Kenneth Arrow Quotes

The Soviet Union and its satellite Socialist countries in Eastern Europe have typically avoided unemployment and business cycles, except as they are induced through their trade with the Western World. But on the other hand they are clearly inefficient and wasteful, at least relative to the West. As repeated statements by the socialist economists themselves make clear, the excessive concentration of economic decision-making is a prime cause of the inefficiency. There are recurring demands for "liberalization," even by the highest authorities (Yuri Andropov, the effective head of the Soviet Union, being the latest example), but they are responded to only mildly or not at all. Clearly, a really major step toward decentralization of economic power, to the plant managers or the workers themselves, is perceived as a threat to the system.

I think one of the things we learned from the physicists and also the theoretical biologists is the idea that when you're dealing with very complex systems you're going to get a large variety of behavior which can be interpreted as hill climbing, but hill climbing with a lot of modifications, hill climbing with big jumps occasionally. This is an elaboration of the idea of the learning model. The learning model story takes off from psychology, but the adaptive processes take off from biology and physics. They have the same story. One thing it does suggest in some sense is that we have to be more modest in what we claim.

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.

The case for equality may be made on other than utilitarian grounds; thus J. Rawls has, argued for maximizing the minimum utility, rather than the sum of utilities, as an ethical criterion, and this criterion would tend toward output equality and therefore strong input progressivity.

Uncertainty means that we do not have a complete description of the world which we fully believe to be true.

The choice among these alternatives in any given case depends on the degree of difficulty consumers have in making the choice unaided, and on the consequences of errors of judgment. It is the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable. The certification proposal never seems to have been discussed seriously.

From a theoretical viewpoint, one might say that the market is in a strange sort of equilibrium; there is some shadowy sort of price at which supply and demand are equated at zero. But this price is not performing much of a signaling function.

I think we may safely agree that the notion of democracy has two components, both indispensable: 1) the securing of the freedom of the individual so that he may develop his individual potential; 2) a symmetric mutual respect of the individuals in the society for each other. These aims are, as has been frequently remarked, partly competitive; but, it must also be stressed, they are to a very considerable extent complementary. A hierarchical society marked by great inequalities in power and esteem will surely not tolerate the liberties of those most disadvantaged. Conversely a world in which individuals have their liberties tightly confined must be one in which there are large inequalities of power.

Nevertheless, when all due allowances are made, the coherence of individual economic decisions is remarkable. As incomes rise and demands shift, for example, from food to clothing and housing, the labor force and productive facilities follow suit. Similarly, and even more surprising to the layman, there is a mutual interaction between shifts in technology and the allocation of the labor force. As technology improves exogenously, through innovations, the labor made redundant does not become permanently unemployed but finds its place in the economy. It is truly amazing that the lessons of both theory and more than a century of history are still so misunderstood. On the other hand, a growing accumulation of instruments of production raises real wages and in turn induces a rise in the prices of labor-intensive commodities relative to those which use little labor. All these phenomena show that by and large and in the long view of history, the economic system adjusts with a considerable degree of smoothness and indeed of rationality to changes in the fundamental facts within which it operates.

The concept of rationality used throughout this study is at the heart of modern economic analysis, and it cannot be denied that it has great intuitive appeal; but closer analysis reveals difficulties.

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.

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.

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.

The aim of achieving an equal distribution of political power requires a restriction on the inequalities of wealth and income.

Dynamic analysis may have deeper implications if we depart from the analysis of stationary states. The frim must now serve some additional roles. In the absence of futures markets, the firm must serve as a forecaster and as a bearer of uncertainty. Further, from a general equilibrium point of view, the forecasts of others become relevant to the evaluation of the firm's shares and therefore possibly of the firm's behavior.