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Kenneth Arrow

137 quotes

“If the markets for durable goods are peculiarly sensitive to price anticipations, while those for perishable goods are more sensitive to current prices, then there is a little more scope for explaining economic fluctuations.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Future and the Present in Economic Life", Economic Inquiry (1978)
“I disagree with the widely accepted proposition that econometric models should have expectations consistent with them. To the extent, it is argued, that the economic theory underlying the model involves anticipations, the anticipations that appear in the model as determining individual behavior should be equal to the forecasts made from the model. More generally, in fact, I would disagree with the weaker proposition that anticipations made by individuals should be necessarily dependent on broadly available general data about the economy and in particular about government actions.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Future and the Present in Economic Life", Economic Inquiry (1978)
“Finding out the prices of a large range of commodities is itself a costly enterprise, and knowledge of this fact by price setters is itself enough to create incentives for inefficient market behavior. If one individual has more information about the quality of a good than the second, the first may exploit the situation, and the second, distrusting him, may not take advantage of what is in fact a desirable trade.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Economics of Information" in M.L. Dertouzos and J. Moses (Eds.) The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View (1979)
“Collective action is a means of power, a means by which individuals can more fully realize their individual values.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As is by now well known, attempts to form social judgments by aggregating individual expressed preferences always lead to the possibility of paradox.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many other organizations beside the government and the firm. But all of them, whether political party or revolutionary movement, university or church, share the common characteristics of the need for collective action and the allocation of resources through nonmarket methods.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is this thinking which I think gives rise to the greatest tragedies of history, this sense of commitment to a past purpose which reinforces the original agreement precisely at a time when experience has shown that it must be reversed.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The purpose of organizations is to exploit the fact that many (virtually all) decisions require the participation of many individuals for their effectiveness.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Uncertainty means that we do not have a complete description of the world which we fully believe to be true.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In eras when authority or at least specific authorities have been questioned, there is more tendency to examine the roots of and the need for authority. The owl of Minerva flies not in the dusk but in the storm.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1921–2017) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: lecture at Trinity University, November 5, 1984. published in William Breit, Barry T. Hirsch (ed.), Lives of the Laureates (5th ed., 2009)
“Multiple discoveries are in fact very common in science and for much the same reason. Developments in related fields with different motivation help one to understand a difficult problem better. Since these developments are public knowledge, many scholars can take advantage of them. It is pleasant to the ego to be first or among the first with a new discovery. However, in this case at least, the evidence is clear that the development of general equilibrium theory would have gone on quite as it did without me.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: lecture at Trinity University, November 5, 1984. published in William Breit, Barry T. Hirsch (ed.), Lives of the Laureates (5th ed., 2009)
“Studying oneself is not the most comfortable of enterprises. One is caught between the desire to show oneself in the best possible light and the fear of claiming more than one’s due.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: lecture at Trinity University, November 5, 1984. published in William Breit, Barry T. Hirsch (ed.), Lives of the Laureates (5th ed., 2009)
“I want to stress that rationality is not a property of the individual alone, although it is usually presented that way. Rather, it gathers not only its force but also its very meaning from the social context in which it is embedded.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rationality of Self and Others in an Economic System", The Journal of Business (1986)
“Certainly, there is no general principle that prevents the creation of an economic theory based on other hypotheses than that of rationality.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rationality of Self and Others in an Economic System", The Journal of Business (1986)
“Gibbard's work was a bombshell. That was very exciting. I didn't know about Satterthwaite's work for a couple of years, but it was very much the same thing. I had taken the liberty of abstracting from manipulability in my thesis and I never went back to that issue. What's surprising is not really that there is an impossibility of non-manipulability, but that the issues should be essentially the same. That strikes one as a remarkable coincidence.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: interview with J. S. Kelly, "An Interview with Kenneth J. Arrow", Social Choice and Welfare (1987)
“Even Ricardo's most famous accomplishment, the law of comparative advantage in foreign trade, is incomplete, though not wrong.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kenneth Arrow, "Ricardo's Work as Viewed by Later Economists" (1988)
“The uncertainty of the future is inescapable, one must think about it and arrive at plans for action. A statement attributed to a number of thinkers is, "Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future." Postdiction, knowing what went on in the past, is also difficult. The past, however, is our basis for understanding the future.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Economic Forecasting", In G.E. Gaull (Ed.) New Technologies and the Future of Food and Nutrition (1991)
“As a general rule, the greater the uncertainty, the better to avoid large and irreversible commitments, to the extent that it is possible. When the famous 1930s gangster, Dutch Schultz, was dying, his incoherent last remarks were taken down by a stenographer. One of them was. "Don't make no bull moves." His words are a lesson for the kind of future that one might choose. Maintaining flexibility or keeping ones options open, is key in these matters.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Economic Forecasting", In G.E. Gaull (Ed.) New Technologies and the Future of Food and Nutrition (1991)
“I am old-fashioned enough to retain David Hume’s view that one can never derive “ought” propositions from “is” propositions. The two issues, method and value, are distinct.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Methodological Individualism and Social Knowledge", American Economic Review (1994)
“Information, one of the fundamental determinants of production, laps over from one firm to another, yet the firm has so far seemed reasonably sharply defined in terms of legal ownership. It seems to me there must be increasing tensions between legal relations and fundamental economic determinants. Small symptoms are already appearing in the legal and economic spheres. There is continual difficulty in defining intellectual property. The United States courts, at least, have come up with some strange definitions of property.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Information and the Organization of Industry", Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, Anno 102, No. 2 (aprile-giugno 1994)
“The slippery role of information as an economic good is of deep significance to economic behavior, especially in the relatively information-rich modern economy. It is an economic good in the traditional sense; it is valuable, and it is costly. But it has a peculiar algebra. Adding one ton of steel to another permits more to be done; repeating the same item of information does not add anything useful. On the other hand, supplying a ton of steel to another reduces the steel available to the supplier; supplying information to another does not reduce the information available to the supplier.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Information, Responsibility, and Human Services," in V. R. Fuchs (ed.), Individual and Social Responsibility: Child Care, Education, Medical Care, and Long-Term Care in America (1996)
“The conflict of incentives and information is increasingly leading to a diffusion of responsibility for medical decisions. The simple picture of the physician making decisions for the patient has certainly become more complicated. Patients always had a role in choosing to seek medical advice and from whom. Their choices are becoming increasingly restricted as medical practice becomes more organized. The problems of cost control in an insured world are partly met by the increasing use of control of medical services through review by health maintenance organizations and insurance carriers.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Information, Responsibility, and Human Services," in V. R. Fuchs (ed.), Individual and Social Responsibility: Child Care, Education, Medical Care, and Long-Term Care in America (1996)
“For the voucher system to work, it would be necessary to have informed parents. One cannot be dogmatic without empirical evidence, but I would be surprised if the average parent has the time or patience or competence to digest the relevant information. Indeed, one wonders where the information is to come from and in what form it should exist. Do we use test scores, themselves affected by the selection processes of the students? Impressions of individual teachers or of the physical appearance of the school will tend to dominate.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Information, Responsibility, and Human Services," in V. R. Fuchs (ed.), Individual and Social Responsibility: Child Care, Education, Medical Care, and Long-Term Care in America (1996)
“Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur has in fact said.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from Kenneth J. Arrow" (1998)
“There are many unknowns in the creation and use of knowledge as a factor of production. Still, two main lessons stand out: * Every country or firm must have education and training in technology and science, even if the research is not on par with that being conducted elsewhere. Knowledge cannot be absorbed unless some knowledge is already possessed. * Countries and firms must be open to new ideas, have multiple sources of new ideas, and see that ideas are diffused. This point strongly argues for freedom of entry, even when it seems to forgo economies of scale.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Knowledge as a Factor of Production," in B. Pleskovic and J. E. Stiglitz (eds.), Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics, 1999 (2000)
“My own view is that both endogenous and exogenous elements are important in explaining innovation. Incentives certainly play a role, but so does the general state of scientific knowledge, which is not directly produced by profit-making entities.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Macrocontext of the Microeconomics of Innovation", in E. Sheshinski, R.J. Strom and W.J. Baumel (Eds.) Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and the Growth Mechanism of the Free-Enterprise Economies (2007)
