17. The Impossibility of Public Good

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the California Idea of higher education emerged, within the policy framework of the mixed public and private economy inherited from the New Deal era, a different set of ideas about government and the public good was also being developed. In 1951, defense intellectual Kenneth Arrow published a paper on social choice and individual values, first prepared when he was working as a summer intern at the RAND Corporation in 1948, in which he inquired into whether it was possible to derive collectively rational decisions from the aggregation of individuals’ preferences. Arrow used set theory