Interpersonal Comparisons Of Welfare Research Articles

Interpersonal Comparisons of What?

I examine the once popular claim according to which interpersonal comparisons of welfare are necessary for social choice. I side with current social choice theorists in emphasizing that, on a narrow construal, this necessity claim is refuted beyond appeal. However, I depart from the opinion presently prevailing in social choice theory in highlighting that on a broader construal, this claim proves not only compatible with, but even comforted by, the current state of the field. I submit that all in all, the most accurate philosophical assessment consists not in flatly rejecting this necessity claim, but in accepting it in a suitably revised form.

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Utilitarianism with and without expected utility

We give two social aggregation theorems under conditions of risk, one for constant population cases, the other an extension to variable populations. Intra and interpersonal welfare comparisons are encoded in a single ‘individual preorder’. The theorems give axioms that uniquely determine a social preorder in terms of this individual preorder. The social preorders described by these theorems have features that may be considered characteristic of Harsanyi-style utilitarianism, such as indifference to ex ante and ex post equality. However, the theorems are also consistent with the rejection of all of the expected utility axioms, completeness, continuity, and independence, at both the individual and social levels. In that sense, expected utility is inessential to Harsanyi-style utilitarianism. In fact, the variable population theorem imposes only a mild constraint on the individual preorder, while the constant population theorem imposes no constraint at all. We then derive further results under the assumption of our basic axioms. First, the individual preorder satisfies the main expected utility axiom of strong independence if and only if the social preorder has a vector-valued expected total utility representation, covering Harsanyi’s utilitarian theorem as a special case. Second, stronger utilitarian-friendly assumptions, like Pareto or strong separability, are essentially equivalent to strong independence. Third, if the individual preorder satisfies a ‘local expected utility’ condition popular in non-expected utility theory, then the social preorder has a ‘local expected total utility’ representation. Fourth, a wide range of non-expected utility theories nevertheless lead to social preorders of outcomes that have been seen as canonically egalitarian, such as rank-dependent social preorders. Although our aggregation theorems are stated under conditions of risk, they are valid in more general frameworks for representing uncertainty or ambiguity.

Interpersonal Comparisons of What?

I examine the once popular claim according to which interpersonal comparisons of welfare are necessary for social choice. I side with current social choice theorists in emphasizing that, on a narrow construal, this necessity claim is refuted beyond appeal. However, I depart from the opinion presently prevailing in social choice theory in highlighting that on a broader construal, this claim proves not only compatible with, but even comforted by, the current state of the field. I submit that all in all, the most accurate philosophical assessment consists not in flatly rejecting this necessity claim, but in accepting it in suitably revised form.

Interpersonal comparisons with preferences and desires

Most moral and political theories require us to make interpersonal comparisons of welfare. This poses a challenge to the popular view that welfare consists in the satisfaction of preferences or desires, because interpersonal comparisons of preference or desire satisfaction are widely thought to be conceptually problematic, and purported solutions to this problem to lead to a hopeless subjectivism about these comparisons. In this article, I argue that the key to meeting this challenge lies in distinguishing preferences from desires, and preference satisfaction from desire satisfaction theories of welfare. More specifically, I defend three conclusions. First, interpersonal comparisons of preference satisfaction do raise a serious conceptual problem, but this same problem does not arise for interpersonal comparisons of desire satisfaction. Second, none of the existing solutions to the conceptual problem of interpersonal comparisons of preference satisfaction are satisfactory, since none explain how we can make interpersonal comparisons of preference satisfaction objectively. Third, we can at least make a limited range of objective interpersonal comparisons of desire satisfaction, and there are reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of making a wider range of such comparisons, but there is a need for further research on the topic.

