Kenneth Arrow Quotes
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 market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions.
Kenneth Joseph Arrow, Economist & Nobel Laureate, Member, Council of Economic Advisers, Social Choice and Individual Values, 1951
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This was the classic, historical argument the Fascists made to justify their take over of democratic societies; the argument made by every military junta that illegally seized power; by Julius Caesar when he took control of Rome.
See {585465} and {585466} for a similar view.
Socialism in its then pure form had the state owning and controlling all the major assets of the nation. In this sense it was contradictory to individual freedom and hence democracy. However, in the years after Tocqueville’s quotation and the industrial revolution, socialism has gradually moved away from state ownership and operations of all institutions and resources. Democracy has tended to adopt a more regulatory view to control the excesses of unbridled capitalism. The range of democratic nations by the 21st century encompassed differences but some were described as “social democracies” and had some state ownership but were basically capitalistic economies. Even the self-described Communist nations had become heavily capitalistic albeit with less political freedom. At the same time, even the United States—the epitome of 21st century capitalism, owned and controlled a few of the resources and means of production and tended to regulate the others—a substantial difference from the American democracy which Tocqueville studied.
Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972.
