I usually only write reviews here about inexpensive math textbooks, but when I saw the other review, I had to add my two cents. This book is a great work of scholarship about the theory of voting and social choice, fields which this book(in its original form as Arrow's PhD thesis created). It is a totally theoretical work, which does not espouse anything about how one should live, contrary to what the other reviewer says. Very certainly, it says nothing about conformity. In a certain very tenuous sense, one could say that the conclusions favor the individual over society, but the work makes no value judgements that kind.

The theory of social choice is concerned with the logical problem of defining what it would mean to say that 'society prefers x to y'. More concretely, given a set of abstract individuals, each with their own set of values, how can we put these individual values together to determine what "society" wants. In particular, this theory clearly has relevance to voting, but it is abstract and has wider relevance as well. Arrow shows in this work that a few very reasonable assumptions about how these social values should behave in relation to the individual values are in fact contradictory(provided one has more than three people in the population-with two good old democracy works perfectly), forcing one to conclude that perhaps the concept of social choice is meaningless.

So he proves that an informal concept of social choice is contradictory, but that doesn't mean that if one takes weaker axioms, you can't get a consistent concept, and he studies this question, a topic of much further research, in the later chapters.

One thing to note is that Arrow's original proof was in fact fallacious, but in this book he provides a fix.

So, it can be tempting to read this work as being opposed to the idea that a society itself can have values, and thus individualism is all, but this was not at all the spirit in which the book was written, which is the spirit of mathematics(though no mathematics is used) and of welfare economics(which is not about welfare in the sense of a government giving money to the poor).

This book espouses intransigent individuality while refuting blind conformity to societal norms.. . .A great work!

This book is a classic in the field of research in negotiations and conflict resolution. This book is a must have for any serious researcher or student of negotiations, conflict resolution, game theory, behavioral research, economics, psychology, and law. Too bad it is unavailable as of the time of writing. Hopefully, it will be available again very soon.

In my humble opinion, although the copy editors should have been a little more attentive to some glaring typographical errors, this is a very important book, an important contribution to the mathematical development of the social sciences. Saari shows how one fundamental insight involving the subtle loss of available information when a whole is broken down into parts leads to surprising resolutions to a broad spectrum of mind boggling problems, dilemma's and paradoxes. Fundamentally, this book is all about recognizing cyclic thinking for what it is, and straightening it out.

Reading this book reminded me of another book I reviewed, titled _A Darwinian Left_, by Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer, in which he issued a call for "the development of a field of social research that shows the way towards a more cooperative society" (pg. 47). Singer should be pleased with Saari's book, as it makes a fundamental theoretical contribution along that line, and shows how to apply it.

The single most memorable part of Saari's book, to my mind (as something of a community activist), is Saari's analysis of the logic of a noise ordinance in Keweenaw County, Michigan. He uses this ordinance to illustrate how individual and societal rights can be logically consistent after all, in spite of a Theorem by another Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, which asserts something to the contrary. Another stand out, in my mind, is Saari's explanation of how the well known "Prisoner's Dilemma" is resolved by a slightly revised version of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as they did to you."

Saari shows how Kenneth Arrow's seminal "Impossibility Theorem," which is often interpreted as a proof that can be no such thing as a fair and consistent voting method when there are more than 2 candidates, is based on fairness criteria which are inconsistent with one another. I learned in logic class that you can resolve a dilemma by eliminating an internal inconsistency of the argument. Saari does just that with Arrow's Theorem.

"Obviously," writes Saari, "whenever the actual conditions defining our decision procedures differ from what we intended, then unexpected conclusions and paradoxes can occur. This point, although obvious, is sufficiently important that I repeat it often enough to resemble a preacher banging on the pulpit." (pg. 26).

Many introductory math textbooks draw too strong a conclusion from Arrow's Theorem, and claim that it proves that a fair and consistent voting method is an impossibility when there are more than 2 candidates. To the contrary, his theorem only proves that there is no method which can satisfy all of his fairness criteria. In other words, Arrow proved that his criteria are inconsistent with one another. In particular, Saari shows that Arrow's "Binary Independence" criterion is inconsistent with non-cyclic outcomes. We must remember that "fairness" is not a strictly objective thing. It necessarily involves an evaluative judgment, and is based on questionable intuitions. Arrow's Theorem may be interpreted as providing a good reason to subject his fairness criteria to further scrutiny, to try to understand why his particular criteria are inconsistent with each other, and to come up with more satisfactory results with other elementary fairness criteria or axioms. Saari interprets and scrutinizes Arrow's Theorem in exactly this way, and comes up with more satisfying results. Among other things, he finds that, if Arrow's "binary independence" condition is slightly modified so as to require a procedure to pay attention to the strength of a voters preferences (he calls his version the "intensity of binary independence" condition), then the Borda Count procedure solves the problem and satisfies the theorem.

Now, I am no professional voting theorist, but I have studied this subject and his work in some depth, and I think Saari has made a very important contribution to voting theory. At least two other ground breaking voting theorists, Amartya Sen and Kenneth Arrow, have received Nobel Prizes in Economics for their contributions. It seems to me that Saari should the next.

It's very interesting how the experts here tore apart The Bell Curve with minimal effort by taking a look at the data in a sensible/ rigorous way. One author assumed that all the data was correct as given and challenged its relevance.

Most importantly, one of the articles used the mathematics associated with these social experiments and asked "Do these numbers really show you what you think they do?" In all of my exhaustive reading about this subject, this book is the first that I have read that specifically addresses that point.

While lots of people have dismissed the proponents of genetic inferiority as an explanation for the "failure" of blacks in the USA, the rebuttals have invariably failed to contront the reasoning of the authors, preferring to dismiss them out of hand as "racist."

One thing that was lacking in this book is a more detailed analysis of the disparity between ethnic groups of the same race-- and yes, they do exist, contrary to what you would believe from reading the newspapers. For this, one of two Thomas Sowell books is a good read. The first: "Race and Culture." The second: "Knowledge and Decisions."

Unfortunately, the use of lots of technical jargon is going to put this fine piece of literature out of the reach of the vast majority of the hoi polloi.

A good read that, at under 80 pages, quickly gets to the point. Based on a lecture series, this book explores public choice concepts with regards to organizations. This is a good augment to North's books on institutions.