Life Quantity, Life Quality and Longevity: an Intertemporal Social Evaluation framework

Jean-Yves Duclos and Bouba Housseini

Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE

Abstract: The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states in which populations differ in size and longevity. This requires social evaluation principles to be sensitive to both the number and the length of lives. This paper explores the use of axiomatic and welfarist principles to assess social welfare in that framework. It attempts to overcome some of the limits of existing methods in the literature, in particular by avoiding a temporal repugnant conclusion, by neither penalizing nor favoring life fragmentation, and by satisfying critical-level temporal consistency. It does this by characterizing a critical-level lifetime utility function that values life periodically. To address some of the controversies on discounting utilities across time, two alternative versions of the function are developed, one with discounting and one without.

Keywords: Intertemporal social evaluation; population ethics; critical-level utilitarianism; lifetime utility; social discounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C02 D31 D63 I31 J17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cirpee.org/fileadmin/documents/Cahiers_2013/CIRPEE13-15.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Life quantity, life quality and longevity: An intertemporal social evaluation framework (2013)
Working Paper: Life quantity, life quality and longevity: An intertemporal social evaluation framework (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:lacicr:1315

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().