Kenneth Arrow Quotes

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I was early regarded as having unusual intellectual capacity. I was an omnivorous reader, and I added to that a desire to systematize my understanding. As a result, history, for example, was not merely a set of dates and colorful stories; I could understand it as a sequence in which one event flowed out of another. This sense of order crystallized during my high-school and college years into a predominant interest in mathematics and mathematical logic.

Kenneth Arrow

Trust is an important lubricant of a social system. It is extremely efficient; it saves a lot of trouble to have a fair degree of reliance on other people's word. Unfortunately this is not a commodity which can be bought very easily. If you have to buy it, you already have some doubts about what you have bought.

Kenneth Arrow

The idealist doctrine then may be summed up by saying that each individual has two orderings, one which governs him in his everyday actions, and one which would be relevant under some ideal conditions and which is in some sense truer than the first ordering. It is the latter which is considered relevant to social choice, and it is assumed that there is complete unanimity with regard to the truer individual ordering.

Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow

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Born: August 23, 1921

Died: February 21, 2017 (aged 95)

Bio: Kenneth Joseph "Ken" Arrow was an American economist, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972. To date, he is the youngest person to have received this award, at 51.

Known for:

Social Choice and Individual Values (1951)
The limits of organization (1974)
General competitive analysis (1971)
Studies in resource allocation processes (1977)
Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare (2002)

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