On being a student of Ken Arrow

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This article is part of a series including:

Kenneth Arrow and nonequilibrium economics†

An open mind: memories of Ken Arrow

Path-breaking contributions of K. J. Arrow

Kenneth Arrow as teacher and adviser

Notes

† Of course economics does not have the same empirical-experimental validity as say physics.

‡ Yale’s graduate class ended up being twice as large as normal that year, and included several future superstars of our profession.

† I also asked him how he managed to travel so much and yet still write so many papers. He said he worked very well on airplanes. A little later David Herlihey, the head of Mather House and an economic historian, told me had had just flown back from Japan, intending to write up his notes on the plane, but my adviser was snoring so loudly in the row behind that Herlihy couldn’t write. I reported this conversation to Arrow and asked how it squared with his claims about working on planes. He said good sleep is very productive work.

‡ At the 19th and last summer Arrow was director, there was a celebratory concert given by Israel’s most famous trio. At intermission everyone kept their seats, and many toasts were given to honor Arrow. The last speaker Eric Maskin, who was taking over the next year as director of the economics summer school, lamented that there was nothing left to say about Arrow. With that he asked the clarinetist to give him his seat, and after intermission the concert continued without missing a beat but with the new clarinetist.

§ Arrow was a devotee of Gilbert and Sullivan, memorizing the lyrics and performing various roles on stage in Harvard student productions.

¶ Waiting in the lunch line at the Santa Fe Institute in 1995 I remarked that it was the 550th anniversary of the Council of Florence, at which the Byzantines had agreed to end the Schism and join the Catholic Church in exchange for a Papal army to protect Constantinople against the Turks. I knew this because my father was a Professor of Byzantine and Renaissance History, and I shamelessly wanted to show that I knew something I figured the two polymaths didn’t. Unfortunately for me, they responded by competing over who could name more delegates to the Council (the Byzantine Patriarch had just died and was not in attendance).

∥ Among other things, Arrow had almost a complete mastery of the Shakespearian classics.

† Arrow seemed unaware in 1969 of the related work of Liindahl in 1919.