This volume presents interviews that have been conducted from the 1980s to the present with important scholars of social choice and welfare theory. Starting with a brief history of social choice and welfare theory written by the book editors, it features 15 conversations with four Nobel Laureates and other key scholars in the discipline. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part presents four conversations with the founding fathers of modern social choice and welfare theory: Kenneth Arrow, John Harsanyi, Paul Samuelson, and Amartya Sen. The second part includes conversations with scholars who made important contributions to the discipline from the early 1970s onwards. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of economics, and the history of social choice and welfare theory in particular.
Author(s): Marc Fleurbaey; Maurice Salles
Series: Studies in Choice and Welfare
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 334
Tags: Social Choice/Welfare Economics/Public Choice
Contents
Contributors
A Brief History of Social Choice and Welfare Theory
1 History of Social Choice and Welfare Theory: A Brief Sketch
1.1 Precursors
1.2 First Foundation
1.3 Second Foundation
1.4 Social Choice Theory Around 1970
1.5 The Recent (Say, Approximately Post 1975) Development of Social Choice and Welfare Theory
2 The Conversations
References
Foundations
Kenneth J. Arrow
References
John C. Harsanyi
References
Paul A. Samuelson
1 Introduction
2 Interview
2.1 On Pigou’s “Old” Welfare Economics
2.2 On Robbins’s Criticism of the “Old” Welfare Economics
2.3 On the Advent of the “New” Welfare Economics
2.4 On the Concept of the Bergson-Samuelson Social Welfare Function
2.5 On the Concept of the Arrow Social Welfare Function
2.6 On the Single-Profile Impossibility Theorems
2.7 On Consequentialism and Welfarism
2.8 On the Resurgence of Consumers’ Surplus
3 Welfare Economics and Economic Policy
4 Concluding Remarks
References
Amartya Sen
References
Developments
Salvador Barberà
References
John Broome
1 Your Intellectual Journey
2 Utilitarianism
3 Bernouilli’s Hypothesis and the Representation of Betterness
4 Interpersonal Addition
5 Personal Goodness and Interpersonal Comparisons
6 The Intuition of Neutrality
Gabrielle Demange
1 Introduction and Background
2 Articles
3 Recent Development and Future Avenues for Research
References
David Donaldson
References
Peter Fishburn
Allan Gibbard
References
Peter J. Hammond
References
Prasanta K. Pattanaik
John E. Roemer
1 On Being an Economist
2 On Economics
Bibliography
William Thomson
References
John A. Weymark
References
