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Author: Marc Fleurbaey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139498770
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
The definition and measurement of social welfare have been a vexed issue for the past century. This book makes a constructive, easily applicable proposal and suggests how to evaluate the economic situation of a society in a way that gives priority to the worse-off and that respects each individual's preferences over his or her own consumption, work, leisure and so on. This approach resonates with the current concern to go 'beyond the GDP' in the measurement of social progress. Compared to technical studies in welfare economics, this book emphasizes constructive results rather than paradoxes and impossibilities, and shows how one can start from basic principles of efficiency and fairness and end up with concrete evaluations of policies. Compared to more philosophical treatments of social justice, this book is more precise about the definition of social welfare and reaches conclusions about concrete policies and institutions only after a rigorous derivation from clearly stated principles.
Author: Marc Fleurbaey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139498770
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
The definition and measurement of social welfare have been a vexed issue for the past century. This book makes a constructive, easily applicable proposal and suggests how to evaluate the economic situation of a society in a way that gives priority to the worse-off and that respects each individual's preferences over his or her own consumption, work, leisure and so on. This approach resonates with the current concern to go 'beyond the GDP' in the measurement of social progress. Compared to technical studies in welfare economics, this book emphasizes constructive results rather than paradoxes and impossibilities, and shows how one can start from basic principles of efficiency and fairness and end up with concrete evaluations of policies. Compared to more philosophical treatments of social justice, this book is more precise about the definition of social welfare and reaches conclusions about concrete policies and institutions only after a rigorous derivation from clearly stated principles.
Author: Herve Moulin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262633116
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
The concept of fair division is as old as civil society itself. Aristotle's "equal treatment of equals" was the first step toward a formal definition of distributive fairness. The concept of collective welfare, more than two centuries old, is a pillar of modern economic analysis. Reflecting fifty years of research, this book examines the contribution of modern microeconomic thinking to distributive justice. Taking the modern axiomatic approach, it compares normative arguments of distributive justice and their relation to efficiency and collective welfare. The book begins with the epistemological status of the axiomatic approach and the four classic principles of distributive justice: compensation, reward, exogenous rights, and fitness. It then presents the simple ideas of equal gains, equal losses, and proportional gains and losses. The book discusses three cardinal interpretations of collective welfare: Bentham's "utilitarian" proposal to maximize the sum of individual utilities, the Nash product, and the egalitarian leximin ordering. It also discusses the two main ordinal definitions of collective welfare: the majority relation and the Borda scoring method. The Shapley value is the single most important contribution of game theory to distributive justice. A formula to divide jointly produced costs or benefits fairly, it is especially useful when the pattern of externalities renders useless the simple ideas of equality and proportionality. The book ends with two versatile methods for dividing commodities efficiently and fairly when only ordinal preferences matter: competitive equilibrium with equal incomes and egalitarian equivalence. The book contains a wealth of empirical examples and exercises.
Author: Louis Kaplow
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039319
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 569
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Book Description
By what criteria should public policy be evaluated? Fairness and justice? Or the welfare of individuals? Debate over this fundamental question has spanned the ages. Fairness versus Welfare poses a bold challenge to contemporary moral philosophy by showing that most moral principles conflict more sharply with welfare than is generally recognized. In particular, the authors demonstrate that all principles that are not based exclusively on welfare will sometimes favor policies under which literally everyone would be worse off. The book draws on the work of moral philosophers, economists, evolutionary and cognitive psychologists, and legal academics to scrutinize a number of particular subjects that have engaged legal scholars and moral philosophers. How can the deeply problematic nature of all nonwelfarist principles be reconciled with our moral instincts and intuitions that support them? The authors offer a fascinating explanation of the origins of our moral instincts and intuitions, developing ideas originally advanced by Hume and Sidgwick and more recently explored by psychologists and evolutionary theorists. Their analysis indicates that most moral principles that seem appealing, upon examination, have a functional explanation, one that does not justify their being accorded independent weight in the assessment of public policy. Fairness versus Welfare has profound implications for the theory and practice of policy analysis and has already generated considerable debate in academia.
Author: John RAWLS
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042603
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 624
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Book Description
Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.
