Noble winning economist Kenneth J Arrow dies

TIL Desk/World/Palo Alto-Kenneth J Arrow, the youngest-ever winner of a Nobel prize for economics, whose theories on risk, innovation and the basic mathematics of markets have influenced thinking on everything from voting to health insurance to high finance, has died. He was 95. Arrow died Tuesday at his home in Palo Alto, in the San Fancisco Bay Area, according to his son, David Arrow.

“He was a very loving, caring father and a very, very humble man. He’d do the dishes every night and cared about people very much,” David Arrow said. “I think in his academic career, when people talk about it, it often sounds like numbers and probabilities. But a large focus of his work was how people matter.” “The fact that people often don’t behave rationally … that was one aspect that he often looked at, how it affected the lives of the people,” he said.

Arrow and British economist Sir John R. Hicks shared the 1972 Nobel memorial prize in economic science for their pioneering mathematical work on general equilibrium theory, which says that there is an overall balance between supply and demand in an economy as a whole. Their mathematical models dealt with the factors involved, such as when and where a product is sold.