Kenneth Arrow developed the “impossibility theorem” which
argues against the possibility of a theoretically perfect democracy. His great discovery in the field of risk has
profoundly influenced the economics of insurance, medical care, prescription
drug testing and other social problems.
The Nobel Committee recognized Professor Arrow jointly with
John R. Hicks “for their pioneering contributions to general economic
equilibrium theory and welfare theory.”
Quotes from Kenneth Arrow’s November 1984 lecture at
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.
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.
I have tried to present, as clearly
as I can, the genesis of some of my researches.
They have all been related to the present state of thinking by
others. The field of science, indeed,
the whole world of human society, is a cooperative one. At each moment, we are competing, whether for
academic honors or business success. But
the background, and what makes society an engine of
progress, is a whole set of successes and even failures from which we all have
learned.
Additional resources on Kenneth
Arrow are available at the Nobel web
site.