greetings and salutations,

i didn’t think enough people read my blog to warrant a newsletter, but here we are. i’ve gotten enough requests that it seems time i finally started something. special thanks to the people who asked for this.

i will send an email when i publish something, which is usually 1-2 times a month. you can probably expect topics to focus on voting, social choice theory, and electoral reform.

for the first eigenletter, i present a blog post on Arrow’s impossibility theorem:

unlike the typical “pull a dictator out of a hat” proof, i’m presenting a much cooler proof by the late, great Peter Fishburn which shows that you can have a perfect ranked voting system, but only so long as you have infinitely many voters!

i recommend my post on IIA as a primer. it was, in some form, originally going to be the introduction of the Arrow’s post. however, it made things too long, so i published it separately.

i know, it looked like i was finally getting good at shorter posts and then here comes another chonker. but hey, i’m just long-winded like that, as you can see here.

on the horizon: i have a number of (hopefully shorter) posts i’m working on related to the following topics

• sen’s theorem

• gibbard’s more general theorem

• approval voting’s amazing properties on the dichotomous domain, and what that means for real voters in practice

anyway, thanks for joining the newsletter. and thanks for reading.

taylor