Population-adjusted egalitarianism

Stéphane Zuber

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: Egalitarianism focuses on the well-being of the worst-off person. It has attracted a lot of attention in economic theory, for instance when dealing with the sustainable intertemporal allocation of resources. Economic theory has formalized egalitarianism through the Maximin and Leximin criteria, but it is not clear how they should be applied when population size may vary. In this paper, I present possible justifications of egalitarian-ism when considering populations with variable sizes. I then propose new versions of egalitarianism that encompass many views on how to trade-off population size and well-being. I discuss some implications of egalitarianism for optimal population size. I first describe how population ethical views affects population growth. In a model with natural resources, I then shows that utilitarianism always recommend a larger population for low levels of resources, but that this conclusion may not hold true for larger levels

Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2018/18034.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Population-Adjusted Egalitarianism (2019)
Working Paper: Population-adjusted egalitarianism (2018)
Working Paper: Population-adjusted egalitarianism (2018)
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:mse:cesdoc:18034

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Label ().