Download or read book A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare written by Marc Fleurbaey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-13 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definition and measurement of social welfare have been a vexed issue for the past century. This book makes a constructive, easily applicable proposal and suggests how to evaluate the economic situation of a society in a way that gives priority to the worse-off and that respects each individual's preferences over his or her own consumption, work, leisure and so on. This approach resonates with the current concern to go 'beyond the GDP' in the measurement of social progress. Compared to technical studies in welfare economics, this book emphasizes constructive results rather than paradoxes and impossibilities, and shows how one can start from basic principles of efficiency and fairness and end up with concrete evaluations of policies. Compared to more philosophical treatments of social justice, this book is more precise about the definition of social welfare and reaches conclusions about concrete policies and institutions only after a rigorous derivation from clearly stated principles.
Download or read book Fairness versus Welfare written by Louis Kaplow and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By what criteria should public policy be evaluated? Fairness and justice? Or the welfare of individuals? Debate over this fundamental question has spanned the ages. Fairness versus Welfare poses a bold challenge to contemporary moral philosophy by showing that most moral principles conflict more sharply with welfare than is generally recognized. In particular, the authors demonstrate that all principles that are not based exclusively on welfare will sometimes favor policies under which literally everyone would be worse off. The book draws on the work of moral philosophers, economists, evolutionary and cognitive psychologists, and legal academics to scrutinize a number of particular subjects that have engaged legal scholars and moral philosophers. How can the deeply problematic nature of all nonwelfarist principles be reconciled with our moral instincts and intuitions that support them? The authors offer a fascinating explanation of the origins of our moral instincts and intuitions, developing ideas originally advanced by Hume and Sidgwick and more recently explored by psychologists and evolutionary theorists. Their analysis indicates that most moral principles that seem appealing, upon examination, have a functional explanation, one that does not justify their being accorded independent weight in the assessment of public policy. Fairness versus Welfare has profound implications for the theory and practice of policy analysis and has already generated considerable debate in academia.
Download or read book Fairness in Law and Economics written by Lee Anne Fennell and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the relationship between fairness and the economic concept of efficiency is usually cast as an adversarial one, this collection demonstrates the robust and diverse ways in which economics engages - and cannot avoid engaging - with fairness. Part I contains papers presenting positive analyses of fairness preferences and beliefs, which are fundamental means through which fairness matters for economic models. Part II turns to normative analysis and the broad question of how law should reconcile fairness and efficiency considerations. Part III presents a sampling of legal and policy applications in which both fairness and efficiency considerations prove important. Along with an original introduction by the editors this is a must-have volume that will appeal to students, academics and practitioners who are interested in this exciting field.
Download or read book Equality and Efficiency REV written by Arthur M. Okun and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1975, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff is a very personal work from one of the most important macroeconomists of the last hundred years. And this new edition includes "Further Thoughts on Equality and Efficiency," a paper published by the author two years later. In classrooms Arthur M. Okun may be best remembered for Okun's Law, but his lasting legacy is the respect and admiration he earned from economists, practitioners, and policymakers. Equality and Efficiency is the perfect embodiment of that legacy, valued both by professional economists and those readers with a keen interest in social policy. To his fellow economists, Okun presents messages, in the form of additional comments and select citations, in his footnotes. To all readers, Okun presents an engaging dual theme: the market needs a place, and the market needs to be kept in its place. As Okun puts it: Institutions in a capitalist democracy prod us to get ahead of our neighbors economically after telling us to stay in line socially. This double standard professes and pursues an egalitarian political and social system while simultaneously generating gaping disparities in economic well-being. Today, Okun's dual theme feels incredibly prescient as we grapple with the hot-button topic of income inequality. In his foreword, Lawrence H. Summers declares: On what one might think of as questions of "economic philosophy," I doubt that Okun has been improved on in the subsequent interval. His discussion of how societies rely on rights as well as markets should be required reading for all young economists who are enamored with market solutions to all problems. With a new foreword by Lawrence H. Summers
Download or read book Fairness in Practice written by Aaron James and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-04-13 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, the author argues that to achieve a fair global economy, there must be compensation of people harmed by their exposure to the global economy, but also equal division of the "gains of trade" across societies.
