Introduction to a special issue in honor of Kenneth Arrow

Excerpt

On February 21, 2017, the fields of economics and political science lost a luminary with the passing of Kenneth J. Arrow, one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century. Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” (1951, 1963) represents the starting point of modern social choice theory, and the axiomatic method he employed in its presentation and proof represents a cornerstone of the modern theory of measurement. Arrow won the John Bates Clark Medal in 1957. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1972—the youngest person to ever receive the prize—for his work on welfare economics and general equilibrium theory. In a career spanning over seventy years Arrow made a staggering number of contributions to social science, including to topics as varied as choice under uncertainty and risk, asymmetric information, the economics of research and development, endogenous growth theory, and climate change. …