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Re: Math and the electoral college's virtue
Posted:
Nov 20, 2000 12:13 PM
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"Dan Goodman" <dog@fcbobDOTdemon.co.uk> wrote in message
news://8usoh9$ev7$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk...
>
> p.s. the Isaac Asimov story isn't that much like my random democracy idea,
> because the vote is effectively made by Multivac, I haven't read the story
> but I'm sure this is the idea. The whole point of the random democracy
idea
> is to get rid of the fiction of a "best" government that "most represents"
> the views of the populace, as this is an unattainable ideal (cf. Arrow's
> paper "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare" in the Journal of
> Political Economy volume 58 issue 4), and to replace it with a government
> that is statistically unbiased.
>
Dan,
I thought the sci-fi analogy was pretty close, though in some of Asimov's
stories it did seem that Multivacs was able to predict human actions before
they occurred, though not necessarily with 100% accuracy.
One wonders if the ancient Greeks would have fought as hard for
"statistically unbiased" government as they did for the "fiction" of one
that "most represents" those governed.
Regards,
Chip
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