EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Utilitarianism and unequal longevities: A remedy?

Marie-Louise Leroux and Gregory Ponthiere

No 2010043, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: This paper re-examines a counterintuitive corollary of utilitarianism under unequal longevities: the tendency to redistribute resources from short-lived towards long-lived agents, against any intuition of compensation. It is shown that this corollary prevails not only under time-additive lifetime welfare, but, also, in general, under non-additive lifetime welfare, so that this counterintuitive redistributive corollary is a robust argument against utilitarianism. This paper studies a remedy to that counterintuitive corollary. This consists in imputing, when solving the social planner's problem, the consumption equivalent of a long life to the consumption of long- lived agents. We identify the conditions under which such a modified utilitarian optimum involves a compensation of short-lived agents with respect to the laissez-faire. That remedy is also applied to an economy with risky longevity, where short-lived agents are penalized not only by the limited opportunities to spread resources over time (due to a shorter life), but, also, by lost savings (due to unanticipated death).

Keywords: utilitarianism; differential longevity; compensation; redistribution; consumption equivalent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I12 I18 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-07-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.uclouvain.be/core/publications/coredp/coredp2010.html (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Utilitarianism and unequal longevities: A remedy? (2013) Downloads
Working Paper: Utilitarianism and unequal longevities: a remedy? (2013)
Working Paper: Utilitarianism and unequal longevities: A remedy? (2013)
Working Paper: Utilitarianism and unequal longevities: A remedy? (2013)
Working Paper: Utilitarianism and unequal longevities: A remedy? (2009) Downloads
Working Paper: Utilitarianism and unequal longevities: A remedy? (2009) Downloads
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:cor:louvco:2010043

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alain GILLIS (alain.gillis@uclouvain.be).

 
Page updated 2025-01-07
Handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2010043