IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-02517017.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Death of Welfare Economics: History of a Controversy

Author

Listed:
  • Herrade Igersheim

    (CEPERC - Centre d'EPistémologie et d'ERgologie Comparatives - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function – one of the main concepts of the new welfare economics as defined by Abram Bergson (Burk) in 1938 and clarified by Paul Samuelson in the Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947, ch. VIII) – does not exist under reasonable conditions. Indeed, from the very start, Arrow kept asserting that his famous impossibility result has direct and devastating consequences for the Bergson-Samuelson Social Welfare Function (1948, 1950, 1951a, 1963), though he seemed to soften his position in the early eighties. On his side, especially from the seventies on, Samuelson remained active on this issue and continued to defend the concept he had devised with Bergson, tooth and nail, against Arrow's attacks (1967, 1977, 1981, 1987, 2005). The aim of this paper is precisely to examine this rather strange controversy, which is almost unknown in the scientific community, even though it lasted more than fifty years and saw a conflict between two economic giants, Arrow and Samuelson, and behind them two distinct communities – the fading welfare economics against the emerging social choice theory –, two conflicting ways of dealing with mathematical tools in welfare economics and, above all, two different conceptions of social welfare. By relying on different kinds of material, I attempt to grasp what the exchanges between Arrow, Samuelson and others, both overtly and behind the scenes, reveal regarding the motivations of my two main actors.

Suggested Citation

  • Herrade Igersheim, 2019. "The Death of Welfare Economics: History of a Controversy," Post-Print hal-02517017, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02517017
    DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2901574
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Abram Bergson, 1954. "On the Concept of Social Welfare," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 68(2), pages 233-252.
    2. Mauro Boianovsky, 2014. "Robertson and the Cambridge approach to utility and welfare," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 38(4), pages 961-985.
    3. Bergson, Abram, 1976. "Social choice and welfare economics under representative government," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 6(3), pages 171-190, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Roger E. Backhouse & Antoinette Baujard & Tamotsu Nishizawa, 2020. "Revisiting the history of welfare economics," Discussion Papers 20-26, Department of Economics, University of Birmingham.
    2. Beatrice Cherrier & Jean-Baptiste Fleury, 2017. "Economists’ interest in collective decision after World War II: a history," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 172(1), pages 23-44, July.
    3. Salvador Barberà & Dolors Berga & Bernardo Moreno, 2020. "Arrow on domain conditions: a fruitful road to travel," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 54(2), pages 237-258, March.
    4. Cherrier, Beatrice & Svorenčík, Andrej, 2017. "Defining Excellence: 70 Years of John Bates Clark Medals," SocArXiv bacmj, Center for Open Science.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Steven Rosefielde, 2020. "Stakeholder Capitalism: Progressive Dream or Nightmare?," Book chapters-LUMEN Proceedings, in: Adriana Grigorescu & Valentin Radu (ed.), 1st International Conference Global Ethics - Key of Sustainability (GEKoS), edition 1, volume 11, chapter 3, pages 14-23, Editura Lumen.
    2. Rosefielde, Steven, 2004. "An abnormal country," BOFIT Discussion Papers 15/2004, Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT).
    3. repec:zbw:bofitp:2004_015 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Rosefielde, Steven, 2004. "An abnormal country," BOFIT Discussion Papers 15/2004, Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition.
    5. Marc Fleurbaey & Philippe Mongin, 2005. "The news of the death of welfare economics is greatly exaggerated," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 25(2), pages 381-418, December.
    6. Richard S.J. Tol & Peter Dolton, 2016. "A survey of the UK population on public policy," Working Paper Series 8416, Department of Economics, University of Sussex.
    7. Steven Rosefielde, 2005. "Russia: An Abnormal Country," European Journal of Comparative Economics, Cattaneo University (LIUC), vol. 2(1), pages 3-16, June.
    8. Marc Fleurbaey, 2007. "Social choice and the indexing dilemma," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 29(4), pages 633-648, December.
    9. John A. Weymark, 2011. "On Kolm’s Use of Epistemic Counterfactuals in Social Choice Theory," Studies in Choice and Welfare, in: Marc Fleurbaey & Maurice Salles & John A. Weymark (ed.), Social Ethics and Normative Economics, pages 279-301, Springer.
    10. Gabriel Leite Mota, 2007. "Why Should Happiness Have a Role in Welfare Economics? Happiness versus Orthodoxy and Capabilities," FEP Working Papers 253, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.
    11. Antoinette Baujard, 2013. "Abram Bergson," Working Papers halshs-00907159, HAL.
      • Antoinette Baujard, 2013. "Abram Bergson," Working Papers 1334, Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon.
    12. Dotti, Valerio, 2014. "Generalized Comparative Statics for Political Economy Models," MPRA Paper 60711, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Steven Rosefielde, 2014. "Cold Peace: "Reset" and Coexistence," The Northeast Asian Economic Review, ERINA - Economic Research Institute for Northeast Asia, vol. 2(1), pages 39-50, March.
    14. Han, Phoumin & Kimura, Fukunari & Sandu, Suwin, 2020. "Household-level analysis of the impacts of electricity consumption on welfare and the environment in Cambodia: Empirical evidence and policy implications," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 476-483.
    15. Mavroutsikos, Charalampos & Giannakas, Konstantinos & Walters, Cory G., 2018. "Crop Insurance under Asymmetric Information and Different Government Objectives," 2018 Annual Meeting, August 5-7, Washington, D.C. 273880, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    16. Dalibor Roháč, 2009. "Je predpoklad voličskej racionality len mýtus? [Is the assumption of voters' rationality just a myth?]," Politická ekonomie, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2009(2), pages 163-176.
    17. d'Aspremont, Claude & Gevers, Louis, 2002. "Social welfare functionals and interpersonal comparability," Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, in: K. J. Arrow & A. K. Sen & K. Suzumura (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 10, pages 459-541, Elsevier.
    18. Béatrice CHERRIER & Jean-Baptiste FLEURY, 2014. "Whose values? The Rise, Fragmentation and Marginalization of Collective Choice in Postwar Economics, 1940-1981," Economics Working Paper from Condorcet Center for political Economy at CREM-CNRS 2014-05-ccr, Condorcet Center for political Economy.
    19. Philippe Mongin, 2006. "Value Judgments and Value Neutrality in Economics," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 73(290), pages 257-286, May.
    20. Mauro BoianovskyBy, 2017. "Optimum saving and growth: Harrod on dynamic welfare economics," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 69(4), pages 1120-1137.
    21. Monica Novackova & Richard S.J. Tol, 2018. "Climate Change Awareness and Willingness to Pay for its Mitigation: Evidence from the UK," Working Paper Series 0318, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02517017. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.