Will I love The Limits of Organization?

In this slim book, Ken Arrow – Nobel laureate and “one of the transcendent minds in the history of economics” – reveals with extraordinary clarity many essential truths about how the world works and why.

The first of these four essays is among the most eloquent and succinct statement about the core conflicts humanity faces: between the individual and society, between freedoms and collective obligation, between compromise and commitment.

Given that context, Arrow builds a framework for understanding the nature of organizations: their purposes, processes, and the central role of information. The clarity with which Arrow has developed this economics… show more.

The core question in social science may well be this: markets or central planning? This short book contains one person’s take on that big question. That person, Ken Arrow, many believe to be the greatest economic theorist of the past hundred years. His clarity, constraint, and curiosity inspire awe. Arrow, who derived the fundamental welfare theorems of economics, describes the advantages markets as only he can without being blind to their shortcomings; markets reward selfishness and fail to include any defensible distribution of income. His rich, prescient analysis of formal organizations goes far beyond the standard transaction costs logic and… show more.