JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
The Kenneth J. Arrow lectures are given in honor of Kenneth Arrow, who was one of Columbia’s most distinguished graduates. The topic of the second annual Arrow lecture, on which this book is based, was Ken’s thesis Social Choice and Individual Values. For anyone doing a PhD, it would be no bad thing to aspire to the standards this work has set.
The fact that Ken’s PhD thesis remains an icon more than a half century after its writing shows just how much it changed the way we think about the whole problem of social choice. That someone could even formulate the question his thesis poses reveals its author’s novel cast of mind. I find that it is still inspiring when I read it today.
The speakers for this lecture—Amartya Sen and Eric Maskin—were particularly suitable for the occasion because of their enormous contributions to the theory of social choice, elaborating on some of the ideas and aspects of the field that Ken opened up more than fifty years ago.
Amartya Sen has been so generously frequent and welcome a visitor at Columbia that I feel we can almost claim him as one of our own. I have known Amartya for more than forty years—we met in England when I was a graduate student in the late sixties—so his presence at the lecture was a particular pleasure for me. He is now the Thomas Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, and until recently he was the Master of Trinity College in Cambridge.
His research has ranged over a number of fields in economics, philosophy, and decision theory, and he has made particularly important contributions to the theory of social choice, which is our broad theme today. In 1998 he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his contribution to welfare economics, and his work on social choice was notably mentioned in the citation of the prize.
Amartya and I worked together on the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance in Social Progress (2009), which was set up by French president Nicholas Sarkozy to translate some of Amartya’s ideas into the measurements of a country’s economic performance. An earlier related work, the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program, has become a standard metric, especially in the context of evaluating the performance in developing countries. Amartya played a central role in creating and shaping that index.
Amartya’s recent book The Idea of Justice is an important work that critically takes on a range of thinkers from Adam Smith to Rawls who have written on this central subject in philosophy, politics, and economics. Some of the ideas surface in his contribution to this book.
The second speaker, Eric Maskin, was the Albert Hirschman Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton at the time of the lecture and is now the Adams University Professor at Harvard University. He is particularly well known for his work on mechanism design, including his work on how to design institutions for achieving particular social or economic goals. In recognition of his fundamental contributions, he shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Eric, like Amartya, has worked in many different fields. Indeed, his work has had a deep influence in almost every area of economics. It was a real pleasure to welcome him to Columbia.