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[David Eric Smith]

I wish I had any idea to offer in response to this post, because the thrust of it is one I agree with.

I am always thrown back on completely intangible factors like whether people act in good faith, a formulation that is as old as humankind, with endless storytelling about how to deal with it, and still it is where much is undone all day every day.

One thing I am aware of is that _many_ things that cause us trouble are “marginalist”, as the economists would call it.

The Law of One Price in posted-price markets sets the price by the marginal buyer and seller who will just-barely enter the market.  Worried about water wastage in Northern NM juxtaposed with water unaffordability?  Well, too bad for you and for everybody.  If there is a distribution tail of rich vacationers up in Glorieta who can afford to pay a lot for water for luxury uses, then the price of water will go wherever meets them on the margin, by volume of water, not by number of people served.  Housing in the Bay Area as far inland as Tracy?  Residential space in Boston?  Law of One Price extracts relatively little of what economists would call “consumer’s surplus”, compared to other matching algorithms that would match those who could pay more against those who must charge more, and those who can’t pay much against those willing to sell for little.  Auctions, being non-one-price, add dimensionality; it would be interesting to know whether they do better in extracting consumer’s surplus, and by what measure in the large scope of desirable economic outcomes.  They don’t treat people equally with respect to price, but since people enter the market in unequal condition, is violation of one price more-equal or less-equal “under the law”? 

Then electoral politics is marginal.  All the obvious stuff: swing states, swing districts, “undecided voters”  (Airline hostess: For dinner, we have two options; chicken or.a plate of shit with broken glass.  Undecided voter, pauses to think a minute: How is the chicken cooked?), vast money put into hand-to-hand fighting over small gerrymanders and sectors of excluded voters, states for which the vote is essentially not a useful tool for gaining representation (though people living in them may have other tools in other arenas).

Then things like the confirmation.  Dick Durban’s comments on the uselessness of the whole hearing process in any modern era sounded to me like good and honest commentary.  Nicholas Kristof wrote an NYT column on essentially the same thing.  Nowadays the confirmation hearings are pure legalistic combat, between senators many of whom are proudly corrupt and cynical, and nominees who refuse effectively to participate in anything.  (Judge B, do you take as part of your working knowledge that the world is round?  B:  I have read opinions on that question, and I have no set commitment myself at this time.)  

I guess parliamentary systems are supposed to add dimensionality in the political realm, maybe vaguely as auctions or haggling markets (Chinese or Indian street markets in the old days, when there was no question of one price) add dimensionality beyond marginalist markets.  Probably there should be coalitional-form game-theoretic analysis of such systems qua systems in aggregate, along the line of Shapley’s “value”, or its spinoff, sometimes termed the Shapley-Shubik power index.  One could ask how to formalize the hypothesis that, in a society where party organization, firm and conglomerate organization, and private wealth organization, can become massively sophisticated, robust, and encompassing, a two-party system etc. throws away a lot of capacity for fine-grained representation, and then ask what the effective addition of dimensionality is in one or another alternative.

Eric



> On Oct 14, 2020, at 11:21 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> So, along with the comments made about Roberts' memos and recognition that the court is just as political as the other 3 branches (and the implicit 4th), and hearkening back to the apparent capitalist *requirement* of a permanent, but materially open, under class, what concrete form could a Platonic Constitutional Representative Democracy take? If not "text", then what? What expression(s) do we have to enshrine in order to enshrine the abstract concepts being expressed?
> 
> Maybe *multiple* expressions would approximate it better, a text, a diagram/animation, and a mechanistic computation. (My principle is 3 are required, 2 is inadequate, 1 is ridicule-worthy.) So if the concept(s) to be enshrined are separation of powers into, say, 4 branches of government, then from that conceptual constitution, we write a text, draw a diagram, and build a simulation. Then those 3 "documents" are held up as "the Constitution" ... "the law of the land".
> 
> To my mind, that question *precedes* the causal inferencing (well-) shone by Whitehouse. The extraction of an ephemeris from noise requires some sort of prior model. We have to decide kindasorta what we're looking for before we start willy-nilly inferring. (While relatively agnostic inference algorithms like empirical mode decomposition are always attractive, TANSTAAFL.)
> 
> On 10/13/20 12:09 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> I don’t really know which thread to attach to, or where best to attach to it.
>> 
>> But in a room I was in, Sheldon Whitehouse’s statement in the confirmation hearing was playing:
>> https://www.facebook.com/derek.friday/videos/10102085065399760/
>> This seems to me where the conversation should be, (or at least this part of it).  I would like the evening news better if they would include content of this kind. For cynics about politicians who want to cop-out and say “Ah, they’re all rats”, I would like to put this forward as an argument that there are plenty there to work with.
>> 
>> Narrow questions that can be answered legalistically, but that refuse to address the big mechanisms of causation, seem to me to be pure distractions, and it irritates me that they get more than proportional time.  Any meaning the narrow moves get is coming from these big causal contexts, and it is worth seeing a bit of the machinery by which they are organized.
> 
> 
> -- 
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
> 
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