Social Choice and Individual Values, Second edition (Cowles Foundation Monographs Series) (Paperback)

~ Kenneth J. Arrow (Author) "In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make "political" decisions, and the..." (more)
Key Phrases: social ordering corresponding, weak ordering relation, vidual orderings, New York, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal (more...)

Product Details

• Paperback: 138 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 2nd edition (September 10, 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300013647
• ISBN-13: 978-0300013641
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #382,102 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, but probably not the same one Garrett read, February 19, 2000

By	A MATH NERD (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

I usually only write reviews here about inexpensive math textbooks, but when I saw the other review, I had to add my two cents. This book is a great work of scholarship about the theory of voting and social choice, fields which this book(in its original form as Arrow's PhD thesis created). It is a totally theoretical work, which does not espouse anything about how one should live, contrary to what the other reviewer says. Very certainly, it says nothing about conformity. In a certain very tenuous sense, one could say that the conclusions favor the individual over society, but the work makes no value judgements that kind.

The theory of social choice is concerned with the logical problem of defining what it would mean to say that 'society prefers x to y'. More concretely, given a set of abstract individuals, each with their own set of values, how can we put these individual values together to determine what "society" wants. In particular, this theory clearly has relevance to voting, but it is abstract and has wider relevance as well. Arrow shows in this work that a few very reasonable assumptions about how these social values should behave in relation to the individual values are in fact contradictory(provided one has more than three people in the population-with two good old democracy works perfectly), forcing one to conclude that perhaps the concept of social choice is meaningless.

So he proves that an informal concept of social choice is contradictory, but that doesn't mean that if one takes weaker axioms, you can't get a consistent concept, and he studies this question, a topic of much further research, in the later chapters.

One thing to note is that Arrow's original proof was in fact fallacious, but in this book he provides a fix.

So, it can be tempting to read this work as being opposed to the idea that a society itself can have values, and thus individualism is all, but this was not at all the spirit in which the book was written, which is the spirit of mathematics(though no mathematics is used) and of welfare economics(which is not about welfare in the sense of a government giving money to the poor).

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, October 9, 2009

By	Luis R. C. Creuz - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Fantastic and a classic book.
And the store send it very fast, considering the shipment to Brazil.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you want to understand a basic logic about collective choice......, August 3, 2007

By	Do Jong Yun "Jong Yoon DOH" (Brussels, Belgium) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As already well known, this book is one of the great books beyond economic scholar area. In particular, this book give us an appropriate answer "what is rational choice in collective choice?(even Arrow's word, social choice)". Arrow firstly proposes "paradox of voting", which is incompatibility of individual choice in one subset as pre-definition. This is to say, paradox of between "individual choice and collective one". And then he dissects "alterantive" in one subset as choice definition. The arternative is based on several axims and conditions about preference and ordering in propositions of well-fare social choice. This book however cannot be considered as very readable one because you need strong conceivable ability and tolerable endurance to understand his all propostions, but must read it for further studies regarding collective choice. That is to say, if you want to understand collective choice theory, this book give you so important and basic several definitions and propositions including mathematic knowledge. Despite hard to way, but absolutely need to way!