Ken Arrow
Arrow's impossibility theorem can be seen as a cohomological obstruction to constructing representative consumers without magical thinking.
There's plenty of beauty in Economics Paul, but that works okay: Coase's Thm, Arrow's Impossibility Thm, Fixed Pt Thms, etc...
VaR -> Kayfabe | Coase -> Economics | Stable Tastes -> Kayfabe | Arrow's Theorem -> Economics | Rep. Consumer -> Kayfabe | B. Scholes-> Econ
Imagine you say to Ken Arrow: "Well you still need a voting system that gets a group to act like an individual." He says: Fuggedaboudit.
Topological Arrow Impossibility theorem for a circle: There is no continuous map from S1xS1 onto its diagonal restricting to the identity.
@disitinerant @tonofbuns @BretWeinstein @primalpoly Iâll take 1 pass at it. Scientists who study optical illusions, cognitive biases, Goedel incompleteness, Arrowâs impossibility theorem etc are tempted to abandon shared objective reality as substrate. Yet these folks cannot be the core. They are the adjustment to shared reality.
@kierhanratty @skdh Arrow? Marshall? Nash? Von Neumann? Black-Scholes-Merton-Bachelier? Modigliani? Coase?
It's about the same to me.
Economists: Ken Arrow taught us we canât aggregate rational preferences into the preferences of a mythical super-individual to represent society.
Also Economists: Konus taught us that Inflation is measured relative to agentsâ PERSONAL preferences.
BLS Economists: US CPI is 7.9%
Unlike Paul Samuelson & Ken Arrow, Gary Becker was cut from different cloth. He reminded me of my dealings w/ Lenny Susskind, Larry Summers, Brad Delong, Jagdish Bhagwati, Ed Witten, Mildred Dresselhaus & others, so possessed by ideology that academic reason could just vanish.
In my recent interview of @EricRWeinstein, he referred to "stable preferences" as Achilles' heel of neoclassical econ. Exhibit A is this famous quote from Becker. At face value, Becker is saying a model w/dynamic preferences wouldn't even be economics anymore. Do others agree?
Gary wasnât stupid. He was just on a failed dead end mission of intellectual suicide. He was shrewd, creative and wildly wrong about human beings at levels that are difficult to convey.
And so it fell to him to tell the ultimate academic lie on behalf of his profession of economics: all humans have stable unchanging tastes.
So dumb. So unethical. Such an intellectually pathetic move. But then he was refereeing the same game within which he was flagrantly cheating.
He was easy to beat in any argument not judged by ideologues. But in Chicago and elsewhere they pretended this was genius rather than a flagrant attempt at patching the vulnerabilities that will sink Neo Classixal economic imperialism.
He lived, and died, in a protected world, not unlike an academic Hermit Kingdom. An intellectual North Korea where people were always bowing before him if they wanted to survive and needed his favor.
But the vulnerability is real. And believe me, he and I both knew it. It was tense as hell dealing with him for a reason:
The fiction of Stable Tastes is THE analog of rhe exhaust vent on the Death Star of NeoClassical Economjc Imperialism. His lifeâs work.
I look forward to showing you just how that little exhaust vent works.
Related Pages
- Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
- Borjas Rectangle Theory
- Boskin Commission
- CPI
- François Divisia
- Gauge Theory
- Immigration
- Paul Samuelson
- Ronald Coase
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