The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the government's cuts to welfare benefits between 2013 and 2015 were unlawful, marking a significant victory for welfare recipients. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/06/27/japan/crime-legal/welfare-benefits-cuts-ruled-unlawful/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #japan #crimelegal #socialwelfare #japanesecourts #poverty
"... this is actually going to cost the government more money. Because, you take away the [equal pay protections], this will lead to higher welfare payment. It will lead to more accommodation supplement. It will lead to higher Working For Families payments. It will lead to a lower tax take, which will cost the Crown money."
#CraigRennie, 2025
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My half-baked deep thought of the weekend:
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem should be renamed Arrow's Context-Sensitivity Theorem, and re-interpreted as saying a social choice function that neglects context leads to dictators.
I say this because the axiom of independence from irrelevant alternatives--one of the assumptions behind the theorem--states that a social choice function should be such that the relationship between A and B is not changed once a new alternative C is introduced. Unpacked, this means the choice function should be insensitive to any context C might bring with it.
Arrow's theorem essentially says that a social choice function satisfying this and a couple other axioms leads to dictators (meaning, one individual's preferences dictate the social choice function's preferences, overruling everyone else involved in the choice who might disagree). Hence the re-interpretation: neglecting context in social choice leads to dictators.
#economics #SocialWelfare #SocialChoice #WelfareEconomics #DecisionTheory #ArrowsTheorem