7 - Extensions

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter considers extensions of the analysis in three directions. In Section 7.2, we study how the analysis can be extended to deal with the evaluation of allocations in different economies. The practice of social evaluation is indeed seldom limited to the comparison of alternative allocations for a given population; economists are often asked to compare allocations of resources involving different populations, such as international comparisons of standards of living or assessment of national growth, inequalities, and social welfare over long periods. We show how such problems require extending the standard social choice approach, and how the social ordering functions introduced here can be refined for this purpose.

In Section 7.3 we explore the possibility of incorporating dimensions of well-being that are not consumptions of resources but correspond to various “functionings,” such as health or education. Such functionings may be the direct objects of individual preferences, along with material consumption, although they do not fit the current framework because they cannot be transferred across individuals, or because it seems meaningless to add them up to compute total or average amounts. This section shows that the introduction of such additional dimensions of well-being in our approach is possible, and once again illustrates the usefulness of the equivalence methodology epitomized by R^Ωlex.

In Section 7.4 we examine the case in which, contrary to an implicit basic ethical assumption made so far, the agents have private endowments of resources that are considered legitimate.