Social Choice and Justice (Volume 1)

by Kenneth J. Arrow

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.

In this first volume, Arrow takes up the basic question of whether collective choices can be made in such a way as to reflect individual preferences. The seminal 1950 paper that opens the volume shows that given certain reasonable conditions that social choices must satisfy to reflect individual preferences, it is impossible to make a choice among all sets of alternatives without violating some of the conditions. The subsequent papers extend, deepen, and clarify these results and examine the concept of justice, both in the abstract and in economic models. The volume also contains searching critiques of the theories of justice of John Rawls and Robert Nozick.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Nick Klagge · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was literally a "moldy old tome." It was one of several economics books that was severely water damaged when our apartment in Brooklyn sprang a leak during Hurricane Irene in 2011. Many of them were damaged beyond repair, but a couple, including this one, were mostly OK, aside from a little mold. Although I got rid of a ton of books when I moved to California, this is one of the ones I kept. After reading Marie Kondo's book, I set myself a goal of reading the few books I still have that have been sitting unread for years, and this was the first one. (I'm sure I had already had it for years before Irene.)

It's a collection of papers, and is not exactly ideal for reading cover to cover. I skimmed parts of it, in part because I didn't really care to go through equations one by one, and in part because there is a fair amount of repetition (the first several essays are all more or less expositions of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem). But, other parts were surprisingly readable. My favorite pieces were the ones on Rawls and Nozick, and actually, I think the main benefit I got out of this book was being reminded that I should read Rawls and Nozick! The most interesting topic for me was intergenerational justice, i.e., what a justice lens has to say about tradeoffs between consumption and investment. Arrow's treatment here was very high-level, but enough to get me interested.