Nathan Newman wrote, >Bernstein did highlight Ellsberg's work as a pioneer in risk theory but >you gave a better summary than he did, since he quickly moved onto others. > >Have any of the public choice rightwingers or other game theorists working >around government decision-making used Ellsberg in their work? It's interesting to hear that my two sentence summary of Ellsberg's work surpasses Bernstein's discussion of it. I'll have to have a look at his book. There is one mention of Ellsberg by a couple of B-school decision theorists that I don't have the citation for. I should qualify that it's been seven or eight years since I scoured the citations indexes for references to Ellsberg, so if there has been anything recent, I'm not aware of it. I doubt that public choice right-wingers would have much use for Ellsberg's Paradox. If anything, the paradox presents an indictment against any kind of reductivism. As I understand "public choice", it is founded on one set of reductivist principles, in opposition to another set of reductivist principles. The problem is not with the scale on which decisions are made but with the nature of the decisions -- "utility" abstracts from some difficult to define considerations in certain kinds of decision making. Thus Ellsberg contrasts the decision situations in which his paradox prevails to those involved with familiar production processes or well-known random events (such as coin flipping). Aren't the right-wingers arguing -- in contrast to Ellsberg -- that there really is "no difference" between, say, personal consumption choices and public policy choices so that the market is an adequate model for either? I would venture to say that "ambiguity" arises often around ethical issues, so that any effort to repackage them in terms of "efficiency" is doomed on grounds of both ethics and efficiency. The solution is not to distribute the ethical choices and hope that millions of atomized, private *utilitarian* decisions will somehow add up to an ethical collective choice (or, at least, a choice "exempt" from criticism on ethical grounds). The privatization of welfare as voluntary charity and the kind of welfare reform that is promoted as "workfare" are two examples of suppressing the public ethical dimensions of issues in the name of a chimerical private ethics. By contrast, the ethical dimensions of the Vietnam war were suppressed in the name of an overriding (and ultimately venal) "national interest". What is needed instead is the foregrounding of the ethical dimensions of public issues and a spirited, informed public discussion around precisely those dimensions -- what used to be known as "democracy". Regards, Tom Walker ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ knoW Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The TimeWork Web: HTTP://WWW.VCN.BC.CA/TIMEWORK/