La Determinación de Polígonos de Pobreza. Análisis metodológico

Introducción: Tanto las condiciones de pobreza como la ubicación espacial de la población, son dinámicos, por ello es fundamental determinar las áreas existentes donde habita la población con diferentes niveles y tipos de pobreza. La aportación de esta investigación consiste en la revisión de los planteamientos metodológicos empleados por las instancias que se relacionan e intervienen en la definición y análisis de los aspectos vinculados con la pobreza, así como el análisis de los diferentes criterios para la definición territorial de la pobreza empleados por dependencias e instancias de los tres niveles de gobierno dados que estos son distintos entre si.Dada la disparidad en los criterios para valorar la pobreza, las acciones emprendidas resultan aisladas y con impactos deficientes en los distintos sectores de la ciudad; por lo que esta investigación define distintas variables para tipificar la pobreza y establecer criterios de delimitación territorial mas adecuados a la realidad.Este artículo es el resultado de dos investigaciones diridigas y coordinadas por el autor durante los años 2009 y 2011; las cuales se titulan: “La Medición de la pobreza y su delimitación territorial. Propuesta metodológica para la definición de polígonos de pobreza en el Estado de Guanajuato.” (Universidad De La Salle Bajio) y “Estudio de Actualización de Polígonos de Pobreza en la ciudad de Leon, Gto.” (Universidad de Guanajuato-IMPLAN).Método: La metodología llevada a cabo consistió en: a) Desarrollo de un marco teórico conceptual de referencia a través de la revisión de los planteamientos metodológicos y perfiles teóricos empleados por las instancias que se relacionan e intervienen en la definición y análisis de los aspectos vinculados con la pobreza; b) Elaboración de la estructura y ruta critica del estudio. Determinación de Conceptos, Categorías, Variables e Indicadores para definición territorial de los polígonos de pobreza, c) Selección de los métodos para la construcción de índices relacionados con las variables identificadas, la selección de los métodos estadísticos para la caracterización y sistemas de correlación de variables e índices; d) Identificación y caracterización de las variables utilizadas para determinar la constitución territorial de los polígonos de pobreza, tomando como caso de estudio la ciudad de Leon, Guanajuato.Resultados: La complejidad de la problemática de la pobreza requiere un análisis con mayor profundidad de cada una de las dimensiones consideradas (incorporando aspectos como la calidad de los servicios recibidos o el uso efectivo de los mismos), así como de otros aspectos que inciden directamente en el nivel de vida de la población (tales como el acceso a infraestructura, el empleo y la discriminación). El concepto de pobreza debe incluir componentes absolutos y relativos, correspondiendo los primeros al cumplimiento de las condiciones de sobrevivencia, de manera independiente al tipo de organización y grado de desarrollo de la sociedad, y los segundos a las comparaciones interpersonales de bienestar. Discusión o Conclusión: Desde una perspectiva multidimensional, puede entenderse la pobreza como una serie de carencias definidas en múltiples dominios, como las oportunidades de participación en las decisiones colectivas, los mecanismos de apropiación de recursos o las titularidades de derechos que permiten el acceso al capital físico, humano o social, entre otros. Su naturaleza multidimensional, sin embargo, no requiere tomar en cuenta las situaciones de privación en todos los ámbitos en los que se puede desarrollar la vida de un individuo. El número y el tipo de dimensiones a considerar están directamente asociados a la forma en que se conciben las condiciones de vida mínimas o aceptables para garantizar un nivel de vida digno para todos y cada uno de los miembros de una sociedad.

Social choice with approximate interpersonal comparison of welfare gains

Suppose it is possible to make approximate interpersonal comparisons of welfare gains and losses. Thus, if $$w$$ , $$x$$ , $$y$$ and $$z$$ are personal states (each encoding all factors which influence the well-being of an individual), then it is sometimes possible to say “The welfare gain of the state change $$w\leadsto x$$ is greater than the welfare gain of the state change $$y\leadsto z$$ ”. We can represent this by the formula “ $$(w\leadsto x)\succeq (y\leadsto z)$$ ”, where $$(\succeq )$$ is a difference preorder: an incomplete preorder on the space of all possible personal state changes. A social state change is a bundle of personal state changes. A social difference preorder (SDP) is an incomplete preorder on the space of social state changes, which satisfies Pareto and Anonymity axioms. We characterize a family of SDPs which are roughly utilitarian in nature. We also apply the model to redistributive taxation.

Utilitarianism without Utility: A Missed Opportunity in Alfred Marshall's Theory of Market Choice

This article argues that Marshall's theory of market choice was originally elaborated within the classic framework of the use value/exchangeable value dichotomy, with reference to a version of utilitarianism that did not assume measurable utility. The key concepts were those of marginal transaction and consumer surplus or rent, both of which were expressed exclusively in terms of money transfers. Later on, Marshall moved toward an explicitly utilitarian framework by emphasizing the marginal utility of money, possibly because he had stumbled on the problem of the determinateness of marginal demand prices. The article shows that, by moving in this direction, Marshall committed himself to a standpoint that undermined the generality of his approach to consumer behavior and obscured his promising ideas concerning interpersonal comparisons of welfare. It is also argued that this move was actually unnecessary, as the early framework could have enabled Marshall to deal with the problem of determinateness in less restrictive terms.

