NEARLY 60 years ago, when a young economist was working on his Ph.D. thesis, he produced a seminal work that is today known as Arrow’s impossibility theorem or Arrow’s paradox, which demonstrates why every voting system is fundamentally flawed.

Why? Because while forms of ballot can be devised that remove the element of arbitrariness, deadlock or inequality of power – none can escape all three.

Kenneth Arrow later went on to become a co-recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics and, while his paradox has been much studied, no one has been able to find a way through it.

For societies like Guernsey, which want a government taking rational decisions in a timely way on a consensual basis, the theorem has profound implications.

Put simply, Arrow’s work demonstrates that while communities might want a democratic process that provides common sense outcomes, decisiveness and no element of dictatorship, it is only ever possible to achieve two out of those three.

More recently, two American academics expressed the paradox this way: ‘If society insists on retaining a degree of collective rationality, it can achieve equality by adopting the rule of consensus – but only at the price of extreme indecisiveness.

‘Society can increase decisiveness by concentrating veto power in progressively fewer hands; the most decisive rule, dictatorship, is also the least egalitarian.’

Extreme indecisiveness is a characteristic of the waste and other debates here and the Jan Kuttelwascher requete last month, which led to the overthrow of the Suez incinerator, was actually a move to restrict Public Services’ executive ability to sign the contract without further reference to the Assembly, a way of increasing the existing indecisiveness.

While the outcome might be what many islanders want, it is not an example of good process and further highlights the need for the Assembly to consider how it translates strategy into action.

In the meantime, is there the possibility of a further paradox? An amendment to a requete last month left the island with no waste strategy so an amendment to the latest could provide guidelines for what is to replace incineration.

In other words, Public Services could set out the principles that it will now seek to adopt – if that’s not being too decisive.