Showing papers by "Kenneth J. Arrow published in 2011"

Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare

Abstract: Social choice theory is concerned with the evaluation of alternative methods of collective decision-making, as well as with the logical foundations of welfare economics. In turn, welfare economics is concerned with the critical scrutiny of the performance of actual and/or imaginary economic systems, as well as with the critique, design and implementation of alternative economic policies. This being the case, it goes without saying that the origin of social choice theory can be traced back all the way to antiquity. Indeed, as soon as multiple individuals are involved in making decisions for their common cause, one or other method of collective decision-making cannot but be invoked. As a reflection of this obvious fact, there are numerous examples in classic writings on the use and usefulness of alternative methods of collective decision-making. Suffice it to quote Aristotle in ancient Greece, and Kautilya in ancient India; they both lived in the fourth century B.C. and explored several possibilities of collective decision-making in their books entitled, respectively, Politics and Economics. 1 Likewise, as soon as any collective body designs and implements an economic mechanism and/or an economic policy, paying proper attention to the costs and benefits accruing to its constituent members, one or other social welfare judgements cannot be avoided. In this sense, Joseph Schumpeter (1954, p.1069) was certainly right when he emphasized “the hallowed antiquity of welfare economics.” He observed that “a large part of the work of Carafa and his successors as well as of the work of the scholastic doctors and their successors was welfare economics. We also know that the welfare point of view was much in evidence in the eighteenth century .... For Bentham and the English utilitarians generally this point of view was, of course, an essential element of their creed. Hence, the positive spirit of Ricardian economics notwithstanding, we find it also in the English ‘classics,’ particularly in J. S. Mill. So far as this goes, modern welfare economists merely revive the Benthamite tradition.” It was

100 Years of the American Economic Review: The Top 20 Articles

Abstract: This paper presents a list of the top 20 articles published in the American Economic Review during its first 100 years. This list was assembled in honor of the AER 's one-hundredth anniversary by a group of distinguished economists at the request of AER 's editor. A brief description accompanies the citations of each article.

Kenneth Arrow on Social Choice Theory

Abstract: Publisher Summary Kenneth Arrow founded the modern form of social choice theory in a path-breaking contribution at the middle of the twentieth century. The editors of the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare other than Arrow begin this final volume by noting the continuing need to read Arrow's decisive contribution in his epoch-making book Social Choice and Individual Values , which started the contemporary round of research on social choice theory. This chapter also includes an interview that Kenneth Arrow gave to Professor Jerry Kelly a few years ago, which was published in Social Choice and Welfare . This presents Arrow's thinking on the subject as it developed because of his own pioneering contribution. Finally, this chapter also includes some new observations by Arrow, “The Classification of Social Choice Propositions,” dealing particularly with the distinction between normative and descriptive statements in social choice theory. These notes, which Arrow has written for this volume at a very difficult time for him, reflect inevitably in a highly compressed form, some recent thoughts of the founder of the discipline on an important methodological issue in social choice theory.