Can Acceptable Social Welfare Orderings Show Compassion for Both Relative Inequality and Poverty? A Reexamination of Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-being and Scale Invariance

Norihito Sakamoto

No 9, RCNE Discussion Paper Series from Research Center for Normative Economics, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: This study shows that combining the Pareto principle and continuity with scale invariance, which has usually been interpreted as the requirement of interpersonal comparisons of well-being, imposes a major constraint on a functional form of a social welfare ordering. In fact, if the social welfare ordering is required to satisfy cardinal full comparability of well-being, then it must belong to a class of weighted utilitarianisms with variable weights. However, thorough an appropriate reformulation on interpersonal comparisons of well-being, the class of acceptable social welfare orderings is shown to be a rank-dependent generalized utilitarianism that can show compassion for both relative inequality and poverty. If additional conditions are required, we can obtain some refinements of this social welfare ordering such as a rank-weighted generalized utilitarianism and a rank-weighted Atkinson-Blackorby-Donaldson social welfare ordering. Moreover, the rank-weighted generalized utilitarianism is shown to approximately include the well-known three social welfare orderings that have been proposed in ethics: the Pareto egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism. Therefore, it makes clear that the theoretical difference between the ideas of distributive justice in ethical theory is simply caused by intensity levels for tolerable inequality and poverty. These results can be easily extended to the context of social choice with variable populations.

JEL-codes: D63 D71 H43 H51 H52 H53 I14 I24 I31 I32 J18 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
Note: First Draft, April 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hermes-ir.lib.hit-u.ac.jp/hermes/ir/re/71664/2021dp9.pdf

Related works:
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:hit:rcnedp:9

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RCNE Discussion Paper Series from Research Center for Normative Economics, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Resources Section, Hitotsubashi University Library ().