Suppose you love Pokemon cards. You spend your first 50K on Pokemon cards, and your second 50K on Pokemon cards. You can't infer, then, that you value the second 50K of Pokemon cards less. 1/

Even if the goods purchased are different, maybe I get the same or more value from the second 50K, but I had to combine it with the goods purchased first? (Maybe I buy a record player first, but it's the records I get the most utility from?) There are lots of possibilities! 2/

The main evidence for declining marginal utility when economics is taken as a positive science is in risk aversion. Absent declining marginal utility, you should be indifferent between doing nothing and flipping a coin, heads you will $1000, tails you lose the same $1000. 3/

Most people refuse that bet, absent some sweetener, suggesting the prospect of gaining an amount, not in terms of any particular good but the purchasing power with which we purchase goods, is less valuable than the cost of losing the same. /fin

Lots of first past the post systems maintain multiple parties, to a degree, Canada, Great Britain are the ones I'm most familiar with. They still tend toward a (sometimes shifting) dominant pair, with third party voters becoming strategic around those pairs in close constituencies. 1/

It's Duverger's tendency more than "law", but even where systems don't collapse to two-party-ness, strategic voting to avoid spoiling becomes a very dominant concern, limiting expressiveness. 2/

Proportional-representation-based systems permit voters to express their own preferences (rather than strategically managing a party landscape) much more, whether or not there's outright collapse to two parties or just weird first-past-the-post strategic voting to navigate. /fin

a thing i really hate is that financial institutions won't let me download all my statements and documents as an archive, i have to go through one month at a time, which takes a long time. 1/

scraping all my documents from financial institutions would be a useful AI use case for me, but also a bit scary, i'd have to give it access logged into financial institutions. 2/

do any of you do anything like this? /fin

proportional representation doesn't require a constitutional change. a unicameral legislature that appoints and can remove the executive certainly would. 1/

however, re impeachment, as you suggest, a multiparty system brings the legislature closer to the founders' imagined legislative independence via "dilution of factions". 2/

in a well-sorted two-party system, Presidential impeachment almost impossibly broken. the legislature will usually be near 50/50, 50% perceive their own fortunes tied to the President's, can't get 2/3rds to impeach absent extraordinary unpopularity. 3/

with multiple parties, that no longer holds. whenever the President's party holds less than 1/3 of the Senate, much of the Senate can serve relatively independently as jury. 4/

(it also avoids the opposite bias: in a 2 party system, kneecapping the other party necessarily helps your own. in a multiparty system, members outside the President's party don't necessarily gain advantage from kneecapping the President's party.) /fin