"Then during the early '50s Kenneth Arrow published his book Social Choice and Individual Values (1951). That stirred up a great deal of interest, both in political science and economics. My general reaction was that the people who criticized Arrow, and Arrow himself, really didn't quite get the message in the sense that the concentration was on the fact that majority rule would not give you a political equilibrium, that you get this political cycle and so forth. My criticism basically was, if that's the way the preferences are, that's what you want to have. A democracy should not mean one majority simply ruling. It ought to be a rotation, if that's the way the preferences are. I was kind of an anti-majoritarian then and now. So my critique of Arrow, which not many people paid much attention to, got me further into thinking about these things."
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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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James M. Buchanan, "Interview with James Buchanan" in The Region (September 1995)
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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