Kenneth Arrow

This survey article (in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) offers an introduction to the field of social choice theory. It covers: (i) the history of social choice theory; (ii) three formal arguments for majority rule (procedural, epistemic, and utilitarian); (iii) preference aggregation; (iv) welfare aggregation; (v) judgment aggregation; and (vi) other topics.
Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-choice/

Virtue ethics interprets human action as pursuing good ends through practices that develop qualities internal to those final goals. The philosophical approach has been identified as critical of economics, leading in turn to the innovative response that by viewing the market as mutually beneficial exchange, economic practice is in fact defendable on virtue ethics grounds. This defends economics using arguments drawn from virtue ethics, but there is a need also to explore space for virtue ethics within economic theory. Examining key contributions of Kenneth J. Arrow, Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, the article notes that virtue ethics' appreciation of persons' communicability of ends is increasingly being relied upon within economics, though sometimes under different names. Its strength to interdisciplinary work between economics and philosophy lies in presenting a methodology able to capture how human beings are capable of, though not fixated on, cooperation.

This paper considers the contribution positive political theory has made to the resolution of “Hobbes’ Problem”—the problem of describing the nature of artificial persons, such as states. This problem plays a central role in both empirical and normative work in political science. Several areas of positive political theory, most notably social choice theory, have shed light on Hobbes’ Problem, and the results have been generally negative. That is to say, they have suggested that the conditions necessary to generate an artificial collective agent out of the individual agents comprising it may be impossible to satisfy,
at least if this is done in a nontrivial way. While efforts to establish the possibility of a collective agent continue—notably in recent work by Christian List and Philip Pettit—the primary accomplishment of positive political theory has been to raise the question of whether Hobbes’ Problem can be solved at all.

Majority cycling and related social choice paradoxes are often thought to threaten the meaningfulness of democracy. Deliberation can protect against majority cycles-not by inducing unanimity, which is unrealistic, but by bringing preferences closer to single-peakedness. We present the first empirical test of this hypothesis, using data from Deliberative Polls. Comparing preferences before and after deliberation, we find increases in proximity to single-peakedness. The increases are greater for lower-versus higher-salience issues and for individuals who seem to have deliberated more versus less effectively. They are not merely a by-product of increased substantive agreement (which in fact does not generally increase). Our results are important, quite apart from their implications for majority cycling, because single-peakedness can be naturally interpreted in terms of an underlying issue dimension, which can both clarify the debate and allow a majority-winning alternative to be interpreted as a median choice and thus as an attractive "compromise."

Amalgamating evidence of different kinds for the same hypothesis into an overall confirmation is analogous, I argue, to amalgamating individuals’ preferences into a group preference. The latter faces well-known impossibility theorems, most famously Arrow’s Theorem. Once the analogy between amalgamating evidence and amalgamating preferences is tight, it is obvious that amalgamating evidence might face a theorem similar to Arrow’s. I prove that this is so, and end by discussing the plausibility of the axioms required for the theorem.

Parte 1 - Um ensaio sobre a literatura e as novas formas de censura (André Rangel Rios)
Derrida e a militância literária
Parte 2 - Três ensaios sobre Derrida e a literatura (Luiz Fernando Medeiros de Carvalho)
Literatura como promessa
Memórias do traço em Retratos-Relâmpago
Malícia do verso

“Las ideas forman el curso de la historia”
John Maynard Keynes

Kenneth Joseph Arrow, falleció esta semana a los 95 años de edad en su casa de Palo Alto; California. Figura legendaria de las ciencias económicas por la influencia de sus ideas; es el ganador más joven hasta el momento del Nobel de Economía que recibió en 1972 a los 51 años; fue también investigador y docente infatigable que trabajó casi hasta el último día de su vida. Fue además de académico, un promotor de la igualdad, de la paz y seguridad mundial y de las investigaciones sobre la salud humana.

La influencia del pensamiento económico de Arrow
Aclamado como economista, reconocido por los miembros de su generación; Arrow también formó a economistas de generaciones posteriores. Poseedor de una cultura, rapidez mental e inteligencia excepcional, Kenneth Arrow tenía un gusto especial por el arte e historia china y la obra de Shakespeare; sus discípulos alababan la humildad con la que debatía, pero precisan que inevitablemente terminaba imponiéndose ante el debate de cualquier tema. Su familia afirma que todo le interesaba, de todo quería documentarse y el único debate que perdía era el de los juegos de la NFL.

