Personal Utilities and Public Judgements: Or What's Wrong with Welfare Economics?

By Amartya Sen. 1979

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Citations in the corpus

Utility in Social Choice (2004, methodology): “This point may be illustrated using a variant of a two-person example considered in Sen [ 93 ].”
Capabilities and Well-Being: Evidence Based on the Sen–Nussbaum Approach to Welfare (2005, background): “An alternative approach favoured by Sen (1977, 1979, 1999), is to argue that the informational basis of welfarism, which defines efficient social states as those in which no individual can be made better off without an offsetting loss to another individual, is too thin.”
Sen's Capability Approach to Welfare Economics (2004, background): “This tradition, which has been dominant for the last two centuries, is called welfarism [59].”
Fair Air: Distributive Justice and Environmental Economics (2010, background): “(7) Note that (7) constitutes a non-welfaristic social welfare function, following the terminology of Sen (1970, 1979), since it does not solely depend on individual utilities.”
The Development of Capability Indicators (2009, methodology): “In particular, the approach developed from Sen’s analysis of axiomatic social choice theory (Sen, 1970, 1976, 1979), where he concludes that there are good normative reasons for wanting to modify conventional welfare economics.”
An Unworkable Idea or a Promising Alternative? Sen's Capability Approach Re-examined (2000, background): “It provides a framework to analyse a variety of social issues, such as well-being2 and poverty, liberty and freedom, development, gender 1 Sen’s critique on traditional welfare economics can be found in e.g. Sen 1977, 1979, 1992.”
Utilitarianism and the Theory of Justice (2002, background): “Principles that reflect this view are called welfarist (Sen, 1979) and they treat values such as freedom and individual autonomy as ‘instrumental’—valuable only because of their contribution to well-being.”
Utilitarianism’s Bad Breath? A Re-Evaluation of the Public Interest Justification for Planning (2002, background): “…notes, took this line of reasoning further by stressing the normative aspects of interpersonal comparisons of utility and arguing that it may also be necessary to take into account ‘non-utility information’ such as overriding ethical principles including rights (Sen, 1979; Sen and Williams, 1982).”
Measuring Welfare: Latent Variable Models for Happiness and Capabilities in the Presence of Unobservable Heterogeneity (2011, background): “The Capability Approach is grounded in an attempt to address fundamental theoretical limits that are inevitable in utilitarian approaches to welfare economics (Sen (1979, 1985, 1992, 1993, 1999)), but it can also be seen as a generalisation of the traditional approach to welfare economics.”
The Capability Approach: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (2003, background): “Sen rejects welfarist theories because, whatever their further specifications, they rely exclusively on utility and thus exclude non-utility information from our moral judgements (e.g. Sen 1979).”
Discourse-based valuation of ecosystem services: establishing fair outcomes through group deliberation (2002, background): “Since the work of Arrow (1951), however, social choice theorists have discovered deep problems with the notion that social decisions can (or should) seek to maximize some index defined in terms of the utility achieved by each member of society (Arrow, 1951; Sen, 1979, 1995).”