9
votes
Accepted
Would a fair distribution of wealth from the super rich increase the purchasing power/life quality of the average person?
tl;dr: In the hypothetical you set in the body of your question redistribution cannot help the poor. However, this is not because redistribution could not significantly raise the welfare of the poor ...
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5
votes
Rawlsian SWF and Arrow Impossibilty Theorem
Independence of irrelevant alternatives prevents you from using the information needed to implement a Rawlsian SWF; the information who is society's worst-off cannot be used.
Indeed, the relevant ...
- 13.7k
5
votes
Accepted
Do any social welfare functionals, other than maximin, meet all of Arrow's conditions plus invariance regarding ordinal level comparability?
There are at least two other examples of SWFs that satisfy these conditions.
The first is a positional dictatorship. Let N be the number of individuals (assume it is fixed). For any k between 1 and ...
- 812
5
votes
Question about Social Welfare Function and Social Profile
In its most general formulation, a social welfare function is just a utility function representing the preferences of "society as a whole" (or the preferences of a hypothetical "...
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4
votes
Accepted
Theory of and studies on the long-term effect of governmental redistribution
This is a very broad question and no one except the respondents in question know exactly what they believe and why.
However, I suspect one important result in this context is the Second Welfare ...
- 6,254
4
votes
Non-axiomatic definition of well-being
When you say that a policy's objective is to "maximize well-being", presumably you mean "maximize collective well-being". And presumably, by "collective" well-being, you mean some sort of aggregate ...
- 812
3
votes
Accepted
Can consumer surplus be negative if a consumer is forced to make a purchase?
Consumer surplus is their willingness to pay minus the price they pay, and producer surplus is the price they receive minus their willingness to receive. So if you are assuming that consumers are ...
- 4,208
3
votes
Accepted
Anonymity in social welfare function
Anonymous/impartial SWFs focus only on the pattern of well-being,
and not the identities of the people who end up at particular well-being levels.
Identities here simply means names. When applying ...
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3
votes
Accepted
Can we add well-being into macro model as an endogenous variable?
One can model anything, that's why it is a model. The real question is what the value of such a model would be.
More to the point, I think this would be a very hard thing to do sensibly because how ...
- 2,383
3
votes
Social welfare in terms of preferences
Usually one tries to construct a Social Welfare Function (SWF), i.e. a general rule how to aggregate individual preferences to a social preference relation. Then various axioms are formulated that a ...
- 7,470
3
votes
Accepted
Social welfare in terms of preferences
The problem as you have described it is somewhat underspecified. At least three pieces of information are required to make further progress:
Do you want a social welfare function (SWF), or just a ...
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3
votes
Axiom of Minimal Liberalism & Sen's Theorem of Paretial Liberal
Your question is a bit confused, because it mixes together several different things. For example, in the title, you mention Sen's Minimal Liberalism, but in the actual question, you don't mention Sen ...
- 812
3
votes
Accepted
Universal Limited Income
Would the state be able to guarantee a worthy socio-economic status to everybody with the money earnt this way?
No, for several reasons.
First the proposal flies in the face of 101 rules of optimal ...
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3
votes
Accepted
Is there a measure of social inequality?
The matter is still largely unsettled, namely, there is not a broad consensus on how to measure it.
Lookup
Binelli, C., Loveless, M., & Whitefield, S. (2015). What is social inequality and why ...
3
votes
Is it possible that pensions (public or private) be actual money saved and “sent” into the future, instead of borrowed from future generations?
It is not only conceivable, but actually the case for some pension schemes including some public sector schemes, that what people pay (eg as a deduction by employers from their employees' salaries) is ...
- 8,773
3
votes
Accepted
Is my understanding of Arrow's dictatorship correct? The dictator is free to update her preference and the social choice will always follow her taste
Yes, this is correct. If $i=1$ is a dictator for the social choice rule $f$, then this means that for any profile $\langle R_i \rangle_{i=1}^I$, we have $f(\langle R_i \rangle_{i=1}^I)=R_1$. Hence, ...
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2
votes
Universal Basic Income - Menial Tasks
Pretty much by definition, "necessary" jobs have to be filled. Wages would have to be bid up so that the positions get filled. This implies some form of relative price shock, or inflation. If robots ...
- 9,907
2
votes
:History: Industry threatening to leave if social change takes effect
What's going on when a for-profit company makes a threat?
The same thing that is happening when does anything. It is trying to increase its profits, relative to what would happen if it didn't do the ...
- 8,168
2
votes
Can monopolistic dead weight loss persist without government intervention? If so how?
If I understand you correctly, monopolistic deadweight loss persists without gov intervention because of the following:
Economies of Scale: if monoplist is able to produce at below the market prices ...
- 2,020
2
votes
Accepted
Why would a politician sollicit foreign investors to come and buy real estate?
The owners of existing housing certainly benefit from increased demand and higher prices for their assets. The total benefit to society may be positive or negative, depending on whether current owners ...
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2
votes
Providing subsidies affects Marginal Private cost but not Marginal Social Cost?
The amount of external cost is determined by the level of production in this framework.
If the producers receive a subsidy the MPC shift to the right as you point out. That also means that for each ...
- 2,383
2
votes
Accepted
Are means-tested or universal programs more effective at reducing the poverty rate?
TL;DR:
There is generally not much support for universal welfare programs (as narrowly defined - see below) in the literature. However, it is for different reasons that what is mentioned in the ...
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2
votes
Accepted
Question regarding social welfare in the presence of externalities
Your understanding is close, but not completely correct. Look at the picture below. Blue is the demand curve, Orange the marginal private costs (which in perfect competition is equal to supply). ...
- 2,383
2
votes
Why is the equilibrium network size can be less than the socially optimal size in networks w/ positive externalities for single system?
The equilibrium network is smaller than that chosen by a social planner because agents do not internalize network externalities.
Vaccination against a contagious disease is a standard such example.
...
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2
votes
Accepted
Rawlsian SWF and Arrow Impossibilty Theorem
Let's say there are individuals 1 and 2, and alternatives A, B, C, and D. Society uses the Rawlsian SWF and thus ranks alternatives according to their maximal rank within individuals' rankings. Denote ...
- 7,470
2
votes
What is the problem with this opportunity cost example?
First of all its all just joke so you should not read too much into it. Most jokes are based on some false/overly simplified premise.
You are right:
There are two problematic claims here:
Being ...
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