Four of his students (Roger Myerson, Eric Maskin, John Harsanyi, and Michael Spence) went on to become Nobel laureates themselves.

His contributions to social choice theory, notably his "impossibility theorem", and his work on general equilibrium analysis are significant.

[10] He graduated from Townsend Harris High School and then earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1940, where he was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon.

He then attended Columbia University for graduate studies, obtaining a master's degree in mathematics in June 1941.

[14] Four of his former students have gone on to become Nobel Prize winners, namely John Harsanyi, Eric Maskin, Roger Myerson, and Michael Spence.

[17]In what he named the General Impossibility Theorem, he theorized that, unless we accept to compare the levels of utility reached by different individuals, it is impossible to formulate a social preference ordering that satisfies all of the following conditions:[18] The theorem has implications for welfare economics and theories of justice, and for voting theory (it extends the Condorcet paradox).

Following Arrow's logical framework, Amartya Sen formulated the liberal paradox which argued that given a status of "Minimal Liberty" there was no way to obtain Pareto optimality, nor to avoid the problem of social choice of neutral but unequal results.

[5] Written in 1776, The Wealth of Nations is an examination of economic growth brought forward by the division of labor, by ensuring interdependence of individuals within society.

This experience of balance is indeed so widespread that it raises no intellectual disquiet among laymen; they take it so much for granted that they are not disposed to understand the mechanism by which it occurs.

[22]In 1951, Arrow presented the first and second fundamental theorems of welfare economics and their proofs without requiring differentiability of utility, consumption, or technology, and including corner solutions.

Endogenous growth theory started with Paul Romer's 1986 paper,[24] borrowing from Arrow's 1962 "learning-by-doing" model which introduced a mechanism to eliminate diminishing returns in aggregate output.

Arrow was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1957[28] and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959.

[37] In 1947, he married Selma Schweitzer, graduate in economics at the University of Chicago[38] and psychotherapist, who died in 2015; they had two children, David Michael (b.

On one occasion (recounted by Eric Maskin), in an attempt to artificially test Arrow's knowledge, the junior faculty agreed to closely study the breeding habits of gray whales—a suitably obscure topic—and discuss it in his presence.