Author: Allan M. Feldman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 038729368X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
This book covers the main topics of welfare economics — general equilibrium models of exchange and production, Pareto optimality, un certainty, externalities and public goods — and some of the major topics of social choice theory — compensation criteria, fairness, voting. Arrow's Theorem, and the theory of implementation. The underlying question is this: "Is a particular economic or voting mechanism good or bad for society?" Welfare economics is mainly about whether the market mechanism is good or bad; social choice is largely about whether voting mechanisms, or other more abstract mechanisms, can improve upon the results of the market. This second edition updates the material of the first, written by Allan Feldman. It incorporates new sections to existing first-edition chapters, and it includes several new ones. Chapters 4, 6, 11, 15 and 16 are new, added in this edition. The first edition of the book grew out of an undergraduate welfare economics course at Brown University. The book is intended for the undergraduate student who has some prior familiarity with microeconomics. However, the book is also useful for graduate students and professionals, economists and non-economists, who want an overview of welfare and social choice results unburdened by detail and mathematical complexity. Welfare economics and social choice both probably suffer from ex cessively technical treatments in professional journals and monographs.
Author: Marc Fleurbaey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019921591X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Develops a theory of fairness incorporating a concern for personal responsibility, opportunities and freedom, and makes accessible the recent developments in economics and philosophy that define social justice in terms of equal opportunities.
Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135132490X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
In theory and practice, the notion of fairness is far from simple. The principle is often elusive and subject to confusion, even in institutions of law, usage, and custom. In Fairness, Nicholas Rescher aims to liberate this concept from misunderstandings by showing how its definitive characteristics prevent it from being absorbed by such related conceptions as paternalistic benevolence, radical egalitarianism, and social harmonization. Rescher demonstrates that equality before the state is an instrument of justice, not of social utility or public welfare, and argues that the notion of fairness stops well short of a literal egalitarianism. Rescher disposes of the confusions arising from economists' penchant to focus on individual preferences, from decision theorists' concern for averting envy, and from political theorists' sympathy for egalitarianism. In their place he shows how the idea of distributive equity forms the core of the concept of fairness in matters of distributive justice. The coordination of shares with valid claims is the crux of the concept of fairness. In Rescher's view, this means that the pursuit of fairness requires objective rather than subjective evaluation of the goods being shared. This is something quite different from subjective equity based on the personal evaluation of goods by those laying claim to them. Insofar as subjective equity is a concern, the appropriate procedure for its realization is a process of maximum value distribution. Further, Rescher demonstrates that in matters of distributive justice, the distinction between new ownership and preexisting ownership is pivotal and calls for proceeding on very different principles depending on the case. How one should proceed depends on context, and what is adjudged fair is pragmatic, in that there are different requirements for effectiveness in achieving the aims and purposes of the sort of distribution that is intended. Rescher concludes that fairness is a fundamentally ethical concept. Its distinctive modus operandi contrasts sharply with the aims of paternalism, preference-maximizing, or economic advantage. Fairness will be of interest to philosophers, economists, and political scientists.
Author: Matthew Adler
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195384997
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 656
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Book Description
A comprehensive philosophically grounded argument for the use of social welfare functions as a framework for governmental policy analysis.
Author: Y.S. Brenner
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400707932
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
This book has three purposes. First, to convince professional economists who study the behaviour of the economic system as a whole that they must re-examine some of the assumptions behind the reigning economic theories. Second, to explain to the general public why the currently fashionable economic policies cannot solve the problem of massive long term unemployment. Third, to show that if people's political engagement is revived there is hope for escaping from the economic morass and moral wasteland into which, ever since the 1970s, the fashionable policies have been leading us. To elucidate the theoretical problem the authors pass in review several recent structural developments and consider their effect on the economy. To encourage renewed public political engagement they draw attention to the risks involved in allowing things to drift on in the present direction. The avowed purpose of the book imposes the need to present it in a manner accessible at once to professional macroeconomists and to a wider public ofpeople concerned about today's malaise, politicians, sociologists or philosophers and others. This imposes the need not to encumber readers with the customary glut of academic references in the text, and to refer only to the best known and politically most influential theories and to authors who are also widely known to people who are not professional economists.
Author: Roger E. Backhouse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108898696
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
This innovative history of welfare economics challenges the view that welfare economics can be discussed without taking ethical values into account. Whatever their theoretical commitments, when economists have considered practical problems relating to public policy, they have adopted a wider range of ethical values, whether equality, justice, freedom, or democracy. Even canonical authors in the history of welfare economics are shown to have adopted ethical positions different from those with which they are commonly associated. Welfare Theory, Public Action, and Ethical Values explores the reasons and implications of this, drawing on concepts of welfarism and non-welfarism developed in modern welfare economics. The authors exemplify how economic theory, public affairs and political philosophy interact, challenging the status quo in order to push economists and historians to reconsider the nature and meaning of welfare economics.
