Marc Fleurbaey

Ecole d'économie de Paris · Department of Economics

Pandemic ethics raises unresolved, fundamental, and controversial questions. The defining feature of a pandemic is its scale—the simultaneous threat to millions or even billions of lives. That scale creates and necessitates awful choices since the wellbeing and lives of all cannot be protected. Central to decisions are questions of the value of lif...

Nationalism has trumped solidarity, resulting in unnecessary loss of life and inequitable access to vaccines and therapeutics. Existing intellectual property (IP) regimens, trade secrets and data rights, under which pharmaceutical firms operate, have also posed obstacles to increasing manufacturing capacity, and ensuring adequate supply, affordable...

Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book...

The social cost of carbon is a central metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the social cost of carbon, but mostly omits heterogeneity below the national level. We present an optimal taxation model of the social cost of carbon that accounts for inequality between and within countries. W...

The conversation shows the journey of a radical social scientist from Marxism to modern contributions to social justice, normative economics, political competition and many topics related to distributive justice, including recently climate justice.

John Broome describes his journey from economics to philosophy, from general equilibrium theory and optimal taxation to intentionality and rationality, as well as more applied topics such as health measurement or climate change. He reflects on utilitarianism and prioritarianism and questions the latter’s approach to the moral valuation of wellbeing...

A brief history of social choice and welfare theory.

We live in a time of pressing planetary challenges, many of which threaten catastrophic change to the natural environment and require massive and novel coordinated scientific and societal efforts on an unprecedented scale. Universities and other academic institutions have the opportunity and responsibility to assume a leading role in an era when th...

We consider a standard optimal taxation framework in which consumers' preferences are separable in consumption and labor and identical over consumption, but are affected by consumption externalities. For every nonlinear, income‐dependent pricing of goods there is a linear pricing scheme, combined with an adjusted income tax schedule, that leaves al...

This volume presents interviews that have been conducted from the 1980s to the present with important scholars of social choice and welfare theory. Starting with a brief history of social choice and welfare theory written by the book editors, it features 15 conversations with four Nobel Laureates and other key scholars in the discipline. The volum...

Significance Migration is increasingly presented as an adaptation solution to climate change. When populations move, they change their level of exposure and vulnerability to climate change impacts. We analyze how different border policies might affect people’s exposure and vulnerability. We propose a substantial methodological innovation by includi...

This policy brief advocates for a coordinated Group of Twenty (G20) global governance response to COVID-19 and future pandemics. The authors identify a crucial governance gap, requiring enhanced multilevel coordination to improve states’ institutional resilience and policy preparedness for managing pandemics and shock-induced challenges. G20 cooper...

The COVID-19 crisis has forced a difficult trade-off between limiting the health impacts of the virus and maintaining economic activity. Welfare economics offers tools to conceptualize this trade-off so that policy-makers and the public can see clearly what is at stake. We review four such tools: the Value of Statistical Life (VSL); the Value of St...

The COVID-19 crisis has forced a difficult trade-off between limiting the health impacts of the virus and maintaining economic activity. Welfare economics offers tools to conceptualize this trade-off so that policy-makers and the public can see clearly what is at stake. We review four such tools: the Value of Statistical Life (VSL); the Value of St...

Empirical analyses of inequality generally focus on resources, whereas philosophical theories of justice are divided between those that focus on resources and opportunities on the one hand, and those that focus on social relations, on the other hand. This paper proposes a model of society that embeds both resources and social relations into a web o...

This paper makes a plea for incorporating the study of social relations into the theory of fair allocation, in order to better take account of the importance of the quality of social interactions in people’s lives and in comprehensive theories of justice. This involves in particular modelling power and status in a more concrete way than has been do...

Over the last four years, we have worked with a large, international, and multidisciplinary group of scholars and social scientists, in the preparation of the first report of the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) (Rethinking Society for the 21st Century, Cambridge University Press, 2018). The question this group set itself to answer was...

Economic rents have long been identified as an efficient tax base. In addition, the recent literature documents that rent income is highly concentrated and that rents are quickly increasing. Rent taxation thus seems attractive for reasons of both efficiency and equity. Nevertheless, rent taxation remains a marginal topic in research and policy maki...

