Great post, voted up. I would add Amartya Sen’s Liberal Paradox to the list, particularly relevant because it’s regarded as a corollary of Arrow’s Theorem.
It purports to show a problem with liberalism (actually, what most people would now call libertarianism). However, it does so by equating rights with obligations—in other words, preventing people from waiving or otherwise trading away their rights, which is pretty much the essence of (what its proponents consider) the chief mechanism by which libertarianism achieves Pareto-optimality.
So, to Sen, a property right to an apple means you can never transfer the right to the apple to another person, which is of questionable applicability to real scenarios. He uses this constraint to show that libertarianism isn’t Pareto-optimal because pesky rights will get in the way of Pareto-improvements. But if a move is really Pareto-optimal, then the relevant parties will waive the relevant rights! (Neat tongue-twister there, by the way.)
Strangely, in developing the alleged problem, Sen passes right by a much stronger argument against libertarianism, that property rights can hinder the well-being of disproportionately many people, even if it wouldn’t be Pareto-optimal to make the move (e.g. the one hold-out is made worse off).
I can only guess that his purpose in presenting the Liberal Paradox was to get that argument across to readers’ minds, but without having to step out as a defender of that view. That would actually have been a clever move.
I’ve never understood why this issue is taken seriously.
Great post, voted up. I would add Amartya Sen’s Liberal Paradox to the list, particularly relevant because it’s regarded as a corollary of Arrow’s Theorem.
It purports to show a problem with liberalism (actually, what most people would now call libertarianism). However, it does so by equating rights with obligations—in other words, preventing people from waiving or otherwise trading away their rights, which is pretty much the essence of (what its proponents consider) the chief mechanism by which libertarianism achieves Pareto-optimality.
So, to Sen, a property right to an apple means you can never transfer the right to the apple to another person, which is of questionable applicability to real scenarios. He uses this constraint to show that libertarianism isn’t Pareto-optimal because pesky rights will get in the way of Pareto-improvements. But if a move is really Pareto-optimal, then the relevant parties will waive the relevant rights! (Neat tongue-twister there, by the way.)
Strangely, in developing the alleged problem, Sen passes right by a much stronger argument against libertarianism, that property rights can hinder the well-being of disproportionately many people, even if it wouldn’t be Pareto-optimal to make the move (e.g. the one hold-out is made worse off).
I can only guess that his purpose in presenting the Liberal Paradox was to get that argument across to readers’ minds, but without having to step out as a defender of that view. That would actually have been a clever move.
I’ve never understood why this issue is taken seriously.