Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kenneth Arrow Made Great Models, and Was One

The late Nobel laureate in economics used abstract math to describe the real world.

February 23, 2017 at 2:15 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

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Economics has taken a lot of flak lately – from esteemed sources, no less – for relying on math that’s so abstract that it doesn’t look like the real world at all. There’s something to that critique, and even economists make fun of themselves on this point. Sometimes, however, mathematical abstraction is precisely what enables economics to help us understand and improve the real world.

Kenneth Arrow, a deeply influential Nobel laureate in economics who died on Tuesday, developed many of the frameworks and ideas that are the foundation of modern economics.