Kenneth Arrow: Socialism

Kenneth Arrow was American economist. Explore interesting quotes on socialism.
Kenneth Arrow: 74   quotes 1   like

“I want, however, to conclude by calling attention to a less visible form of social action: norms of social behavior, including ethical and moral codes. I suggest as one possible interpretation that they are reactions of society to compensate for market failures. It is useful for individuals to have some trust in each other's word. In the absence of trust it would become very costly to arrange for alternative sanctions and guarantees, and many opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation would have to be, foregone.”

Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow, “The Organization of Economic Activity: Issues Pertinent to the Choice of Market versus Non-market Allocation” (1969)
1950s-1960s

Behavior , Failure

“Trust is an important lubricant of a social system. It is extremely efficient; it saves a lot of trouble to have a fair degree of reliance on other people's word. Unfortunately this is not a commodity which can be bought very easily. If you have to buy it, you already have some doubts about what you have bought.”

Kenneth Arrow

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 1, Rationality: Individual And Social, p. 23

People

“From the point of view of seeking a consensus of the moral imperative of individuals, such consensus being assumed to exist, the problem of choosing an electoral or other choice mechanism, or, more broadly, of choosing a social structure, assumes an entirely different form from that discussed in the greater part of this study.”

Kenneth Arrow

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 85

Problem , Study , Parting

“The idealist doctrine then may be summed up by saying that each individual has two orderings, one which governs him in his everyday actions, and one which would be relevant under some ideal conditions and which is in some sense truer than the first ordering. It is the latter which is considered relevant to social choice, and it is assumed that there is complete unanimity with regard to the truer individual ordering.”

Kenneth Arrow

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 83

Sense

“I want to stress that rationality is not a property of the individual alone, although it is usually presented that way. Rather, it gathers not only its force but also its very meaning from the social context in which it is embedded.”

Kenneth Arrow

1970s-1980s, "Rationality of Self and Others in an Economic System", 1986

Way

“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 its the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable. The certification proposal never seems to have been discussed seriously.”

Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow, "Uncertainty and The Welfare Economics of Medical Care", The American Economic Review(1953)
1950s-1960s

Error , Dependency

“As is by now well known, attempts to form social judgments by aggregating individual expressed preferences always lead to the possibility of paradox.”

Kenneth Arrow

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 1, Rationality: Individual And Social, p. 25

“In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions. In the emerging democracies with mixed economic systems Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia, the same two modes of making social choices prevail, though more scope is given to the method of voting and to decisions based directly or indirectly on it and less to the rule of the price mechanism. Elsewhere in the world, and even in smaller social units within the democracies, the social decisions are sometimes made by single individuals or small groups and sometimes (more and more rarely in this modern world) by a widely encompassing set of traditional rules for making the social choice in any given situation, for example, a religious code.”

Kenneth Arrow

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 1: Opening pharagraph

World , Democracy , Decision