Quote: Original post by LessBread
I suggest that if you're not pleased with the description of this thesis in that article that you find one you are pleased with and share it with us rather than recommending we read the 100+ pages of his phd thesis. Seriously. Instead of tossing out names and relying on "arguments from authority" make an effort to educate us.

The wiki article is a good start, and is not 100 pages.

Quote: Original post by taby
A warning though... Sen and Arrow seem to be buddies, or at least have co-edited a few books together.

I doubt Arrow got the prize because he was buddies with the Nobel committee...

Quote: Original post by Prune

Quote: Original post by taby
A warning though... Sen and Arrow seem to be buddies, or at least have co-edited a few books together.

I doubt Arrow got the prize because he was buddies with the Nobel committee...

Sen got it after Arrow.

Actually, chances are good that Sen got nominated because of Arrow. That's how it works... previous Nobel winners get the luxury of nominating future possible winners.

OK, but how many get nominated vs how many win?

Nominees: A dozen?
Winners: 1 - 3.

Major applicable, and proven to be field-effective economic theory breakthroughs aren't made every year.

Consider financial derivatives. A good idea, but not a good practice sometimes. Perhaps they were stretching the value of financial derivatives when they came up with this nomination in 1997? In that case there was likely only 1 even remotely plausible nominee that year. I have no idea what the real situation was! You tell me. :)

Do you have a list of economics nominees?

I'm just surprised that I am not being put to sleep by the sheer mention of economics. Just typing the word economics makes my eyes glaze over a little. It seems very difficult to understand. It frightens me.

[Edited by - taby on September 12, 2010 5:51:56 AM]

Quote: Original post by Prune

Quote: Original post by LessBread
I suggest that if you're not pleased with the description of this thesis in that article that you find one you are pleased with and share it with us rather than recommending we read the 100+ pages of his phd thesis. Seriously. Instead of tossing out names and relying on "arguments from authority" make an effort to educate us.

The wiki article is a good start, and is not 100 pages.

That's a cop out. The description of his theorem varies from his bio entry to the entry for his book to the entry for the theorem itself. And none of them make the leap to ruling out the theoretical possibility of true democracy as you did.



Returning to the OP... Here's an op-ed quality blog post that asserts the "Bush 3" thesis without gloating or solely blaming Obama and that recognizes the impact of the ruling goes far beyond the current administration.

Barack Obama: Torturer-and-Assassin-in-Chief

Quote:
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling yesterday in the case of Binyam Mohamed vs. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. confirms two things: the U.S. government wields the omnipotent, unreviewable power to torture people and, two, that Barack Obama, despite his much ballyhooed pre-election campaign hype about “change,” is actually just serving George W. Bush’s third term in office.
...
What should the Court have done? It should not only have let the case go forward, it should have expressly ordered that the plaintiffs were fully entitled, through pre-trial discovery, to delve into every nook and cranny of this dark, nefarious program and to disclose everything about it to the American people and the people of the world. At the end of this road, the nation would continue to stand, in fact on a much more solid moral foundation.
...
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling confirms that we now live in a country in which the president and his military and paramilitary forces can torture anyone they want with impunity. Add to that the president’s claim of power to assassinate anyone he wants. How is all this different from any ordinary totalitarian dictatorship? Sure, the torturer-and-assassin-in-chief is democratically elected, but so what? What difference does that make to the victims?

The Constitution called into existence a federal government with limited, enumerated powers. If a power wasn’t enumerated, it couldn’t be exercised. Where are the powers to torture and assassinate people? One searches the Constitution in vain for them. Moreover, how can a ludicrous “state-secrets doctrine,” which appears nowhere in the Constitution, trump the express restrictions on power that the American people imposed on federal officials with the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment?

Ultimately, the root of this evil weed lies in U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. Empire goes abroad and stirs up hornets’ nests. That produces rage among the victims, which then manifests itself in terrorist retaliation. The terrorist retaliation is then used as the excuse by federal officials to ignore the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by claiming omnipotent powers to wage “war on terrorism,” including the power to torture people and the power to assassinate people.
...

That's how a libertarian ought to respond to this ruling.



In my first post in this thread I asked about the judges on this court and their failure to check executive power. I asked what happened to the sixth judge? Well, it turns out that his name is Goodwin Liu and his appointment is being held up by Senate Republicans: Obama judicial nominee Goodwin Liu comes under GOP fire. There are actually 4 vacancies on the 9th so there is no certainty that Liu would have made a difference on this ruling but with such a close decision it's possible if not probable. So far I have yet to read a complaint about this ruling that brings up Liu or the confirmation backlog.