The UN Resolution heralding the Sustainable Development Goals pledges to leave no one behind, and moreover “to reach the furthest behind first”. This priority echoes the priority to the worst-off that is being discussed in philosophy, economics and related disciplines, but also the pleas of many actors who represent or fight for the most disadvanta...

Social justice considerations are incorporated into welfare economics via properties of the social welfare function and measures of individual utility. The ethical issues underlying various approaches are illustrated through intriguing paradoxes that have emerged in the literature. Such puzzles point to the tensions among certain important values (...

This paper presents the International Panel on Social Progress and expounds key ideas from its first report, Rethinking Society for the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2018). It emphasizes the importance of three dimensions of progress on which serious challenges need to be addressed: equity, freedom and sustainability. Addressing these c...

This paper provides an overview of the conceptual and empirical issues involved in the overarching goal of “leaving no one behind” (LNOB). After reviewing some existing documents on the topic, it proposes ways to operationalize LNOB, discusses whether to take a country-focused or person-focused approach, examines various (multidimensional) ways to...

Déréglementation, crise économique, tensions sociales, déstabilisation démocratique, guerre : la période 1980-2030 va-t-elle rejouer le drame de 1890-1940, avec en outre la forte probabilité d’être suivie de cataclysmes environnementaux balayant tout sur leur passage dans la seconde moitié du siècle ?La situation paraît chaque jour plus alarmante e...

In 2014, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote: ‘Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don't matter in today's great debates … I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found on university campuses. So, prof...

The contributors to this symposium have brought up many important points in their discussions of five chapters of the Report, and we are very grateful to them. Since the authors of the chapters would be better able to respond to many of the specific comments, we will confine ourselves here to a brief discussion of a few major issues highlighted by...

The authors propose a policy compact to achieve more inclusive growth in G20 countries so that economic growth regains the ultimate sense of improving all people’s lives. Guiding principles are: 1) prosperity is not just about income but about all relevant outcomes of well-being and capabilities to overcome the initial social disadvantage; 2) it is...

Cambridge Core - Macroeconomics - A Manifesto for Social Progress - by Marc Fleurbaey

We consider a model where agents differ in their preferences about consumption, labor, and human capital. Moreover, choosing a certain level of human capital, agents can differently affect their endogenous earning ability. Finally, agents differ in their human capital disposition: different agents face a different cost to acquire a certain amount o...

The economic theory of income taxation has recently been eager to apply philosophically prominent approaches to the selection of the optimal tax on earnings. This chapter presents and compares the consequentialist–utilitarian approach to taxation developed by Mirrlees and defended by Murphy and Nagel, to the fair allocation approach, as adapted to...

Rethinking Society for the 21st Century - by International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) July 2018

Rethinking Society for the 21st Century - by International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP) July 2018

In this paper we propose different criteria to rank income distributions according to equality of opportunity. Different from existing ones, our criteria explicitly recognize the interplay between circumstances and effort. We characterize them axiomatically and we compare them with existing criteria; then we propose some scalar measures. We show th...

La theorie du choix social contient des apories qui n’ont malheureusement pas favorise la production de criteres d’evaluation plus satisfaisants que ceux encore utilises de nos jours en analyse cout-benefice. Il existe pourtant des solutions interessantes qui tiennent compte des choix ethiques imposes par les impossibilites logiques revelees par la...

Harsanyi invested his Aggregation Theorem and Impartial Observer Theorem with utilitarian sense, but Sen described them as "representation theorems" with little ethical import. This critical view has never been subjected to full analytical scrutinity. The formal argument we provide here supports the utilitarian relevance of the Aggregation Theorem....

Suppose that you must make choices that may influence the well-being and the identities of the people who will exist, though not the number of people who will exist. How ought you to choose? This paper answers this question. It argues that the currency of distributive ethics in such cases is a combination of an individual’s final well-being and her...

This article examines how distributional weights can be introduced into benefit–cost analysis (BCA) by using insights from recent developments in welfare economics, in particular the theory of fair social allocation and happiness studies. We argue that it is easier than commonly believed to design weights that embody the Paretian and equity propert...

Marc Fleurbaey and colleagues explain why and how 300 scholars in the social sciences and humanities are collaborating to synthesize knowledge for policymakers.

