- Person
- Kenneth Arrow
- Lived
- 1921–2017
- Field
- Economics
- From
- American
The story
Kenneth Arrow had been a pacifist in the late 1930s, but he later said he came to see that the war had to be fought. He heard the news of Pearl Harbor when a Sunday radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic was interrupted. Then a graduate student at Columbia with a master's degree in mathematics, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, which placed him in research because of his training in mathematics and statistics.
He served from 1942 to 1946 as a weather officer, first in the Forecast Research Unit of the Weather Wing in Washington, D.C., and, after less than a year, in Asheville, North Carolina. Working with a desk calculator, he used probability and regression analysis to test how reliable long-range forecasts really were. Calculating a forecast for the Pacific for the next two or three days could take him eight hours, and he found the forecasts were not very accurate.
His most important project concerned fuel, which was scarce. He studied how bombers could fly long routes from the United States to Europe by a northerly path while taking advantage of prevailing winds and air pressure. Two well-known mathematicians had solved a version of the problem by treating the Earth as flat; Arrow solved it for a round Earth, and he and a team from the Women's Army Corps drew maps from his calculations. In an oral history he recalled that his method promised theoretical fuel savings of 15 to 20 percent, though his superiors never put it into wide use.
The work produced his first published paper, "On the Optimal Use of Winds for Flight Planning," which appeared in the Journal of Meteorology in 1949. After the war he was transferred to Langley Field in Virginia, promoted to captain, and left the service in 1946.
The project foreshadowed his later career. The operations research historians at INFORMS note that the wartime memorandum presaged his interest in using mathematics to optimise real decisions, an interest that led him to inventory theory at RAND and to help found Stanford's operations research department. He returned to Columbia on the G.I. Bill and soon began the work on social choice that would make his name.
Why it matters
Arrow's wartime problem-solving foreshadowed the operations research methods he later helped build, used today to plan efficient routes and schedules.
About Kenneth Arrow
Economist whose impossibility theorem, general-equilibrium proofs and work on risk, information and health care reshaped economics; still the youngest winner of the Nobel economics prize.
More about Kenneth Arrow
- Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu proved markets can balanceIn 1954 Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu published the first rigorous proof that a competitive economy can have a set of prices at which every market clears.
- Kenneth Arrow's 1963 paper launched health economicsKenneth Arrow's 1963 paper on uncertainty and medical care explained why health care markets behave differently, laying a foundation for health economics.
- Kenneth Arrow proved no voting system is perfectKenneth Arrow's 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values introduced his impossibility theorem and founded modern social choice theory.
- Kenneth Arrow showed how learning by doing drives growthKenneth Arrow's 1962 papers on learning by doing and on markets for invention helped economists explain where innovation and growth come from.
- Kenneth Arrow helped create Stanford's operations researchKenneth Arrow co-wrote a 1951 classic on optimal inventory policy and helped establish Stanford's operations research department in the early 1960s.
- Kenneth Arrow made the case for affordable malaria drugsIn 2004 Kenneth Arrow chaired an Institute of Medicine committee that called for a global subsidy so that effective malaria drugs could reach the world's poor.
Sources
- Kenneth Arrow oral history The National WWII Museum
- Kenneth J. Arrow: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Arrow, Kenneth J. INFORMS
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.