Sublime

In order to figure out the most fair and equitable way to structure society, he proposed that the designers of said society operate behind a veil of ignorance. This means that they could not know who they would be in the society they were creating. If they designed the society without knowing their economic status, their ethnic background, talents

We have an alternative solution, ergodicity economics, which has replaced the expectation value of the operator on this random object with a time average, or time average growth.

The take-home message from Schelling’s story—that incentives sometimes backfire—is familiar to psychologists.

One is the neoclassical rational-choice-equilibrium argument that markets automatically come to the Pareto optimal equilibrium for society. This was Ken Arrow and Debreu’s great work. The second is more out of the Hayekian tradition, that markets are efficient at processing distributed information to help coordinate activity in the economy. But bot

When we do, we assume the politicians are clients in a patron–client relationship, and we assume their obligations will cloud their impartial judgment.

Parties with more alternatives and lower needs have the most power.

Scientific models that seek to predict the consequences of human actions with some reasonable accuracy—such as game theoretical models of economic behavior—for the most part ignore human individuality in favor of aggregated outcomes.