El Teorema de la Imposibilidad
La contribución más destacada, o al menos más popular  de Arrow se conoce como el "Teorema de la Imposibilidad" y es una condición que está presente en la toma de decisiones de la vida diaria e incluso se expresa en el tipo de democracia que es mundialmente la más común: la representativa. El estudio del Teorema es básico en numerosas ciencias; economía, política, filosofía e incluso las ciencias computacionales. Básicamente el teorema se refiere a que ningún procedimiento de votación puede ser plenamente satisfactorio y que los resultados electorales pueden ser irracionales aun cuando todos los votantes sean racionales. El éxito electoral del populismo, del Brexit y de Donald Trump, es en cierta medida una manifestación del Teorema de la Imposibilidad de Kennneth Arrow y demuestra su vigencia presente y futura.

Un economista de múltiples ideas
Con su trabajo Arrow influyó sobre la teoría de juegos, la elección social, la votación por mayoría, la teoría del bienestar, el crecimiento endógeno, el equilibrio general y los contratos. Fundó incluso los estudios de economía de la salud y en la última etapa de su vida, era un férreo defensor de la igualdad de razas, de la intervención gubernamental para apoyar la innovación, del desarrollo de la economía de la información y escribió textos sobre los peligros del cambio climático. Arrow siempre usó modelos matemáticos para expresar ideas en casi todos los campos de la economía, pero siempre fue explícito acerca de la limitación de estos modelos.

The article sets out to reconstruct the ongoing re-discussion of role of morality in the economic subsystem. Traditional dichotomies between selfishness and benevolence, individual and collective interest, equality and efficiency have been shown to need more cautious reformulation. The claim is that, rather than taking sides for or against the reasons of  ‘man’ or ‘solidarity’ against alleged reasons of the economy or the market, what is required is better understanding of the ways economies and markets work.

This paper considers in detail the ontological and normative presuppositions of the state-contingent approach to pricing commodities first introduced by Arrow (Le rôle des valeurs boursières pour la répartition la meilleure des risques. Econo-métrie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1953) in his model of general equilibrium under uncertainty, which became a milestone in the theory of finance. By contextualizing Arrow's fundamental contribution and subsequent developments in finance, it demonstrates how this new conceptual framework implied certain technologies-both intellectual and financial. In showing how theoretical thinking about finance was underlying institutional developments in finance, this paper complements the familiar narrative of the performativity of economics. Keywords Performativity · General equilibrium · State pricing approach · Arrow securities · Market socialism · Normativity

Most accounts of welfare aggregation in the tradition of Kenneth Arrow's and Amartya Sen's social-choice-theoretic frameworks represent the welfare of an individual in terms of a single welfare ordering or a single one-dimensional welfare function. I develop a multidimensional generalization of Arrow's and Sen's frameworks, representing individual welfare in terms of multiple personal welfare functions, corresponding to multiple 'dimensions' of welfare. I show that, as in the one-dimensional case, the existence of compelling aggregation procedures depends on certain informational assumptions, specifically about the measurability of welfare and its comparability not only across individuals but also across dimensions. I state several impossibility and possibility results. Under Arrow-type conditions, insufficient comparability across individuals leads to dictatorship of a single individual, while insufficient comparability across dimensions leads to dominance of a single dimension. Given sufficient comparability both across individuals and across dimensions, a range of possibilities emerges. I discuss the substantive implications of the results.
Preprint available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/699/1/MSWFL.pdf
The definitive version is published in Public Choice 119 (1-2), pp. 119-142, 2004

reconstruct a few themes of the early twentieth-century discussion that headed to the claim of a value-free character of economic theory and of the subsequent discussion that headed to a resumption of a rich discussion of economic ethics and of applied ethics with regard to economic practices. I examine the dicussion on value-freedom from classical political economy to Robbins, the role played by utilitarianism in economic theory and the puzzles connected to the idea of utility and several recent discussions on social choice, welfare, and collective choice. I end by discussing a few good reasons for the revival of business ethics.

Abstract This paper discusses the thesis that in Arrow's Possibility Theorem the dictator (merely) serves as a solution to the logical problem of aggregating preference while Machi-avelli's dictator, the Prince, has the historical function to bring order into a world of chaos and ...