Farewell to Kenneth Arrow, a Gentle Genius of Economics - WSJ - 0 views
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Is there a voting system that can be relied on to distill the will of a group of people? Arrow’s impossibility theorem regarding voting and combining preferences put him in the rarefied group of economists with theorems named after them.
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Drawing upon mathematical logic, it shows that there is no possible voting scheme that can consistently and sensibly reflect the preferences of a set of individuals with diverse views
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Any scheme that could ever be invented will be at risk of perverse outcomes, where, for example, the choice between options A and B is affected by the presence or absence of option C; or where a vote switch by one person toward option A makes it less likely to prevail.
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