"The interesting thing is that Ken Arrow was a dove and Bob Solow was then a hawk, in 1963-4. We used to have huge debates. Hahn was very hawkish, Meade was hawkish, only Arrow and what's now the Cambridge left were doves, particularly the Asians, for obvious reasons. After all, it was the Asians who were being napalmed. There were terrible fights going on, and the beginning of huge rifts in the faculty over the Vietnam war. Solow switched, later on, and to his everlasting credit came out and said he'd switched. Arrow was always a dove. That's why, fond as I am of Bob Solow, and much thought I admire him, I've always admired Arrow more, because Arrow, I think, has always had the right instincts. He's a self-declared socialist, he was a dove, he was always active on civil rights, he fought for Sam Bowles at Harvard, and so on. He's always gone out on a limb for the right issues - on the left issues, actually. By that time (1967-8), I was in the thick of moratoria and death threats and bombs and all the rest of it. I wrote the survey in about four months. It was refereed by Arrow, Stiglitz, Samuelson and one other - I've never found out who it was. Samuelson recommended publication 'as is'. Arrow wrote to me and said, 'May I use you brilliant survey for my graduate class at Harvard?', which is the letter I prize most of any I've received in all the world. Stiglitz didn't say anything at the time, but he saved it all up for when he wrote that very critical review article of my book (which he kept calling my article!) in the Journal of Political Economy."
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Academics from the United StatesPeople from New York CityMathematicians from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesNobel laureates in Economics
Original Language: English
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Geoffrey Harcourt, quoted in Conversations with Post Keynesians (1995) by J. E. King
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arrow
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Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Joseph Arrow (August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, who was Professor Emeritus of Economics in Stanford, and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972.
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