Nick writes: “I don’t mean to say that “fair districts” aren’t possible. I just mean to say that I, as your philosopher-king, could not design them.”
Wasn’t there a recent effort by the MIT Sloan school to redesign the school bus routes in Boston? They managed to reduce the cost and time of the routes by a large amount, but then many complained because it didn’t reflect the underlying class structure of the community and the preferences of the richer communities. One can design an optimization to balance any set of goals. It’s just that some of the goals we don’t talk about. They are wired-in to our reptile brain as baseline expectations and not reflected in the political conversations of dinner parties. Marcus
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