Excessivist Social Welfare: An Axiomatic Characterization and Application

This paper develops an axiomatic characterization of excessivist social welfare orderings, a class of welfare criteria inspired by limitarianism. The central idea is that income has positive social value only up to a richness threshold; above that line, further income increases reduce social welfare. The paper characterizes additive generalized-utilitarian orderings in which individual income is evaluated through a single-peaked function: increasing below the richness line and decreasing above it. The characterization relies on continuity, anonymity, separability, a restricted Pareto principle below the threshold, aversion to excessive richness, threshold-preserving Pigou- Dalton transfers, and ratio-scale invariance. An empirical illustration using LIS data for six European countries shows that the excessivist criterion can generate rankings that differ from standard utilitarian and inequality-adjusted welfare measures, especially when the richness line is treated as a moving relative benchmark or as an anchored real-income threshold.