Prioritarianism in Practice

Prioritarianism in Practice PDF Author: Matthew D. Adler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108480934
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 687

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Book Description
Prioritarianism is a systematic framework for analyzing governmental policy that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off.

Prioritarianism in Practice

Prioritarianism in Practice PDF Author: Matthew D. Adler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108480934
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 687

Get Book Here

Book Description
Prioritarianism is a systematic framework for analyzing governmental policy that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off.

Prioritarianism in Practice

Prioritarianism in Practice PDF Author: Matthew D. Adler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781108691734
Category : POLITICAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Prioritarianism is a framework for ethical assessment that gives extra weight to the worse off. Unlike utilitarianism, which simply adds up well-being numbers, prioritarianism is sensitive to the distribution of well-being across the population of ethical concern. Prioritarianism in Practice examines the use of prioritarianism as a policy-evaluation methodology-across a range of policy domains, including taxation, health policy, risk regulation, climate change, education, and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic-and as an indicator of a society's condition (as contrasted with GDP). This chapter is an introductory chapter to the Prioritarianism in Practice volume. It surveys the intellectual roots of prioritarianism: in the philosophical literature, in welfare economics, and in scholarship about public health. And it provides brief summaries of each of the volume's chapters. This chapter provides theoretical foundations for the Prioritarianism in Practice volume, by clarifying the features of prioritarian social welfare functions (SWFs). A prioritarian SWF sums up individuals' well-being numbers plugged into a strictly increasing and strictly increasing transformation function. Prioritarian SWFs, like the utilitarian SWF, fall within the "generalized utilitarian" class of SWFs. Generalized-utilitarian SWFs are additive and, hence, especially tractable for purposes of policy analysis. The chapter reviews the axiomatic properties of generalized utilitarian SWFs and, specifically, of prioritarian SWFs. Prioritarianism satisfies the Pigou-Dalton axiom (a pure, gap-diminishing transfer of well-being from a better-off to a worse-off person is an ethical improvement), while utilitarianism does not. Pigou-Dalton is the axiomatic expression of the fact that a prioritarian SWF gives extra weight (priority) to well-being changes affecting worse-off individuals. The chapter also discusses the informational requirements of prioritarian SWFs (as regards interpersonal well-being comparisons). It reviews the various methodologies for applying a prioritarian SWF under uncertainty. And it describes the two main subfamilies of prioritarian SWFs, namely Atkinson and Kolm-Pollak SWFs"--

Prioritarianism in Practice

Prioritarianism in Practice PDF Author: Matthew D. Adler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108574424
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 687

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Book Description
Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book is the first to show how prioritarianism can be used to assess governmental policies and evaluate societal conditions. This book uses prioritarianism as a methodology to evaluate governmental policy across a variety of policy domains: taxation, health policy, risk regulation, education, climate policy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also the first to demonstrate how prioritarianism improves on GDP as an indicator of a society's progress over time. Edited by two senior figures in the field with contributions from some of the world's leading economists, this volume bridges the gap from the theory of prioritarianism to its practical application.

Fairness in Practice

Fairness in Practice PDF Author: Aaron James
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199846154
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
In this book, the author argues that to achieve a fair global economy, there must be compensation of people harmed by their exposure to the global economy, but also equal division of the "gains of trade" across societies.

Well-Being and Fair Distribution

Well-Being and Fair Distribution PDF 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.

Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism PDF Author: Nils Holtug
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 019160884X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Egalitarianism, the view that equality matters, attracts a great deal of attention amongst contemporary political theorists. And yet it has turned out to be surprisingly difficult to provide a fully satisfactory egalitarian theory. The cutting-edge articles in Egalitarianism move the debate forward. They are written by some of the leading political philosophers in the field. Recent issues in the debate over equality are given careful consideration: the distinction between 'telic' and 'deontic' egalitarianism; prioritarianism and the so-called 'levelling down objection' to egalitarianism; whether egalitarian justice should have 'whole lives' or some subset thereof as its temporal focus; the implications of Scanlon's contractualist account of the value of choice for egalitarian justice; and the question of whether non-human animals fall within the scope of egalitarianism and if so, what the implications are. Numerous 'classic' issues receive a new treatment too: how egalitarianism can be justified and how, if at all, this value should be combined with other values such as desert, liberty and sufficiency; how to define the 'worst off' for the purposes of Rawls' difference principle; Elizabeth Anderson's feminist account of 'equality of relations'; how equality applies to risky choices and, in particular, whether it is justifiable to restrict the freedom of suppliers who wish to release goods that confer different levels of risk on consumers, depending on their ability to pay. Finally, the implications of egalitarianism and prioritarianism for health care are scrutinized. The contributors to the volume are: Richard Arneson, Linda Barclay, Thomas Christiano, Nils Holtug, Susan Hurley, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Dennis McKerlie, Ingmar Persson, Bertil Tungodden, Peter Vallentyne, Andrew Williams, and Jonathan Wolff.

