Childhood, Well-Being and Fairness

This paper examines the design of optimal family policies when chil- dren have unequal needs (in terms of material goods and parental time), leading to heterogeneous preferences, and have parents with unequal de- grees of altruism. We examine the issue of interpersonal well-being com- parisons between children by means of consumption-equivalent and time- equivalent indexes, and show that the conditions of existence of these equivalents - as well as their rankings across children - differ across the metric used. We also examine well-being comparisons across parents who differ in their children's preferences and in their altruism. Then, we de- rive the constrained egalitarian social optimum (where only children's well-being levels are equalized) and the double egalitarian social optimum (where both children's and parents'well-being are equalized). It is shown that the optimal allocation and the optimal family policy vary with the metric used for the measurement of children's well-being.