“The creation of knowledge that constitutes an innovation is in turn dependent on the acquisition and application of existing knowledge; information is an input into the production of information. This background knowledge and the ability to use it are the most important elements of the social context of individually motivated innovation.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Macrocontext of the Microeconomics of Innovation", in E. Sheshinski, R.J. Strom and W.J. Baumel (Eds.) Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and the Growth Mechanism of the Free-Enterprise Economies (2007)
“I was a very polite person, though. Paul Samuelson tells these stories how he used to correct his professors. I assume that’s true. But I wasn’t that type.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in Karen Ilse Horn (ed.) Roads to Wisdom, Conversations With Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009)
“The Austrian a priori dogmatism (von Mises, especially; Hayek, to a lesser degree).”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: on question "In your mind, what has been the most misleading theoretical approach in economics?", in Karen Ilse Horn (ed.) Roads to Wisdom, Conversations With Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009)
“I then follow up with four major aspects of economic research in the last 60 years, the period of my scholarly activity. One, econometric methodology and practice, is of such fundamental importance that it cannotgo unnoticed, although I played no role in it. With the other three, general equilibrium, dynamic processes, and uncertainty and information, I was more intimately involved.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kenneth Arrow, "Some Developments in Economic Theory Since 1940: An Eyewitness Account" Annu. Rev. Econ. 2009
“Clearly, information is of the utmost importance in making economic decisions, especially when it comes to securities or other assets whose value depends on events not yet known. Now the distribution of information cannot simply be taken as given. On the contrary, information can be acquired at some cost.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Economic theory and the financial crisis", Information Systems Frontiers (2012)
“As we see it, a choice is not something you do today in isolation; it is part of a plan that includes some choices to be made in the future.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conflict of Values: A Decision View", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (2014)
“Once individuals are acting to carry out a norm and cannot be fully checked, their natural norm of self-interest will come into play. The rules actually acted upon will therefore move away from any norm that might be acceptable on the basis of general principles.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conflict of Values: A Decision View", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (2014)
“We don’t have a laissez-faire system. The intervention of the federal government, as measured by expenditures, is growing. It is not a private system at all. Roughly 50 percent of health costs are paid for by the government, and state governments are spending more and more on health. It’s crowding out education. State budget-support for education, especially higher education, is crowded out by two things: health and prisons. Nobody is prepared for the idea of a laissez-faire system, and we never really had one.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in "There Is Regulatory Capture, But It Is By No Means Complete" (2016)
“The businessman may be compared with two other types of individuals who are essentially concerned with behavior under uncertainty ― the scientist and the statistician. The scientist must choose, on the basis of limited information, among the innumerable logically conceivable laws of nature, a limited number. He cannot know whether his decisions are right or wrong, and, indeed, it is none too clear what is meant by those terms. There is a long history of attempts to reduce scientific method to system, including many which introduce probability theory, but it cannot be said that any great formal success has attended these efforts. If we were to compare the businessman to the scientist, we would be forced to the melancholy conclusion that little of a systematic nature can be said about the former’s decision-making processes. The statistician typically finds himself in situations more similar to that of the businessman. The problem of statistics can be formulated roughly as follows. It is known that one out of a number of hypotheses about a given situation is true. The statistician has the choice of one of a number of different experiments (a series of experiments can be regarded as a single experiment, so that drawing a sample of any size can be included in this schema), the outcome of any one of which is a random variable with a probability distribution depending on which of the unknown hypotheses is correct. On the basis of that outcome, the statistician must take some action (accept or reject a hypothesis, estimate the mean of a distribution to be some particular value, accept or reject a lot of goods, recommend a change in production methods, and so on), the consequences of which depend on the action taken and on the hypothesis that is actually true.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Alternative Approaches to the Theory of Choice in Risk-Taking Situations", Economterica (1951)
