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