(Many thanks to my political science colleague David Schwab, who made these arguments so clearly in an email that I am very heavily quoting/paraphrasing him here. David, you're a game theory monster.)
The chair of my department sent out an email today suggesting that we check out an "interesting" piece by Nobel Laureate Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post. I say "interesting" because it is a direct quote…and because I believe the column might better be described as "retarded."
I am somewhat in disbelief in response to Mallaby's argument. That is, I simply can't believe that he's really this stupid. He's a Nobel Laureate. He brashly, nauseatingly titled the column "A Nobel Laureate's Primary" to remind us all that he's a goddamn Nobel Laureate. They're smart, right? Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we could conclude that he is simply dumbing this topic down for a general newspaper audience. But academics should never, ever do that. Whatever they gain in mainstream notoriety, they will lose to the sharpened claws of their colleagues in the field. Ask James David Barber.
Simply put, Mallaby, a Nobel Laureate in mechanism design (a specialized area of game theory), could show such a complete and appalling lack of understanding of the mechanisms of voting. His proposal is essentially to find a Condorcet winner, which is a concept that any first-year grad student (and many knowledgable laypeople) can explain. Said grad students could easily explain that not every election can or will have a Condorcet winner. Then what, Sebastian?
The heart of his proposal has some appeal to the average reader – let's end up with the candidate who is preferred by the largest number of voters. Let's let voters indicate orders of preference among multiple candidates. Mallaby seems to think he has proposed a system that will do this…and more! It'll help you lose weight, too. It will make you more attractive. Apparently he had his fingers crossed that no one has ever heard of Kenneth Arrow or the General Possibility Theorem, which (again, most undergrads could explain this) proves that, given several generally-accepted criteria for rationality, renders any preference aggregation system involving more than two choices irrational.
I'm not sure Mr. Mallaby proved much aside from the fact that he can wave around an honor he has received like a flag of authenticity while simultaneously giving ample reason to question the Nobel folks' decision. Maybe a fancy title, a "novel" idea, and some big words are enough to create the appearance of authority in the eyes of high school graduates reading the paper during the morning commute, but I wonder why he'd let his academic colleagues see something that shows such an embarassing lack of understanding in his field of "expertise."
(Thanks again, Dave! You explained it a lot better than I could have.)