Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Arrow (born 1921) is Paul Samuelson's brother-in-law. His first major work, forming his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University was Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), which brought economics into contact with political theory. This gave rise to social choice theory with the introduction of his "Possibility Theorem". In his words:

This sparked widespread discussion over how to interpret the different conditions of the theorem and what implications it had for democracy and voting. Most controversial of his four (1963) or five (1950/1951) conditions is the independence of irrelevant alternatives.

In the 1950s, Arrow and Gerard Debreu developed the Arrow-Debreu model of general equilibria. In 1971 Arrow with Frank Hahn co-authored General Competitive Analysis (1971), which reasserted a theory of general equilibrium of prices through the economy. In 1969 the Swedish Central Bank began awarding a prize in economics, as an analogy to the Nobel prizes awarded in Chemistry, Physics, Medicine as well as Literature and Peace (though Alfred Nobel never endorsed this in his will). With John Hicks, Arrow won the Bank of Sweden prize in 1972, the youngest recipient ever. The year before, US President Richard Nixon's had declared that "We are all Keynesians now".^[73] The irony was that this was the beginning of a new revolution in economic thought.