“Ever since I encountered Hicks’s Value and Capital while I was still a graduate student, I had the aim of completing and extending his vision of the economic system in its purest form. This was not because I believed that the economic world was perfectly competitive or that it was clearly self-equilibrating; after all, Chamberlin, Robinson, and Keynes were dominant intellectual influences, and I had the even more powerful influence of the facts of massive unemployment and large corporations. But the idea that the economic world was a general system, with all parts interdependent, seemed (and seems) to me to be an essential of good analysis. I regret what appears to be a revival of single-market thinking both among monetarists and among some of the younger empirical analysts. Then as now, the only game in town that offered a general system of economic interdependence was general competitive equilibrium, an idea to which the name of Leon Walras is imperishably linked. At least, such a system would provide a starting point for analysis of the market’s imperfections.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1953 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Role of Securities in the Optimal Allocation of Risk Bearing", Review of Economic Studies (1963-64), appeared originally in French translation in Econometrie (1953)
“The government may be regarded as a decision-making entity. Among the decisions it makes are the formation of economic policy and the collection of economic-statistical information. In all modern nations the economic policies of the government are significant activities, if for no other reason than the high proportion of national income which passes through the Treasury; but of course in many countries much more ambitious economic planning is aimed at, though not necessarily achieved. Economic statistics, on the other hand, if one is to judge by expenditures, form only an insignificant proportion of a government's activities and are the least developed precisely in those underdeveloped countries which have the greatest felt needs for economic plans.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statistics and Economic Policy", Econometrica (1957)
“In view of the magnitude of an economic system, it would take only a very small percentage of improvement in economic stability or growth to make almost any conceivable data collection worthwhile. The situation is analogous to reported results of the use of linear programming in industry; the gains are small in proportion to previous profit levels but still very much larger than the costs of the programming. No country is adequate in respect to its data. In particular the underdeveloped countries, with their ambitious programs, might well ponder whether or not the marginal productivity of investment in better economic statistics is perhaps not higher than almost any conceivable alternative; they have more need and fewer data.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statistics and Economic Policy", Econometrica (1957)
“The formal structure of a decision problem in any area can be put into four parts: (1) the choice of an objective function defining the relative desirability of different outcomes; (2) specification of the policy alternatives which are available to the agent, or decision-maker, (3) specification of the model, that is, empirical relations that link the objective function, or the variables that enter into it, with the policy alternatives and possibly other variables; and (4) computational methods for choosing among the policy alternatives that one which performs best as measured by the objective function.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Decision Theory and Operations Research", Operation Research (1957)
“Index numbers are, of course, desired for purposes other than to measure the cost of living. One obvious possibility is to consider some subset of cost-of- living items, such as food. The logic of the preceding argument goes through precisely provided we assume that the distribution of food expenditures in any period among different foods depends only on the total volume of food expenditures and is independent of the prices of other goods, for any given total volume of food expenditures. This does not deny substitution between foods and other commodities, but we assume that the total effect of this substitution is already reflected in the choice of a volume of food expenditures. In a broad way, similar considerations apply to the pricing of producers’ goods, which should be interpreted as reflecting indirectly consumers’ preferences. However, there is undoubtedly a good deal more in the detailed working out of the theory that has never been developed.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Measurement of Price Change", in Joint Economic Commitee. U. S. Congress, "The Relationship of Prices to Economic Stability and Growth (1958)
“In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions. In the emerging democracies with mixed economic systems Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia, the same two modes of making social choices prevail, though more scope is given to the method of voting and to decisions based directly or indirectly on it and less to the rule of the price mechanism. Elsewhere in the world, and even in smaller social units within the democracies, the social decisions are sometimes made by single individuals or small groups and sometimes (more and more rarely in this modern world) by a widely encompassing set of traditional rules for making the social choice in any given situation, for example, a religious code.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In addition to ignoring game aspects of the problem of social choice, we will also assume in the present study that individual values are taken as data and are not capable of being altered by the nature of the decision process itself. This, of course, is the standard view in economic theory (though the unreality of this assumption has been asserted by such writers as Veblen, Professor J. M. Clark, and Knight) and also in the classical liberal creed. If individual values can themselves be affected by the method of social choice, it becomes much more difficult to learn what is meant by one method’s being preferable to another.