Ellenberg
Public opinion polls routinely show that large majorities of Americans support cutting spending and oppose raising taxes. But when lists of government programs are presented one by one, cuts in each program face majority opposition. What's going on here?
University of Wisconsin-Madison mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg will delve into this question on Wednesday, Jan. 23, in a special public lecture in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery's DeLuca Forum. Ellenberg's lecture, entitled "There is No Such Thing as Public Opinion: The Mathematics of Elections, Consensus, and Slime Molds," begins at 7 p.m.
A typical account of the above question is that Americans are irrational thinkers who want a free lunch, with low taxes and big government programs for all. The truth is more complicated. In fact, trying to put together the opinions of a heterogeneous population can lead to paradoxical results, even when the individuals involved are perfectly rational.
The math that explains the puzzling polling on the budget — first discovered by Condorcet in the midst of the French Revolution, and culminating in the Nobel-winning work of Kenneth Arrow — also explains the vexingness of the Bush-Gore-Nader clash in Florida in 2000, and the apparently irrational decisions made by slime molds, primitive brainless creatures who biologists believe to be similar in certain respects to electorates.