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    The Pareto principle is insufficient as the sole basis fo... — Carmelics
    Home/Consequentialism
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    The Pareto principle is insufficient as the sole basis for welfare economics judgments in public policy contexts

    ConsequentialismDemocracy & Governance
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.In the absence of interpersonal utility comparisons, the Pareto principle is the only available grounding for social welfare judgments
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    • 2.The Pareto principle only approves changes that improve the situation of every member of the concerned population
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    • 3.Most public policy changes hurt some subgroups for the benefit of others
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Kaldor-Hicks efficiency extends Pareto logic to permit welfare comparisons where gainers could hypothetically compensate losers, enabling policy judgments without interpersonal utility comparisons.
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    • 2.The hypothetical compensation criterion, developed by Hicks (1939) and Kaldor (1939), preserves the ordinal preference-satisfaction foundation of Pareto while dramatically expanding its policy applicability.
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    • 3.If Kaldor-Hicks is treated as a principled extension rather than a departure from Paretian welfare economics, the claim that Pareto reasoning is silent on most policy questions is overstated.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates that any move beyond Pareto to richer social welfare functions requires either dictatorship or violation of independence of irrelevant alternatives, making Pareto's silence a rational boundary rather than a defect.
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    • 2.Buchanan and the Virginia school argue that the Pareto constraint's silence on redistributive questions properly reflects the limits of scientific economics, reserving contested distributional choices for democratic constitutional processes rather than technocratic welfare judgments.
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    Topics

    ConsequentialismDemocracy & Governance

    Related

    Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates that any move beyond Pareto to richer...Buchanan and the Virginia school argue that the Pareto constraint's silence on r...If Kaldor-Hicks is treated as a principled extension rather than a departure fro...In the absence of interpersonal utility comparisons, the Pareto principle is the...
    +5 moreShow less
    Kaldor-Hicks efficiency extends Pareto logic to permit welfare comparisons where...Most public policy changes hurt some subgroups for the benefit of othersThe Pareto principle only approves changes that improve the situation of every m...The hypothetical compensation criterion, developed by Hicks (1939) and Kaldor (1...Therefore the Pareto principle remains silent on most policy questions

    Similar

    In the absence of interpersonal utility comparisons, the Pareto princi...80%The principle of advancing the general welfare demands that we conside...74%The Bergson-Samuelson approach is incomplete because it lacks specific...74%Democratic principles should be extended into the economic arena.74%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: economic-justice
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    The proponents of a “new” welfare economics (Hicks, Kaldor, Scitovsky) have distanced themselves from their predecessors (Marshall, Pigou, Lerner) by abandoning the idea of making social welfare judgments on the basis of interpersonal comparisons of utility. Their problem was then that in absence of any kind of interpersonal comparisons, the only principle on which to ground their judgments was the Pareto principle, according to which a situation is a global improvement if it is an improvement f
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit