk until my feet complain and then walk a little more. Old Montreal rewards the stubborn. The streets in the old … Read more
Thursday’s post ended on a one-dimensional dial and a promise. The promise was that a single dimension is exactly what majority rule needs in order to behave. Turn an evaluation loose across many dimensions and it cycles — McKelvey and Schofield, the chaos in this blog’s masthead1 — but compress the whole question of equitable-versus-uniform … Read more
Wednesday’s post answered what selects: a stationary distribution, the wheel turning by no hand in particular. Knowing what the dynamics pick, though, is not the same as knowing whether they picked well. So step off the graph — out of the local view every node is stuck inside — and try to do the one … Read more
Last week I asked you to take your hand off the lever. The argument, compressed, was that the designer we kept reaching for — the planner who would tune the network so cooperation paid and nobody got fleeced — dissolves the moment you write him into the model. There is no seat at the controls. … Read more
TOKYO — Earlier this week I wrote that there was a man I meant to come back to before I left Japan. This is me keeping the promise. The meeting that Maggie and I came to Tokyo for is the gathering of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, and at the turn of the … Read more
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
UENO — Two kinds of time trouble follow me around, and only one of them is worth a paragraph. The first is jet lag, which is real, tedious, and has nothing to teach anybody: my body is keeping East Coast hours in a city that gave them up long ago, and it will right itself … Read more
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