“Preference Change and Interpersonal Comparisons of Welfare”

Suppose that we agree that for questions of justice in a pluralistic society, we need a public standard of welfare. An appropriate public standard of welfare will have to meet the following two requirements. First, its conception of each person's welfare should, to the greatest reasonable extent, be something that each person can recognise as encompassing the things she wants for herself and as giving these things weights that reflect the relative importance she gives to them. Second, it should be sensitive to the fact that reasonable people hold conflicting conceptions of what constitutes an individual's welfare. It should therefore, to the greatest reasonable extent, respect neutrality of judgement by refraining from endorsing any particular conception of welfare as superior to any other.

Preference Change and Interpersonal Comparisons of Welfare

Suppose that we agree that for questions of justice in a pluralistic society, we need a public standard of welfare. An appropriate public standard of welfare will have to meet the following two requirements. First, its conception of each person’s welfare should, to the greatest reasonable extent, be something that each person can recognise as encompassing the things she wants for herself and as giving these things weights that reflect the relative importance she gives to them. Second, it should be sensitive to the fact that reasonable people hold conflicting conceptions of what constitutes an individual’s welfare. It should therefore, to the greatest reasonable extent, respect neutrality of judgement by refraining from endorsing any particular conception of welfare as superior to any other.

Preference Change and Interpersonal Comparisons of Welfare

Can a preference-based conception of welfare accommodate changes in people's preferences? I argue that the fact that people care about which preferences they have, and the fact that people can change their preferences about which preferences it is good for them to have, together undermine the case for accepting a preference-satisfaction conception of welfare.

Moral Principles and Individual Rights: How to Use Ethical Imperatives to Solve the Gibbard's Libertarian Paradox

This paper examines the possibility of using interpersonal welfare comparisons and moral principles to solve the libertarian paradox by Gibbard (1974). The paper discusses different ways of introducing moral principles in social choice and provides alternative possibility results. First, it extends previous results by Wriglesworth (1985) and MacIntyre (1988) who sought a solution to Gibbard's paradox by using justice principles. Then, it explores how moral principles should, in general, enter social decisions and shows that the different ways of considering moral principles lead to different solutions of the Gibbard's libertarian conflict. Thus, this conflict simply becomes a disagreement as to how moral principles should enter social decisions, and different normative positions are possible.

Egalitarianism versus Utilitarianism

This paper is a comparative analysis of egalitarianism and utilitarianism from a naturalistic perspective that offers some insight into the manner in which we come to make interpersonal comparisons of welfare.

Simulation and Interpersonal Utility

The aim of this article is to show how research in cognitive science is relevant to a certain theoretical issue in moral theory, namely, the legitimacy of interpersonal utility (IU) comparisons. The legitimacy of IU comparisons is important to ethics for at least two reasons. First, certain ethical theories rely essentially on IUjudgments, so the viability of those views rests on the tenability of such judgments. Repudiation of IU comparisons threatens not only utilitarianism but all approaches to social theory that invoke welfare comparisons across individuals. Second, skepticism about IU comparisons has led social choice theorists to adopt conceptual tools unsullied by such comparisons, but the normative adequacy of these tools is in doubt. I specifically have in mind here the concept of Pareto optimality, or Pareto efficiency. An allocation of goods is called Pareto efficient just in case there is no feasible alternative allocation where everyone would be at least as well off and at least one agent would be strictly better off. This definition invokes only interpersonal welfare comparisons. But the concept of Pareto efficiency is extremely weak as a normative concept. Pareto efficient states are a dime a dozen, and there is little temptation to regard every such state as normatively acceptable. (For example, an allocation where one agent gets everything in the economy and all others get nothing is Pareto efficient, since any reallocation would make the first agent worse off.) It is therefore essential to review the question of whether principled avoidance of IU comparisons is indeed required. As Amartya Sen points out, different moral theories may require different types of IU comparisons.' Classical utilitarianism, for example, requires the maximization of a welfare sum, and therefore needs comparisons of welfare differences across individuals. On a Rawlsian

ETHICS AND EXTERNALITIES: AGRICULTURAL STEWARDSHIP AND OTHER BEHAVIOUR: PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

Neo classical micro‐economic theory of the firm and household rests on the foundations of profit maximising and utility maximising behaviour respectively. This paper explores the issue of whether market efficiency can be improved when economic agents' behaviour is motivated by ethical objectives such as fairness and altruism. In particular the paper examines agricultural stewardship as an ethically motivated form of behaviour, which is profit sacrificing, but which improves economic efficiency by reducing environmental externalities. The paper also reiterates the limitations of Pareto optimality as a criterion of economic welfare because its rejection of interpersonal welfare comparisons rules out ethical considerations of income and wealth distribution.

