Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Joseph Arrow

Arrow was born on 23 August 1921, in New York City. Growing up during the Great Depression, he embraced socialism in his youth. He would later move away from socialism, but his views retained a left-leaning philosophy. He earned a Bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1940 in mathematics. He attended Columbia University, for his graduate studies. While there, he studied under Harold Hotelling, and was greatly influenced by him. He received a Master's degree in 1941. He served as a weather officer in the United States Army Air Forces from 1942–1946.

I was not familiar with Ken Arrow until he was assigned as my alias, but after learning about him, Arrow has some great theorems and was a world renowned economist. He is best known for his impossibility theorem. He theorized that it was impossible to formulate a social preference ordering. In short, the theorem states that no rank-order electoral system can be designed that always satisfies these three "fairness" criteria:

• If every voter prefers alternative X over alternative Y, then the group prefers X over Y.
• If every voter's preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then the group's preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged (even if voters' preferences between other pairs like X and Z, Y and Z, or Z and W change).
• There is no "dictator": no single voter possesses the power to always determine the group's preference.

 Arrow is a Nobel Prize- winning economist, who's theories are applied to modern economics. He was one of the first economists to note the existence of a learning curve. He social- choice model can be used in many situations, will probably indirectly or directly be involved in this class.