Collective choice involves the aggregation of individual preferences by some method such as voting to produce a social outcome. Analysis shows that it involves surprisingly intransigent paradoxes that seem to challenge the possibility of fair democratic decision-making. Among the most important of these is the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, the inspiration for the now vast field of social choice theory. That the theorem is valid cannot be disputed. The main objective of this informal, nontechnical discussion is to explicate its content and evaluate its significance. The less than happy conclusion is that it states a deep problem for the theory of democratic politics that 60 years of intensive discussion has failed to dissipate.
The theorem was discovered by Kenneth J. Arrow, a Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist. He showed that four minimal and obvious constraints seemingly necessary for a fair, democratic, and rational outcome cannot be satisfied by any method for aggregating...
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Schwartz, J. (2011). Collective Choice. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_226
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