THE BLOG of John Gelles
October 16, 2007Copyrighted work reprinted here, if any, is for educational non profit purposes—and at the teachable moment. It was offered free to me on the internet (as a member of a wide audience) and is copied here free to others adding to its value)—it is fair use of the work.
On Monday 15 October I wrote to John Barrett who is chair of a Justice Robert Jackson fan club-like academic fraternity: Dear Professor Barrett,
I have very recently had a particular enlightened thought in my head --the result of 82 years of living in and out of that head. It is as follows:"Misuse of Price, Law, Information, and Elections, Reduces the Number of Fair Outcomes and the Protection of Individual Freedom".
In your most recent message -- to which this is a reply -- you mentioned Arthur Schlesinger' distinction between Justices Black and Douglas (activists) and Justices Frankfurter and Jackson (self-restrainers):
"The salient distinction was the activists’ addiction to results … and the self-restrainers’ more traditional addiction to process."
I believe the dichotomy between [achieving "results"] and [conforming to due "process"] is pretty much the same dichotomy we see between equity and law; inductive and deductive reasoning; management by objectives and management by principles; and the critiques I propose for the way we use the "outcomes" versus the "axioms" of critical contemporary systems in the realms of Price, Law, Information, and Elections.
For we do not use these systems to reach fair outcomes or individual political and economic freedom.
Rather, we use them as fairly rigid systems to be followed and not reformed until outcomes are unbearable and freedom is nearly gone.Concerning misuse of Price, Law, Information, and Elections:
My approach to Price will be Keynes without Debt or Taxes http://www.ustaxreform.us/kwod.htm
My approach to Law will be Felix Cohen's functional law -- with a critique that asks for very little law, very much fact, no attempt at restatement of stare decisis or case law, and an appellate process that appeals to an intuitive appreciation of what is fair and what is less fair, even unfair.
My approach to Information (and communication) will be to prune the astronomical redundancy and waste that prevents greater attention to critical need everywhere and on all sides.
My approach to Elections will be to match elections to the skills of voters and to repeat any election whose outcome is closer than a 60-40 split.
Thank you again for your List. It's content is not responsible for replies as long as this. Yet it was responsible for additional pleasure your story of activism and restraint added to my day of mulling over similar divisions separating modes of thought that may occupy the legal mind.
By coincidence, my desire to see again on the horizon the triumph of substance over form is matched by this year's Nobel prize winners--see blow. I hope to follow up on this, as is evident from my message to Professor Barrett. (I have not printed his very nice reply because it did not go into substantive ideas.)
(See also this discussion.)
October 16, 3007
American trio wins 2007 Nobel for economics
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the award honored the trio's work on "mechanism design theory", which assesses how well different institutions fare in allocating resources and the need for government intervention.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Mechanism design
Mechanism design is a sub-field of economics. It is the art of designing rules of a game to achieve a specific outcome.
This is done by setting up a structure in which each player has an incentive to behave as the designer intends.
The game is then said to implement the desired outcome. The strength of such a result depends on the solution concept used in the game. See also contract theory.
Mechanism designers commonly try to achieve the following basic outcomes: truthfulness, individual rationality, budget balance, and social welfare. More advanced mechanisms attempt to resist harmful coalitions of players.
Most of the results in mechanism design have been established by economists, but some mathematicians, computer scientists and electrical engineers also work in the field.
One branch of mechanism design is the creation of markets, auctions, and combinatorial auctions. Another is the design of matching algorithms such as the one used to pair medical school graduates with internships. A third application is to the provision of public goods, and the optimal design of taxation schemes by governments.
A common exercise in mechanism design is to achieve the desired outcome according to a specific solution concept. The celebrated Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem shows that any outcome that can be implemented as a dominant strategy equilibrium is necessarily dictatorial.
This is similar to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. By contrast, implementation in Nash equilibrium is possible for a much wider range of social choice rules.
The 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory".
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