The Errant Æsthete

When Ralph Nader clambered into the U.S. presidential race this week, he did more than rattle Democrats. He supplied an extra reason to read William Poundstone’s “Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It).” In at least five presidential elections, the second most popular candidate has won, the cerebral author says. Why? Because a spoiler siphoned votes away from the leader, as Green candidate Nader did in the 2000 match between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

If the spoiler effect sounds like a reasonable price to pay for democracy, Poundstone has news for you. Voting itself is fundamentally unfair, as Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow demonstrated with his “impossibility theorem.”

“He showed that vote splitting and worse paradoxes can corrupt almost any reasonable way of voting,” Poundstone writes. Political strategists are only too happy to exploit the flaws.

Can the system be fixed? One answer, Poundstone posits, may lie in range voting, which is widely used in Internet polls and consumer surveys. YouTube habitues know how it works: Viewers award a video one to five stars; the average score becomes the rating. Olympic judging works the same way.

Poundstone blends science with storytelling to show how lofty concepts influence the real world. His last book, “Fortune’s Formula,” turned the “Kelly formula” for gambling into a rocking tale about money, mathematics and greed.

Droll and authoritative, his new book is compulsive reading for anyone who frets about fair elections. Best of all, he practically invites you to dispute his conclusions.

“Books are finite, and arguments are endless,” he says.

`Eccentric Billionaire’

If the man who bankrolled the MacArthur “genius awards” is a mystery to you, pick up Nancy Kriplen’s lively biography, “The Eccentric Billionaire.”

John D. MacArthur was a cluster of contradictions from start to finish. Born the seventh child of an evangelist preacher in 1897, MacArthur grew up in not-so-genteel poverty. He dropped out of high school, slipped in and out of the U.S. Navy during World War I, then headed north to Canada to join the Royal Flying Corps. The fun was just beginning.

Ambitious, determined and often crude (yet somehow charming), MacArthur made a fortune in insurance as the owner of Bankers Life & Casualty Co. He expanded his wealth through lucrative investments in Florida and, by the time of his death in 1978, had become one of the U.S.’s richest men and benefactors.

Creativity, Promise

Each year, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grants five-year, no-strings-attached fellowships — the stipend is $500,000 — to authors, scientists, artists and others who have displayed exceptional creativity, promise and determination.

It’s a fitting prize for the brother of playwright Charles MacArthur, best known for the comedies he wrote with Ben Hecht and the pickup line that snagged actress Helen Hayes. (Would you like some peanuts, he asked, pouring some into her hand and adding, “I wish they were emeralds.” They married in 1928.)

Yet John MacArthur’s decision to create the philanthropic foundation, as recounted here, flowed not from munificence, but from a desire to protect his estate from the taxman. He was, after all, notoriously tightfisted.

MacArthur dressed like a bum, drove old cars, flew coach (after he stopped piloting his own stripped-down B-25) and often worked at a Formica-topped table in a hotel coffee shop. The first MacArthur fellowship wasn’t granted until 1981, three years after his death.

Kriplen, a former Time magazine staffer, writes in rat-a- tat, anecdotal style that belies the depth of her research. She knows how to spin a yarn and never bogs down in details, even when insurance regulators heave into view.

A more voluminous, authoritative biography may one day be written. But it probably won’t be this much fun to read.

“The Eccentric Billionaire: John D. MacArthur — Empire Builder, Reluctant Philanthropist, Relentless Adversary” is available from Amazon. [Link]