 Utilitarianism and unequal longevities: A remedy?Marie-Louise Leroux and Gregory Ponthiere PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL Abstract: In the context of unequal deterministic longevities, classical utilitarianism exhibits, under time-additive individual preferences, a counterintuitive tendency to redistribute resources from short-lived agents towards long-lived agents, against any intuition for compensation. We examine the robustness of that result to the introduction of risky lifetime, and to a broader class of individual preferences. It is shown that classical utilitarianism remains unable to provide, in that broader framework, a general redistribution towards the short-lived. Then, we propose a remedy, which consists in imputing, when solving the social planner's allocation problem, the consumption equivalent of a long life to the consumption of long-lived agents. This compensation-constrained utilitarianism is shown to reduce welfare inequalities across agents with unequal lifetimes. Keywords: Utilitarianism; Differential longevity; Compensation; Redistribution; Consumption equivalent (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Economic Modelling, 2013, 30, pp.888-999. ⟨10.1016/j.econmod.2012.10.006⟩ There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:pseptp:hal-00813226 DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2012.10.006 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL |
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