The Reasonableness of Independence:

A conversation has been going on for over 200 years that is not concluded (nor will this paper conclude it). Is it normatively appropriate to impose a condition of independence of irrelevant alternatives on choice or ordering rules? This paper reviews the conversation since it began in 1784. It sides with Arrow against Saari. The transparency of the Borda rule is simultaneously its theoretical beauty and its practical horror. It is just Borda’s violation of IIA that makes it a non-starter for real-world use. The Reasonableness of Independence: A Conversation from Condorcet and Borda to Arrow and Saari A conversation has been going on for over 200 years that is not concluded (nor will this paper conclude it). Is it normatively appropriate to impose a condition of independence of irrelevant alternatives on choice or ordering rules? The conversation began in 1784, with the publication of Borda’s On Elections by Ballot (Mémoire sur les elections au scrutiny) in the Mémoires de l’académie Royale des Sciences année 1781. The Histoire et Mémoires de l’académie Royale des Sciences was the leading scientific journal in the world. In 1784 it was running three years in arrears, a feat which puts the current record of, say, the APSR into perspective. The layout of the journal was that copied and still followed 200 years later by a number of the top scientific journals today, such as Nature and The Lancet. The opening section, the Histoire, contains the leading articles. These draw the reader’s attention to the most important scientific discoveries in the journal, and are written by the editor. The following section, the Mémoires, contain the papers themselves. The editor of the Histoire et Mémoires in 1784 was the Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, the Marquis de Condorcet. Condorcet was quite self-consciously the gatekeeper of French and therefore of world science (see especially Baker 1975 passim esp. pp. 35-55). France was, as the USA is now, the locus of the best academies and the best journals. In the French model, followed in much of Europe and the former Soviet Union, scientific research concentrated not in the universities but in the national academies of science. The royal Academy in Paris was the senior academy, whose secretary exchanged papers and scientists with the daughter academies in St Petersburg, Berlin, Bologna, and Philadelphia (viz., his friend Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society). Thus did Bernoulli and Diderot go to St Petersburg, rather as visiting Americans now go to less enlightened places such as Paris and Oxford.