Workability of a Social Choice Economy
Mood:  incredulous
Now Playing: Ryan Kisor
Topic: Social Choice
For a Social Choice Economy to be feasible, it must be workable or have user friendliness. It must expedite the choices individuals make in a real world capitalist economy. The basic decisions of an economy have to do with work and consumption. In the most simplistic terms you work, you get paid, you take the money and go out and buy things, and there are a lot of things you can buy, a lot of things to spend your money on, a large number of choices. A Social Choice economy has to be at least as workable as a capitalist economy in terms of the ease of use and the number of choices available.

According to Arrow, each individual in a Social Choice economy expresses his or her preferences over a number of work-commodity bundles, and then all this information is amalgamated to reach a social decision as to what to produce, how much of each commodity and service to produce, work assignments for each individual and the distribution of each commodity and service to individuals. Obviously, this is cumbersome.

What would serve the individual best is first work placement according to his or her preferences. Obviously, this service could expedite work placement over the current system. As far as consumption is concerned, it is far less likely that an individual would be willing to take the time to sit down and make out a preference list of commodity bundles. He would rather just go to a store or make a purchase over the internet without having to specify in advance what he or she wished to purchase.

However, the total production in a society for toothpaste, for example, can be predicted by monitoring past consumption. Also survey techniques can be used to predict consumer trends. Therefore, each individual would not have to be polled regarding his or her consumer preferences. Production can be predicted for each commodity and service, and also for new commodities and services.

Therefore, the social decisions that would have to be made would have to do with the work assignments for each individual, how much they were to be paid, and how much of each commodity and service would be produced. The goal would be to come as close as possible to an economy in which production matched consumption (no surpluses or shortages), and the work was distributed among the populace in such a way as to maximize job satisfaction as measured by each individual's stated work preferences. There is an implication that pricing of commodities would correspond to the consumers' ability to buy them according to their predicted consumption and predicted income.

Note that in a strict Social Choice sense, the alternative set would be time varying with new alternatives becoming available and old alternatives becoming unavailable on practically an instantaneous basis. The Social Choice dilemma of what to do if one alternative is dropped from the alternative set (the Principle of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) becomes magnified beyond belief. Obviously a practical system has to deal with this in as good a way as possible.

Since I believe that Social Choice is possible as opposed to those who believe in Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, I think a system can be devised which deals with 1) instantaneous changes in the alternative set; 2) instantaneous changes in the number of participants; 3) incomplete information regarding individual preferences; 4) probabilistic information.

Therefore, I believe an algorithm can be devised which maximizes satisfaction or utility in society in an economy which would resemble in most respects, as far as the individual worker-consumer is concerned, an advanced capitalistic economy. A supercomputer would process an enormous amount of data to achieve work and consumption outcomes which result in a harmonious society as far as both work and consumption are concerned.