Why a Dutch court stopped high school students from exchanging schools
I&#x27;m going to repost the same comment I made on &#x2F;r&#x2F;math:<p>&gt; By trading places, students could get another shot at a place. At schools for which they already had a go in the lottery. This would give them better chances. At the expense of students that don’t (or can’t) trade. This is unfair.<p>This argument here is not correct. It&#x27;s not at anyone&#x27;s expense. The two people trading both benefit, and other students are unaffected. Not everything is zero-sum; not every benefit is at somebody&#x27;s expense! (The strategy argument -- that people had been explicitly told the system was strategy-free, and it would be wrong to go back on that guarantee by allowing trading -- makes much more sense.)<p>This is an interesting article about social choice theory but the non-mathematical parts seem to be making some implicit assumptions about &quot;fairness&quot; that are, let&#x27;s say, not exactly uncontroversial. And the argument I point out above is just in error.