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Title: Social Choice and Individual Values by Kenneth J. Arrow ISBN: 0-300-01364-7 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1970 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great book, but probably not the same one Garrett read
Comment: 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).
Rating: 5
Summary: A brilliant attack on sycophancy in support of individuality
Comment: This book espouses intransigent individuality while refuting blind conformity to societal norms.. . .A great work!
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Title: Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups by Mancur Olson ISBN: 0674537513 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1971 List Price(USD): $20.50 |
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Title: The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan, Gordon Tullock ISBN: 0472061003 Publisher: University of Michigan Press Pub. Date: June, 1962 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice by William H. Riker ISBN: 0881333670 Publisher: Waveland Press Pub. Date: July, 1988 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Essays on Economics and Economists by R. H. Coase ISBN: 0226111032 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: August, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science by Donald Green, Ian Shapiro ISBN: 0300066368 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: February, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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