Egalitarianism, Responsibility, and Information

Radical and liberal theories of egalitarianism are distinguished, in large part, by the differing degrees to which they hold people responsible for their own well-being. The most liberal or individualistic theory calls for equality of opportunity. Once such “starting gate equality,” as Dworkin (1981a) calls it, is guaranteed, then any final outcome is justified, provided certain rules, such as voluntary trading, are observed. At the other pole, the most radical egalitarianism calls for equality of welfare (assuming that interpersonal welfare comparisons can be made, so that such equality makes sense). In between these two extremes are egalitarian proposals that equalize more than conventional opportunities, yet less than full welfare. Sen (1980) speaks of equality of basic capabilities as a goal; implementing that requires more than starting gate equality, because some will require more resources than others to attain the same capabilities. Meeting basic needs is another objective. Equality of needs fulfillment is perhaps less radical than equality of basic capabilities and more radical than equality of opportunity. Rawls (1971) takes equality of primary goods as a benchmark; he distinguishes primary goods from welfare, but includes among them goods that are more complicated than conventional resources and opportunities, all of which are supposed inputs into any conception of welfare. One could imagine proposing an egalitarianism that equalized some quite measurable outcome across populations, such as infant mortality. That would be an outcome-equalizing theory where the rate of infant mortality is a proxy, presumably, for some more complicated maximand, such as the degree of wellbeing of a population.

Social justice in the large and small

Social justice is an issue at both the large or even whole-society level and the very small group or dyadic level. If it is an issue in distribution of resources or welfare, rather than an issue of procedure, it requires very strong interpersonally comparable value judgments. This generally distinguishes it from other small and large group moral and political problems, which can often be resolved satisfactorily without such a strong value theory, in particular without interpersonal comparisons of welfare, because their resolution can yield mutual advantage to all concerned. At the dyadic and small-group level social justice is the philosopher's problem of beneficence; at the large level it is the problem of distributive justice. Much of the social-psychological literature on social justice deals with the small-scale problem; political theory is generally concerned with the large-scale problem. Yet, strategically and in their value theory requirements, the two problems are in many ways analogous. In both variants of social justice the core problem is a pure conflict interaction in which one party or group must bear a cost in order that another party or group may benefit.

The direct social preference relation in the theory of public expenditure

It is shown that if there is a finite number of private goods, a single public good, and the individual preferences satisfy certain monotonicity and separability conditions then there is a unique and complete social preference relation defined on the set of allocations by the requirement that the relation is individualistic in terms of the individual ordinal preferences. This relation, called the direct social preference relation, is derived without imposing interpersonal welfare comparisons and all its ordinal properties are inherited “directly” from those of the individual preferences. However, an allocation which is maximal in terms of the direct social preference relation on the set of feasible allocations is in general not Pareto optimal and the relation may therefore not be suitable as a guide to optimizing social choice.

INTERPERSONAL WELFARE COMPARISONS: A REPLY

KyklosVolume 31, Issue 2 p. 315-317 INTERPERSONAL WELFARE COMPARISONS: A REPLY Julian L. Simon, Julian L. Simon University of Illinois, Urbana.Search for more papers by this author Julian L. Simon, Julian L. Simon University of Illinois, Urbana.Search for more papers by this author First published: May 1978 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1978.tb00802.xCitations: 1 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume31, Issue2May 1978Pages 315-317 RelatedInformation

INTERPERSONAL WELFARE COMPARISONS AND WELFARE ECONOMICS: A COMMENT

KyklosVolume 31, Issue 2 p. 311-314 INTERPERSONAL WELFARE COMPARISONS AND WELFARE ECONOMICS: A COMMENT Luis Toharia, Luis Toharia Economics Department Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, USA. Financial support from Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain is gratefully acknowledged.Search for more papers by this author Luis Toharia, Luis Toharia Economics Department Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, USA. Financial support from Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain is gratefully acknowledged.Search for more papers by this author First published: May 1978 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1978.tb00801.xCitations: 1 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume31, Issue2May 1978Pages 311-314 RelatedInformation