IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/gat/wpaper/2610.html

The History of Economic Thought Matters for Economics: Lessons from Welfarism in Welfare economics

Author

Listed:
  • Antoinette Baujard

    (Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, Université Lyon 2, emLyon, CNRS, GATE Lyon Saint-Etienne UMR 5824, F-42023 Saint-Etienne, France)

Abstract

The history of economic thought matters for economics. Observing how the exact meaning of the word ‘welfarism’ – a focus on utility to assess social states – varies across historical and multi-disciplinary perspectives offers lessons to revisit welfare economics. While Sen’s definition initially raised two categories of criticism, this paper shows that welfare economics has gradually incorporated the ‘informational issue’, but continues to overlook major problems raised by the ‘framework issue’, such as the neglect of agency and individualism. The epistemic reliability of such broad narratives depends on an explicit benchmark and is further supported by papers using other approaches.

Suggested Citation

  • Antoinette Baujard, 2026. "The History of Economic Thought Matters for Economics: Lessons from Welfarism in Welfare economics," Working Papers 2610, Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Etienne (GATE Lyon St-Etienne), Université de Lyon.
    • Handle: RePEc:gat:wpaper:2610
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.gate.cnrs.fr/RePEc/2026/2610.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • B21 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - Microeconomics
    • B41 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Economic Methodology
    • D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:gat:wpaper:2610. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Béatrice HENRY (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gateefr.html .

    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.