progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL facing an "acquit or convict" choice (in a criminal law case); "convict" is correct if and only if the defendant has committed the crime. First, the CJT.s competence assumption requires (roughly) that each voter's probability of making a correct judgment exceeds 1/2. While on a particular criminal-law case a judge may easily be mistaken .say, if there is highly misleading evidence ., surely such cases are rather the exception than the rule, and so within the large class of related court cases a voter's rate (frequency) of correct judgments exceeds 1/2. Hence the competence assumption holds. Second, the CJT's independence assumption requires (roughly) that it be probabilstically independent whether judge 1 is right, judge 2 is right, etc. While it is true that the problem's circumstances .such as evidence observed by all judges, or the process of group deliberation .can make it likely that the judges cast the same vote (hence are all right or all wrong), probabilistic independence is secured if by "probability" we mean "probability conditional on the problem" : indeed, conditional on the exact body of evidence, process of group deliberation and so on, nothing can anymore create a probabilistic dependence between the voters (who do not look on each others' ballot sheets). What has gone wrong in the argument? To justify the competence assumption, I have appealed to a variable decision problem: one that is picked at random from a class of relevant problems. But to justify the independence assumption, I have .xed (i.e. conditionalised on) the decision problem: its particular body of evidence, process of group deliberation, and so on. One cannot have it both ways." In effect, there are a great many issues which one must assume that are at times in conflict and the convergence may very well not occur. Koriyama and Szentzes state: The classical Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) states that large committees can aggregate decentralized information more efficiently than small ones. Its origin can be traced to the dawn of the French Revolution when Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat le Marquis de Condorcet [1785, translation 1994] investigated decision-making processes in societies Recently, a growing literature on committee design pointed out that if the information acquisition is costly, the CJT fails to hold. The reason is that if the size of a committee is large, a committee member realizes that the probability that she can influence the final decision is too small compared to the cost of information acquisition. As a result, she might prefer to save this cost and free-ride on the information of others. Therefore, larger committees might generate lower social welfare than smaller ones. These results suggest that in the presence of costly information acquisition, optimally choosing the size of a committee is an important and delicate issue. Page 174
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL On the one hand, we also identify a welfare loss associated to oversized committees. On the other hand, we show that this loss is surprisingly small in certain environments. Therefore, the careful design of a committee might not be as important an issue as it was originally thought to be, as long as the committee size is large enough. In fact, if either the information structure is ambiguous, or the committee has to make decisions in various informational environments, it might be optimal to design the committee to be as large as possible. The reason committee design receives a considerable attention by economists is that in many situations, groups rather than individuals make decisions. Information about the desirability of the possible decisions is often decentralized: individual group members must separately acquire costly information about the alternatives. A classical example is a trial jury where a jury has to decide whether a defendant is guilty or innocent. Each juror may individually obtain some information about the defendant at some effort cost (paying attention to the trial, investigating evidences, etc.). We spend a great deal of time going back and understanding this Jury Theorem because it become the heart of Sunstein's view on how to deal with the Constitution. Namely he relies heavily on this principle having dozens of pages referring to it. He argues that by having an open Court with majority opinions using the same facts will result in the best result. In fact this then becomes his basis for introducing non US law since that just adds to the opinion base and he argues that the result will improve the judgments. However when one looks at the facts, the opposite is true. As Sunstein states about the Constitution 174 : "…Madison did not believe that the Constitution ought to be set in stone. He accepted the Constitution's procedures for constitutional amendment…Jefferson had an altogether different view. Indeed he believed that Madison's approach badly disserved the aspirations for which the American Revolution had been fought. Jefferson insisted "the dead have no rights"…" This quote from Jefferson has become the cornerstone for all those like Sunstein who see a flexible Constitution, a document which means whatever a small group at the time seem to think it means. For Sunstein takes glee in stating 175 : "…Jefferson had his revenge - not through formal amendments, but through social practices and interpretations that render the Constitution very different from the founder's Constitution…" 174 Sunstein, Constitution, pp 1-2. 175 Sunstein, Constitution, p. 3. Page 175
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progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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