Download or read book Superfairness written by William J. Baumol and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his characteristic acuteness and lucidity, William Baumol, one of America's foremost economists, tackles the problem of equity considerations in welfare economics by applying the novel "superfairness" criterion to the distribution of resources, product, income, and wealth that arises from economic decisions.
Download or read book Economy Society and Public Policy written by The Core Team and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economy, Society, and Public Policy is a new way to learn economics. It is designed specifically for students studying social sciences, public policy, business studies, engineering and other disciplines who want to understand how the economy works and how it can be made to work better. Topical policy problems are used to motivate learning of key concepts and methods of economics. It engages, challenges and empowers students, and will provide them with the tools to articulate reasoned views on pressing policy problems. This project is the result of a worldwide collaboration between researchers, educators, and students who are committed to bringing the socially relevant insights of economics to a broader audience.KEY FEATURESESPP does not teach microeconomics as a body of knowledge separate from macroeconomicsStudents begin their study of economics by understanding that the economy is situated within society and the biosphereStudents study problems of identifying causation, not just correlation, through the use of natural experiments, lab experiments, and other quantitative methodsSocial interactions, modelled using simple game theory, and incomplete information, modelled using a series of principal-agent problems, are introduced from the beginning. As a result, phenomena studied by the other social sciences such as social norms and the exercise of power play a roleThe insights of diverse schools of thought, from Marx and the classical economists to Hayek and Schumpeter, play an integral part in the bookThe way economists think about public policy is central to ESPP. This is introduced in Units 2 and 3, rather than later in the course.
Download or read book The Economics of Fairness written by Alexander W. Cappelen and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A growing literature in economics has studied how fairness considerations shape human behavior. This research collection comprises forty key theoretical and empirical contributions spanning the last four decades, along with influential related work in normative economics. These papers show that the fairness motive is essential for understanding human behavior in a wide range of settings, such as markets, bargaining, and redistributive situations. They document large heterogeneity in what people view as fair and the importance people attach to fairness, displaying how a concern for fairness develops in childhood and manifests itself in the brain. Together with an original introduction by the editors, this volume will be a valuable research tool for those interested in the fascinating field of the economics of fairness.
Download or read book Morality Competition and the Firm written by Joseph Heath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of provocative essays, Joseph Heath provides a compelling new framework for thinking about the moral obligations that private actors in a market economy have toward each other and to society. In a sharp break with traditional approaches to business ethics, Heath argues that the basic principles of corporate social responsibility are already implicit in the institutional norms that structure both marketplace competition and the modern business corporation. In four new and nine previously published essays, Heath articulates the foundations of a "market failures" approach to business ethics. Rather than bringing moral concerns to bear upon economic activity as a set of foreign or externally imposed constraints, this approach seeks to articulate a robust conception of business ethics derived solely from the basic normative justification for capitalism. The result is a unified theory of business ethics, corporate law, economic regulation, and the welfare state, which offers a reconstruction of the central normative preoccupations in each area that is consistent across all four domains. Beyond the core theory, Heath offers new insights on a wide range of topics in economics and philosophy, from agency theory and risk management to social cooperation and the transaction cost theory of the firm.
