An election result is ‘as much’ the result of the procedure as of the preferences. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem is complex and full with paradoxes, but the dependence of morality upon time provides a way towards solution.
There are two key conclusions:
(1) The Pareto condition for the candidates under ballot should not be neglected - i.e. that only those candidates are voted on that are an improvement compared to the status quo.
(2) The Borda Fixed Point can be seen as a compromise between the Borda and Condorcet procedures (on Paretian points), and provides a degree of protection against budget changes.
There is also another conclusion. Voting is complex, and becomes increasingly complex when the numbers of candidates and voters rise (especially when we also include indifference and not just strict preference). Direct election of a President becomes quickly infeasible for the more advanced voting procedures. From this observation we can conclude that it is better to have a proportional parlementary system, so that the elected professionals can use the advanced voting procedures to select the President. This approach of representation also prevents that there is a different electoral mandate for President versus Parliament. Note that the discussion above, on Arrow’s Theorem and the Borda Fixed Point method, considers single seat elections, and not multi-seat elections. But the complexity of direct single seat elections tends to support this conclusion on the overall system of proportional representation and indirect election of the chief executives.
36. Some notes on ethics
The following notes on ethics are not well developed but the points are useful to observe.
(a) I was struck by Keynes’s quote: “along the line of origin at least, economics - more properly called political economy - is a side of ethics” (Skidelsky (2000:264)). This is a point that is commonly not seen by the general public who associate economics with money, and neither by many economists who don’t appreciate the subject of political economy.
(b) Ethics focusses on survival and the good life (“flourishing”). That is, just like laboratory animals require an optimal environment, humans have their own conditions for flourishing. Csikszentmihalyi (1997), “Living well. The psychology of everyday life”, clarifies the required balance between challenge and competence: too much challenge causes stress while too little challenge causes boredom. The Rasch model, also known in psychology as the item-response model, or the Elo model used for Elo rating in chess, seems to fit the situation.
(c) Colignatus (2003), “On the value of life”, essentially focusses on survival: the lifeyears saved and the allocation over individuals. On the quality of life, the “flourishing”, I only have a rough outline “On the price of health”.