Submitted by Fletcher, who has posted here previously. Welcome back!

The economic and mathematical analysis of voting has generated a large amount of literature. Ever since Ken Arrow showed that there is no social choice function that satisfies the logical choice properties, people have sought to find the next best solution. Recently, Marginal Revolution had a thread about range voting that generated a lot of discussion about voting systems in general. I won’t bore you with the details of range voting, but to say that you assign a score to multiple options within a range of numbers. The highest score then wins the election. This is actually similar to a Borda Count, where the range in equivalent to the number of options.

Read more…

[Note: The opinions expressed below, as well as the title of the post, belong to Fletcher (bio here), and no one else. They do not necessarily represent the opinions of myself, the LDS Church, or this guy. I do not edit guest posts; as such, any grammatical, logical, or factual mistakes that may exist are entirely Fletcher's fault, and frankly, I'm astonished that he didn't catch them.]

Read more…

Moses had his Aaron, and I have a Gay, Ex-Catholic Atheist. Guest author Dan Weston (See here for an introduction to Dan) offered to address the first question in my series “Answers to Mormon Questions” for me. The question came from commenter MM:

What do you think is the Mormon take on “natural rights?” Are individuals born with natural rights? Are they an inherent part of creation or can they be taken away? In what sense? Or are natural rights really an illusion, i.e., “non-sense upon stilts” as Bentham refered to them? More of a way for us to describe basic respect for one another than anything else? Or are you a consquentialist libertarian not a deontic libertarian and wouldn’t necessarily have a strong opinion about natural rights per se?

Read more…