Download or read book Handbook of Utility Theory written by Salvador Barbera and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2004-03-31 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The standard rationality hypothesis is that behaviour can be represented as the maximization of a suitably restricted utility function. This hypothesis lies at the heart of a large body of recent work in economics, of course, but also in political science, ethics, and other major branches of the social sciences. Though this hypothesis of utility maximization deserves our continued respect, finding further refinements and developing new critiques remain areas of active research. In fact, many fundamental conceptual problems remain unsettled. Where others have been resolved, their resolutions may be too recent to have achieved widespread understanding among social scientists. Last but not least, a growing number of papers attempt to challenge the rationality hypothesis head on, at least in its more orthodox formulation. The main purpose of this Handbook is to make more widely available some recent developments in the area. Yet we are well aware that the final chapter of a handbook like this can never be written as long as the area of research remains active, as is certainly the case with utility theory. The editors originally selected a list of topics that seemed ripe enough at the time that the book was planned. Then they invited contributions from researchers whose work had come to their attention. So the list of topics and contributors is largely the editors' responsibility, although some potential con tributors did decline our invitation. Each chapter has also been refereed, and often significantly revised in the light of the referees' remarks.
Download or read book Big Data and Social Science written by Ian Foster and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-08-10 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both Traditional Students and Working Professionals Acquire the Skills to Analyze Social Problems. Big Data and Social Science: A Practical Guide to Methods and Tools shows how to apply data science to real-world problems in both research and the practice. The book provides practical guidance on combining methods and tools from computer science, statistics, and social science. This concrete approach is illustrated throughout using an important national problem, the quantitative study of innovation. The text draws on the expertise of prominent leaders in statistics, the social sciences, data science, and computer science to teach students how to use modern social science research principles as well as the best analytical and computational tools. It uses a real-world challenge to introduce how these tools are used to identify and capture appropriate data, apply data science models and tools to that data, and recognize and respond to data errors and limitations. For more information, including sample chapters and news, please visit the author's website.
Download or read book Fair Division and Collective Welfare written by Herve Moulin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-08-20 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of fair division is as old as civil society itself. Aristotle's "equal treatment of equals" was the first step toward a formal definition of distributive fairness. The concept of collective welfare, more than two centuries old, is a pillar of modern economic analysis. Reflecting fifty years of research, this book examines the contribution of modern microeconomic thinking to distributive justice. Taking the modern axiomatic approach, it compares normative arguments of distributive justice and their relation to efficiency and collective welfare. The book begins with the epistemological status of the axiomatic approach and the four classic principles of distributive justice: compensation, reward, exogenous rights, and fitness. It then presents the simple ideas of equal gains, equal losses, and proportional gains and losses. The book discusses three cardinal interpretations of collective welfare: Bentham's "utilitarian" proposal to maximize the sum of individual utilities, the Nash product, and the egalitarian leximin ordering. It also discusses the two main ordinal definitions of collective welfare: the majority relation and the Borda scoring method. The Shapley value is the single most important contribution of game theory to distributive justice. A formula to divide jointly produced costs or benefits fairly, it is especially useful when the pattern of externalities renders useless the simple ideas of equality and proportionality. The book ends with two versatile methods for dividing commodities efficiently and fairly when only ordinal preferences matter: competitive equilibrium with equal incomes and egalitarian equivalence. The book contains a wealth of empirical examples and exercises.
Download or read book Fair Weather written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2003-05-14 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades of evolving U.S. policy have led to three sectors providing weather servicesâ€"NOAA (primarily the National Weather Service [NWS]), academic institutions, and private companies. This three-sector system has produced a scope and diversity of weather services in the United States second to none. However, rapid scientific and technological change is changing the capabilities of the sectors and creating occasional friction. Fair Weather: Effective Partnerships in Weather and Climate Services examines the roles of the three sectors in providing weather and climate services, the barriers to interaction among the sectors, and the impact of scientific and technological advances on the weather enterprise. Readers from all three sectors will be interested in the analysis and recommendations provided in Fair Weather.
