Preface

Summary

This book emerged from the celebration of Kenneth Arrow's 70th birthday at a workshop entitled “Columbia Celebrates Arrow's Contributions” in October 1991. This took place at Columbia University, where he studied between 1941 and 1950, and obtained his PhD degree under the supervision of Harold Hotelling and Albert Hart. The papers presented at that workshop to a most enthusiastic audience were special. It was a heartwarming event. It was later suggested that those papers, and those of other authors closely related to Ken Arrow, be compiled in a volume in his honor to memorialize this happy occasion. Uncharacteristically for such a volume, the book starts with a paper by Arrow himself, which he presented at the Columbia workshop. His piece on information and uncertainty reflects upon the future of industrial societies in a most original and thoughtprovoking manner. Each subsequent author reflects on an aspect of the uncertainty-information axis, which, as argued below, is a representation of a tug-of-war between the individual, whose life is short and whose capacities to predict are limited, and society, which exists in a more atemporal world.

Many thanks are owed to the authors who kindly helped with the process of producing this book, and to close associates and colleagues at Columbia who provided invaluable support: Drs. Yun Lin and Yuqing Zhao, Geoffrey Heal, Bruce Greenwald, Ned Phelps, David Krantz and Duncan Foley; also to colleagues at Stanford University where some of the work was completed: Paul Milgrom, David Starrett, and Paul Ehrlich, and to my daughter Natasha Chichilnisky-Heal, and Kim Stack and Grace Fernandez of the Program on Information and Resources (PIR) at Columbia.