Biography of Kenneth Arrow

Intellectual economic earthquakes

August 23, 1921 Kenneth Joseph Arrow was born in New York on August 23, 1921. The American economist is together with John Hicks, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in the year 1972, thanks to their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory. He attended first the Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York where he graduated in 1940. Perfects her studies at Columbia University where he obtained a master in 1941. He interrupted his studies due to the outbreak of the second World War: Kenneth Arrow's Meteorological Service official in the army of the United States, from 1942 until 1946. Back at Columbia university in 1946, where he continued his studies; during the same period is also a research associate at The Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago and an Assistant Professor of Economics at the same University. They married in 1947 and married Selma Schweitzer, with whom he had two sons, David Michael and Andrew Seth. In 1951 gets a doctorate at Columbia. With the Nobel Prize of 1972, 51 years Kenneth Arrow is the youngest winner of the prestigious award. It is also one of the first to be awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, as the Central Bank of Sweden expanded the award to that field only in 1968. In 2004 the President of the United States George w. Bush delivered to Arrow the "National Medal of Science", Scientific American's highest award, for his contributions in research on determination of decisions under conditions of imperfect information and on risk management. Kenneth Arrow is a founding member of the Pontifical Academy of social sciences: is considered one of the founders of modern neoclassical economics. His main contributions relate to the analysis of situations of general equilibrium and the theory of social choice, a field in which he contributed with his theorem the impossibility. The demonstration of the "Arrow's impossibility theorem" implies the impossibility of representative democracy based on principles that are usually considered the basis of democracy itself: equality of votes, uniqueness of choice, guaranteed results. Arrow has also contributed to other areas of economic research as the endogenous growth theory--concerning the study of technological changes, considered a key element of economic growth-and the study of asymmetric information in markets: in many transactions, part-usually the seller-it has more information about the product, compared to the other party (for example, buy). These asymmetries encourage predatory behavior by the operator more precise information. The result was the birth of tools to operate these markets, while under the asymmetries, such as guarantees and authentication by a third party. Arrow has devoted himself to the issue of asymmetric information in medical care, exchange of securities in the secondary market in insurance and in online auctions.
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