Download or read book Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory written by Allan M. Feldman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-06-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers the main topics of welfare economics — general equilibrium models of exchange and production, Pareto optimality, un certainty, externalities and public goods — and some of the major topics of social choice theory — compensation criteria, fairness, voting. Arrow's Theorem, and the theory of implementation. The underlying question is this: "Is a particular economic or voting mechanism good or bad for society?" Welfare economics is mainly about whether the market mechanism is good or bad; social choice is largely about whether voting mechanisms, or other more abstract mechanisms, can improve upon the results of the market. This second edition updates the material of the first, written by Allan Feldman. It incorporates new sections to existing first-edition chapters, and it includes several new ones. Chapters 4, 6, 11, 15 and 16 are new, added in this edition. The first edition of the book grew out of an undergraduate welfare economics course at Brown University. The book is intended for the undergraduate student who has some prior familiarity with microeconomics. However, the book is also useful for graduate students and professionals, economists and non-economists, who want an overview of welfare and social choice results unburdened by detail and mathematical complexity. Welfare economics and social choice both probably suffer from ex cessively technical treatments in professional journals and monographs.
Download or read book Free Market Fairness written by John Tomasi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-05 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative new vision of free market capitalism that achieves liberal ends by libertarian means Can libertarians care about social justice? In Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi argues that they can and should. Drawing simultaneously on moral insights from defenders of economic liberty such as F. A. Hayek and advocates of social justice such as John Rawls, Tomasi presents a new theory of liberal justice. This theory, free market fairness, is committed to both limited government and the material betterment of the poor. Unlike traditional libertarians, Tomasi argues that property rights are best defended not in terms of self-ownership or economic efficiency but as requirements of democratic legitimacy. At the same time, he encourages egalitarians concerned about social justice to listen more sympathetically to the claims ordinary citizens make about the importance of private economic liberty in their daily lives. In place of the familiar social democratic interpretations of social justice, Tomasi offers a "market democratic" conception of social justice: free market fairness. Tomasi argues that free market fairness, with its twin commitment to economic liberty and a fair distribution of goods and opportunities, is a morally superior account of liberal justice. Free market fairness is also a distinctively American ideal. It extends the notion, prominent in America's founding period, that protection of property and promotion of real opportunity are indivisible goals. Indeed, according to Tomasi, free market fairness is social justice, American style. Provocative and vigorously argued, Free Market Fairness offers a bold new way of thinking about politics, economics, and justice—one that will challenge readers on both the left and right.
Download or read book Social Fairness and Economics written by Lance Taylor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together papers inspired by the work of Duncan Foley, an extraordinarily productive economist who has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of areas. Foley’s work cannot be easily classified, but one thread that runs through it is a critical examination (along both ethical and analytical lines) of conventional neoclassical economic theory, particularly involving general equilibrium theories of value and money. Foley was a pioneer of complexity economics as well, which adopts approaches to these questions drawn from natural sciences, so the collection therefore has an interdisciplinary quality that will interest a wide variety of readers. Some of the chapters are intellectual biographies that contextualize and identify Foley’s contributions to Keynesian macroeconomics, Marxian value theory, and complexity theory in economics. The topics covered include the economics of complexity; the ethics of general equilibrium theory; the economics of climate change; applications of Keynesian, Marxian and Ricardian political economy; and money and financial crises. The collection should be useful to scholars who work in various economic traditions critical of the currently dominant free-market approach, but it also speaks to scholars of critical theory in various disciplines beyond economics such as the mathematicians, physicists, and other natural scientists who are interested in understanding the complexity of social processes using their analytical frameworks. This book should also appeal to graduate students in economics who are working in these traditions, as well as scholars (including current graduate students in orthodox programs) who are dissatisfied with the current state of economic theory and would like to satisfy their intellectual curiosity by sampling the contributions of critical theorists.
Download or read book What We Owe Each Other written by Minouche Shafik and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change. Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience—raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old—and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this. A more generous and inclusive society would also share more risks collectively and ask everyone to contribute for as long as they can so that everyone can fulfill their potential. What We Owe Each Other identifies the key elements of a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return. Powerful, hopeful, and thought-provoking, What We Owe Each Other provides practical solutions to current challenges and demonstrates how we can build a better society—together.
