Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Joseph Arrow (August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist.

Arrow was born on August 23, 1921, in New York City.

Arrow's mother, Lilian (Greenberg), was from Iași, Romania, and his father, Harry Arrow, was from nearby Podu Iloaiei.

The Arrow family were Romanian Jews.

His family was very supportive of his education.

Growing up during the Great Depression, he embraced socialism in his youth.

He would later move away from socialism, but his views retained a left-leaning philosophy.

He graduated from Townsend Harris High School and then earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1940, where he was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon.

He then attended Columbia University for graduate studies, obtaining a master's degree in mathematics in June 1941.

At Columbia, Arrow studied under Harold Hotelling, who influenced him to switch fields to economics.

He served as a weather officer in the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1946.

From 1946 to 1949 Arrow spent his time partly as a graduate student at Columbia and partly as a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, then at the University of Chicago.

During that time he also held the rank of Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and worked at the RAND Corporation in California.

He left Chicago to take up the post of Acting Assistant Professor of Economics and Statistics at Stanford University.

In 1951, he earned his PhD from Columbia.

Arrow's monograph Social Choice and Individual Values derives from his 1951 PhD thesis.

"If we exclude the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility, then the only methods of passing from individual tastes to social preferences which will be satisfactory and which will be defined for a wide range of sets of individual orderings are either imposed or dictatorial."

In what he named the General Impossibility Theorem, he theorized that, unless we accept to compare the levels of utility reached by different individuals, it is impossible to formulate a social preference ordering that satisfies all of the following conditions:

The theorem has implications for welfare economics and theories of justice, and for voting theory (it extends the Condorcet paradox).

Following Arrow's logical framework, Amartya Sen formulated the liberal paradox which argued that given a status of "Minimal Liberty" there was no way to obtain Pareto optimality, nor to avoid the problem of social choice of neutral but unequal results.

Work by Arrow and Gérard Debreu and simultaneous work by Lionel McKenzie offered the first rigorous proofs of the existence of a market clearing equilibrium.

He served in the government on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers in the 1960s with Robert Solow.

In 1968, he left Stanford for the position of Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

It was during his tenure there that he received the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Along with John Hicks, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972.

In economics, Arrow was a major figure in post-World War II neoclassical economic theory.

Many of his former graduate students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize themselves.

His most significant works are his contributions to social choice theory, notably "Arrow's impossibility theorem," and his work on general equilibrium analysis.

He has also provided foundational work in many other areas of economics, including endogenous growth theory and the economics of information.

Arrow returned to Stanford in 1979 and became the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research.

For this work and his other contributions, Debreu won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Arrow went on to extend the model and its analysis to include uncertainty, the stability.

His contributions to the general equilibrium theory were influenced by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

He retired in 1991.

As a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, in 1995 he taught economics at the University of Siena.

He was also a founding member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and a member of the Science Board of Santa Fe Institute.

At various stages in his career he was a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

He was one of the founding editors of the Annual Review of Economics, which was first published in 2009.

Five of his former students have gone on to become Nobel Prize winners, namely John Harsanyi, Eric Maskin, Roger Myerson, Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

A collection of Arrow's papers is housed at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.