Social Choice Quotes

The technological revolution has the potential to liberate us or enslave us, and the road we take will depend on our politics.

Either the happiness of the many or the predominance of the few must be sacrificed

Whenever Americans are free to select their own associates they almost always select associates of their own race.

I have a lot of respect for aspects of Islam, but I would not choose to live in a theocratically organised Muslim society.

I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.

There's only one problem that bothers me. And that's something my theorem [ of Impossibility] really doesn't cover. In my theorem I was assuming people vote sincerely. The trouble with methods where you have three or four classes, I think if people vote sincerely they may well be very satisfactory. The problem is the incentive to misrepresent your vote may be high.

The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one's happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It's only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen - that is what makes the crucial difference.

Technology is not destiny.

The choice lies between property on the one hand and slavery, public or private, on the other. There is no third issue.

Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

Who would you rather be with: someone with more alternatives or someone with fewer?

It's so nice that today, young gay men have a choice about who they want to hang out with.

I'll tell you why, I don't invite the ones I don't like.

I don't pick my friends based on politics.

Every country must be absolutely free to adopt the type of economic, political and social system that it considers convenient.

A delicacy of taste is favorable to love and friendship, by confining our choice to few people, and making us indifferent to the company and conversation of the greater part of men.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer.

Now if you expand their choice set. Say you give them 20 different speed dates, everything goes out the window. Everybody starts choosing in accordance with looks because that becomes the easiest criteria by which to weed out all the options and decide "So who am I going to say yes to?"

Today if you look at most economic textbooks, economics is not defined by subject matter. It's presented as a science of social choice that applies not only to material goods - not only to flat-screen televisions - but to every decision we make, whether it's to get married, or to stay married, whether to have children and how to educate those children, or how to look after our health.

I try to only be in agreeable circumstances.

Gangs are a part of living in Los Angeles, but you can exist in Inglewood or Culver City or anywhere else, without joining one.