In their letter “Social cost of carbon: Domestic duty” (5 February, p. [569][1]), A. Fraas et al. argue that regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the United States should be evaluated in the light of the domestic benefits they provide instead of global benefits, as recommended by the

Individual well-being depends not only on income but also on other dimensions of life, such as health, the quality of social relations and of the environment, employment, and job satisfaction. In this chapter we survey the economic literature on how to construct such overall measures of well-being. We distinguish three approaches: the capability (a...

Significance Hundreds of published papers produce “optimal” trajectories of global emissions of carbon dioxide, and corresponding carbon prices, over this century, taking into account future damages inflicted by climate change. To our knowledge, in all instances the models ignore inequalities in economic variables beyond regional differences. Here,...

In a new survey we ask respondents, after a standard Subjective Well‐Being (SWB) question, if they can think of changes in their lives that would improve their SWB score. If the SWB score is just one argument among others in the respondents’ goals in life, they should easily find ways to improve it, at the expense of other dimensions they care abou...

The interplay between normative and positive analysis is always a matter of unease, of embarrassment. In this paper, I argue for a particular division of labor between disciplines and subdisciplines in the construction of useful conceptual tools for those (decision-makers, analysts, citizens, etc.) who want to evaluate policy options and social sta...

Economist Anthony Atkinson proposes ambitious policies for combating inequality.

The interplay between normative and positive analysis is always a matter of unease, of embarrassment. In this paper, I argue for a particular division of labor between disciplines and subdisciplines in the construction of useful conceptual tools for those (decision-makers, analysts, citizens, etc.) who want to evaluate policy options and social sta...

This paper proposes four criteria for the selection of a better measure of living standards: it should be comprehensive, correlation sensitive, preference based, and fairness based. These criteria are applied to the following measures: income, equivalent income, capabilities, and satisfaction. The paper then explores the relationship between the sp...

If a potential person would have a good life, if he were to come into existence, can we coherently regard his coming into existence as better for him than his never coming into existence? And can we regard the situation in which he never comes into existence as worse for him? It has been argued by several authors that such comparisons are absurd be...

This paper proposes to define sustainability in terms of leaving it possible for future generations to sustain certain defined targets. It is shown that variants of genuine savings and the ecological footprint can then serve as indicators of sustainability. The link between sustainability and intergenerational welfare is examined, and it is shown h...

This chapter examines various conditions that influence a fair distribution of resources. The natural policy that offered itself as a salient solution and passed the no-envy test and therefore most of the other fairness requirements, is not available in other cases. This problem is due to a basic conflict between the compensation principle and the...

This chapter examines the notion of regret and the ethical intuition that goes against fresh starts. More specifically, it asks whether people who regret their past decisions should be compelled to bear the consequences just as if they were still happy about them. The chapter first considers two kinds of regret, one of which is linked to learning a...

This chapter examines the utilitarian principle of reward. It begins by considering how a social criterion can embody not only a concern for equality along dimensions for which individuals are not responsible, but also a concern for the sum along responsibility dimensions. It looks at two main criteria, the difference of which can be analysed in te...

Discounted utilitarianism and the Ramsey equation prevail in the debate on the discount rate on consumption. The utility discount rate is assumed to be constant and to reflect either the uncertainty about the existence of future generations or a pure preference for the present. We question the unique status of discounted utilitarianism and discuss...

This Guidance for Priority Setting in Health Care (GPS-Health), initiated by the World Health Organization, offers a comprehensive map of equity criteria that are relevant to health care priority setting and should be considered in addition to cost-effectiveness analysis. The guidance, in the form of a checklist, is especially targeted at decision...

We introduce the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of welfare (living standards) for individuals and populations of possibly different sizes and preferences. It can be used for policy evaluation, int...

The interview was conducted on October 4, 2007, during a Workshop associated with the 2007 Condorcet lectures delivered by Kotaro Suzumura on October 4 and 5, 2007 at the University of Caen. It was revised and expanded substantially on the occasion of Bossert’s visit to Waseda University, where Suzumura taught social choice theory and public philos...

What is the appropriate balance between scientific analysis and governmental input in the IPCC? Claiming government overreach and calling for greater insulation of the process come from a misleadingly simple interpretation. Such insulation would likely diminish the policy relevance of the SPM. The

We provide a general method for extending fair social preferences defined for riskless economic environments to the context of risk and uncertainty. We apply the method to the problems of managing unemployment allowances (in the context of macroeconomic fluctuations) and catastrophic risks (in the context of climate change). It requires paying atte...