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem of measuring utility has frequently been compared with the problem of measuring temperature. This comparison is very apt. Operationally, the temperature of a body is the volume of a unit mass of a perfect gas placed in contact with it (provided the mass of the gas is small compared with the mass of the body). Why, it might be asked, was not the logarithm of the volume or perhaps the cube root of the volume of the gas used instead? The reason is simply that the general gas equation assumes a particularly simple form when temperature is defined in the way indicated. But there is no deeper significance.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To conclude, I argue that the government should not display risk aversion in its behavior. Hence, the proper procedure is to compute the expected values of benefits and costs, and discount them at a riskless rate, contrary to the view of Hirshleifer (1964, p. 85). Suppose the future to be unknown; it is known that one of a set of states will prevail, and their probabilities are known (or believed in). A given state means a complete description of all production possibilities, so that all uncertainties are resolved when the state is known. To summarize some earlier discussions (Arrow, 1964b; Deberu, 1959, chap 7; Hrishleifer, 1964, pp. 80-85), we can achieve an optimal allocation if we imagine markets in all possible commodity-options, a commodity-option being an obligation to deliver a fixed amount of a given commodity if, and only if, a given state prevails.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Discounting and Public Investment Criteria", in A. V. Kneese and S. C. Smith (ed.) Water Research (1966)
“The fundamental fact which causes the need for discussing public values at all is that all significant actions involve joint participation of many individuals. Even the apparently simplest act of individual decision involves the participation of a whole society. It is important to note that this observation tells us all non-trivial actions are essentially the property of society as a whole, not of individuals. It is quite customary to think of each individual as being able to undertake actions on his own (e.g., decisions of consumption, produc- tion, and exchange, moving from place to place, forming and dissolving families). Formally, a social action is then taken to be the resultant of all individual actions. In other words, any social action is thought of as being factored into a sequence of individual actions.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Values and Collective Decision Making", in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society third Series (1967)
“The only rational defense of what may be termed a liberal position, or perhaps more precisely a principle of limited social preference, is that it is itself a value judgment. In other words, an individual may have as part of his value structure precisely that he does not think it proper to influence consequences outside a limited realm. This is a perfectly coherent position, but I find it difficult to insist that this judgment is of such overriding importance that it outweighs all other considerations. Personally, my values are such that I am willing to go very far indeed in the direction of respect for the means by which others choose to derive their satisfactions.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Values and Collective Decision Making", in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society third Series (1967)
“I interpret moral obligation as the carrying out of agreements which may, however, be implicit. Thus, a society in which everyone immediately executed his aggressive impulses would be untenable. Therefore, there is an agreement that I will refrain from aggressive actions, which in themselves give me satisfaction, in return for your not taking aggressive action against me. However, conscious agreements to achieve these ends are much too costly in terms of information and bargaining. Therefore, as societies have evolved they have found it economical to make these agreements at an unconscious, implicit level. Internalized feelings of guilt and right are essentially unconscious equivalents of agreements that represent social decisions.”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Place of Moral Obligation in Preference Systems", in Sidney Hook (ed.), Human Values and Economic Policy (1967)
“In this case of unrestricted income distribution, the dimensionality of the issue space is the same as the number of individuals. Thus, as Tullock argues, political resolution of distributional issues is apt to be possible only if only a few parameters of the income distribution are under consideration, not the whole distribution. Why this restriction of the scope of choice should occur is not easy to explain on simple economic grounds. On the other hand, the restriction does conform to the long-standing view of writers on ethics, of whom Kant is perhaps most conspicuous, that decisions on distribution ought to be made as if by an impartial observer, who considers then only the mean, a measure of inequality, and perhaps one or two further parameters characterizing the income distribution, but not specifically who gets what. If voters acted like Kantian judges, they might still differ, but the chances of coming to an agreement by majority decision would be much greater than if voters consulted egoistic values only. Does this suggest that ethics may have survival value for political systems and therefore descriptive as well as prescriptive significance?”
Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tullock and an Existence Theorem", Public Choice, Vol. 6 (Spring, 1969)