[lbo-talk] neocon economists

[andie nachgeborenen]

No, Arrow's social choice theory is decidedly not game theory. Game theory was more or less invented as a formal discipline by von Neumann and Morgenstern in their Economic Behavior and the Theory of Games, and GT involves the mathematiucs of strategic behavior, what a rational actor should do in specified circumstances given what the others will do given what the ratiobal actor will do . . . . The basic insights of the theory, informally expressed, are old; you can find them in  Hobbes (on standard interpretations) and Thucydi des. But vN & M worked out the mathematics, which was then adapted for use in the arms race by people like Daniel Ellsberg, Thomas Schelling, Anatole Rapport, and (less famously) my dad (Ben Schwartz). All of these people were nice liberals. Very few of them ended up on the loony riight. Btw Herman Kahn and Henry the K, famous nuclear strategists, were NOT game theorists and as far as anyone knws were utterly innocent of mathematics. Game theory is real heavy lifting math.  Arrovian social choice theory, by contrast, is an extension of Condorcet's work on voting. Arrow proved that no mechnaism for aggregating preferences (like a voting system) can meet a handful of simple, obvious, and apparently necesasry conditions for ratioanlity and democracy: nondictatorship, independence of irrelevant alternatives, consistency, and independence of order of presentation of alternatives. There's no "game" involved, although Arrow's results certainly suggest games that legislators can (and do) play.  jks 

Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
Michael Perelman wrote:


> The tie in to game theory is not direct, but it suggests a parallel
> trajectory in which liberal for social democratic people began to 
> identify
> with power and the Pentagon.

Do you mean Arrow? This is connected to Lange and through this to the 
socialist calculation debate, no? I've argued before that this has 
nothing to do with the idea of planning implicit in Marx's conception 
of a community of "universally developed individuals". For one thing 
Marx's idea of the "good" life can't be captured by the idea of 
maximizing a "utility function"; Bentham, for Marx, is "a genius in the 
way of bourgeois stupidity. (Capital, vol. 1 [Penguin ed.], p. 759)"

A psychological connection to "game theory" is provided by the idea of 
a "plan" as a central planner completely controlling everything with a 
view to maximizing all individual "utility functions". (I believe 
their are modern ideas of "planning" in this sense which point to 
modern computer technology as making the ideas practicable.) This, I 
would have thought, was an expression of a psychologically rooted need 
to exercise omniscient, omnipotent control. As Mirowski points out, 
it's characteristic of many "machine dreamers" e.g. John Nash.

Ted

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