This episode discusses a foundational paper by David Pearce and an applied paper on voting rules by Peter Cramton and his co-authors.

Economists’ conceptions of utility and welfare reflect misguided attempts to mimic the physical sciences. The resulting tangle of ideas about meaninglessness, cardinality, and measurability forms a pyramid of misunderstandings that supports the wildly inappropriate standard interpretation of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. This paper is a quick primer on seeing past the myths. A natural reading of Arrow’s Theorem resolves the tension between abstract social choice theory and practical welfare analysis.

No election rules are perfect, but they can be better. The Electoral College is increasingly failing to represent voter preferences in determining election winners. A path to reform begins with identifying election goals and establishing voting rules that best achieve these goals.

The connection between the papers is discussed.