The emergence of social choice at the Cowles Commission, 1948–1952: Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values in context
Robert Dimand
The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2023, vol. 30, issue 5, 791-811
Abstract:
Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values (Cowles Monograph No. 12, 1951), a work that established the field of social choice and set the limits for what public economic theory could hope to achieve, was formulated at the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago from 1947 to 1949 (and during the summer of 1948 at the RAND Corporation) in a context in which concern with using economic theory to guide the economy was intense. During the period just before he shared in developing the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie proof of existence of general equilibrium, Arrow moved through a series of papers to prove the non-existence of a social welfare function. The context of Arrow’s non-existence proof for aggregation of individual preferences into social welfare function and to Arrow’s shift from trying to prove a possibility theorem for social welfare to proving an impossibility theorem has been confused by a reprinted and influential reminiscence in which Arrow mis-remembered when he had spent a summer at RAND and when he had presented his impossibility theorem to the Econometric Society.
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2023.2248313 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:eujhet:v:30:y:2023:i:5:p:791-811
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20
DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2023.2248313
Access Statistics for this article
The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso
More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().