There's no leap here. Voting is the essence of any democracy, whether direct democracy (referendums) or representative democracy (voting for parties and/or candidates). Any possible system of voting is covered, and voting is basically taken to be the process of aggregating individual preferences. Thus, it is sufficient to show that no voting system can have a theoretical guarantee of fairness in order to show that there can be no true democracy.1

All voting systems that exist, and can exist, violate at least one item in the small set of criteria listed. Some of them violate different criteria, and so a given vote can give a different aggregate ranking depending on the voting system chosen. This means that all voting systems are flawed, and thus democracy is not implementable--because the need to satisfy each of these criteria is pretty much self-evident and comes naturally from the idea of fairness and reasonableness of any voting system. Non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives are especially obvious, but it might take a little though to see that unrestricted domain must also not be violated to claim a decent voting system. And yet, it is not possible to satisfy all four of these.

There are deep problems with the idea of assigning preference to a population rather than an individual. In general, preferences of a group do not preserve transitivity; i.e. if an individual prefers X to Y and Y to Z, it necessarily follows that the individual prefers X to Z. However, for a population that logical implication does not hold, and one can do some research and find historical examples, as it is not a rare occurrence for transitivity to be violated. My way of looking at these issues is simply to acknowledge that preference does not make sense as a concept when applied to an aggregation.

The non-dictatorship criteria is the one I prefer to give up on, partly for theoretical reasons, and party for practical ones, and I have my own ideas of the specific manner in which it would be best to do that.

1While one could try to argue that in practice most of the time the common voting systems work fairly, it turns out that situations where they do not, and different voting systems would, for example, choose different winners, is quite common.

Quote: Original post by Prune
There's no leap here. Voting is the essence of any democracy, whether direct democracy (referendums) or representative democracy (voting for parties and/or candidates). Any possible system of voting is covered, and voting is basically taken to be the process of aggregating individual preferences. Thus, it is sufficient to show that no voting system can have a theoretical guarantee of fairness in order to show that there can be no true democracy.1

All voting systems that exist, and can exist, violate at least one item in the small set of criteria listed. Some of them violate different criteria, and so a given vote can give a different aggregate ranking depending on the voting system chosen. This means that all voting systems are flawed, and thus democracy is not implementable--because the need to satisfy each of these criteria is pretty much self-evident and comes naturally from the idea of fairness and reasonableness of any voting system. Non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives are especially obvious, but it might take a little though to see that unrestricted domain must also not be violated to claim a decent voting system. And yet, it is not possible to satisfy all four of these.

There are deep problems with the idea of assigning preference to a population rather than an individual. In general, preferences of a group do not preserve transitivity; i.e. if an individual prefers X to Y and Y to Z, it necessarily follows that the individual prefers X to Z. However, for a population that logical implication does not hold, and one can do some research and find historical examples, as it is not a rare occurrence for transitivity to be violated. My way of looking at these issues is simply to acknowledge that preference does not make sense as a concept when applied to an aggregation.

The non-dictatorship criteria is the one I prefer to give up on, partly for theoretical reasons, and party for practical ones, and I have my own ideas of the specific manner in which it would be best to do that.

1While one could try to argue that in practice most of the time the common voting systems work fairly, it turns out that situations where they do not, and different voting systems would, for example, choose different winners, is quite common.

You should read Hoppes, "Democracy, the God that Failed" He lays out a very compelling argument I think you'd appreciate.

Ultimately Hoppes promotes anarchy; I do not, for similar reasons I'm not a libertarian. I don't see libertarianism as viable by itself, since it cannot be stable and will degrade either into anarchy or some sort of suboptimal authoritarian system. If people are not busy with day-to-day survival, the rise of power-centric hierarchical self-organization in society is inevitable. This is why civilization appeared immediately after agriculture was developed and no longer was everyone responsible for producing sustenance.

At first look, meritocracy sounds great, as power based on merit is better than power based on popularity (the latter is known as democracy) and much better than any of the more traditional metrics (caste, money, etc.), and optimally would be implemented in a way that blends in a strong recognition of individual rights, which is the one really valuable element from libertarian systems. Of course, this begs the question of who is the arbiter of merit, and thus I do not propose a meritocracy since there's no way to practically implement it.

Anarchy and libertarianism remove the pyramid--the hierarchical structure of society. But either chaos would ensue or new pyramids will arise naturally. Instead, I suggest that a flattened pyramid would be best, with the top layer being small. This is different from the usual versions of libertarianism that have some central governing body but one with very limited powers, where its connection with the public is democratic in nature. In consideration of Arrow's theorem, my point about popularity vs merit, as well as classical criticisms of this flavor of libertarianism which I won't repeat here, I propose instead a non-democratic connection between the public and minimalist governing body--an empire as a second tier above a collection of libertarian-like meritocracies, with this upper level serving primarily as a unifying and dispute/conflict-resolution and tie-breaking mechanism that has the added benefit of being able to enter humanity in truly long-term, large-scope, civilization-scale endeavors (this last bit definitely sets me apart from anything libertarian and anything conservative). This begs the question of how to produce a benevolent dictator, but I see that as much easier to resolve than the practical issues of a representative system, not to mention the theoretical impossibility ones.

Quote: Original post by Prune
...

I really wish you would stop editing yourself. The parts you omit would be interesting to everyone reading this thread. I'm being serious, it's annoying!! Stop being modest, proper, etc., and give us the whole info. :)