The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy

The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy PDF Author: Matthew D. Adler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199325839
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 985

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Book Description
What are the methodologies for assessing and improving governmental policy in light of well-being? The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of this topic. The contributors draw from welfare economics, moral philosophy, and psychology and are leading scholars in these fields. The Handbook includes thirty chapters divided into four Parts. Part I covers the full range of methodologies for evaluating governmental policy and assessing societal condition-including both the leading approaches in current use by policymakers and academics (such as GDP, cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, inequality and poverty metrics, and the concept of the "social welfare function"), and emerging techniques. Part II focuses on the nature of well-being. What, most fundamentally, determines whether an individual life is better or worse for the person living it? Her happiness? Her preference-satisfaction? Her attainment of various "objective goods"? Part III addresses the measurement of well-being and the thorny topic of interpersonal comparisons. How can we construct a meaningful scale of individual welfare, which allows for comparisons of well-being levels and differences, both within one individual's life, and across lives? Finally, Part IV reviews the major challenges to designing governmental policy around individual well-being.

Measuring Social Welfare

Measuring Social Welfare PDF Author: Matthew D. Adler
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190643021
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Disputes over government policies rage in a number of areas. From taxation to climate change, from public finance to risk regulation, and from health care to infrastructure planning, advocates debate how policies affect multiple dimensions of individual well-being, how these effects balance against each other, and how trade-offs between overall well-being and inequality should be resolved. How to measure and balance well-being gains and losses is a vexed issue. Matthew D. Adler advances the debate by introducing the social welfare function (SWF) framework and demonstrating how it can be used as a powerful tool for evaluating governmental policies. The framework originates in welfare economics and in philosophical scholarship regarding individual well-being, ethics, and distributive justice. It has three core components: a well-being measure, which translates each of the possible policy outcomes into an array of interpersonally comparable well-being numbers, quantifying how well off each person in the population would be in that outcome; a rule for ranking outcomes thus described; and an uncertainty module, which orders policies understood as probability distributions over outcomes. The SWF framework is a significant improvement compared to cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which quantifies policy impacts in dollars, is thereby biased towards the rich, and is insensitive to the distribution of these monetized impacts. The SWF framework, by contrast, uses an unbiased measure of well-being and allows the policymaker to consider both efficiency (total well-being) and equity (the distribution of well-being). Because the SWF framework is a fully generic methodology for policy assessment, Adler also discusses how it can be implemented to inform government policies. He illustrates it through a detailed case study of risk regulation, contrasting the implications of results of SWF and CBA. This book provides an accessible, yet rigorous overview of the SWF approach that can inform policy-makers and students.

Research Handbook on Nudges and Society

Research Handbook on Nudges and Society PDF Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1035303035
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This timely Research Handbook offers offers a comprehensive examination of the growing field of nudging and its impact on society. The editors, Cass R. Sunstein and Lucia A. Reisch provide readers with a detailed exploration of the theoretical and empirical work on nudging, as well as an understanding of current and likely future developments in the field. Divided into six key thematic parts, the Research Handbook covers everything from the foundations of nudging to its use in government and private organizations.

The Heart of Human Rights

The Heart of Human Rights PDF Author: Allen Buchanan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199325405
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
This is the first attempt to provide an in-depth moral assessment of the heart of the modern human rights enterprise: the system of international legal human rights. It is international human rights law--not any philosophical theory of moral human rights or any "folk" conception of moral human rights--that serves as the lingua franca of modern human rights practice. Yet contemporary philosophers have had little to say about international legal human rights. They have tended to assume, rather than to argue, that international legal human rights, if morally justified, must mirror or at least help realize moral human rights. But this assumption is mistaken. International legal human rights, like many other legal rights, can be justified by several different types of moral considerations, of which the need to realize a corresponding moral right is only one. Further, this volume shows that some of the most important international legal human rights cannot be adequately justified by appeal to corresponding moral human rights. The problem is that the content of these international legal human rights--the full set of correlative duties--is much broader than can be justified by appealing to the morally important interests of any individual. In addition, it is necessary to examine the legitimacy of the institutions that create, interpret, and implement international human rights law and to defend the claim that international human rights law should "trump" the domestic law of even the most admirable constitutional democracies.