The Evolution of Social Choice Theory

How should society organise its decision-making so that it does indeed choose the options that it wants? These two questions had been present, at least implicitly, from the beginning of modern democracy. Now they became the central questions of a branch of mathematical game theory known as social choice theory. Some interesting mathematics was discovered, but little, if any of it ever met those aspirations. The assumptions behind social choice theory were proved to be incoherent or inconsistent by no-go-theorems like that of Balinsky and Young.