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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (222)
Suppose that, for whatever reason, it is decided that inequalities within countries are more offensive than inequalities between countries, and that inequalities between populations living together are more offensive than inequalities between generations living in different times. Can a social welfare function express that preference? We show that...
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
When considering the social valuation of a life-year, there is a conflict between two basic intuitions: on the one hand, the intuition of universality, according to which the value of an additional life-year should be universal, and, as such, should be invariant to the context considered; on the other hand, the intuition of complementarity, accordi...
We study the measurement of well-being when individuals have heterogeneous preferences, including different conceptions of a life worth living. When individuals differ in the conception of a life worth living, the equivalent income can regard an individual whose life is not worth living as being better off than an individual whose life is worth liv...
Migration is a widely used adaptation strategy to climate change impacts. Yet resource constraints caused by such impacts may limit the ability to migrate, thereby leading to immobility. Here we provide a quantitative, global analysis of reduced international mobility due to resource deprivation caused by climate change. We incorporate both migrati...
While little agreement exists regarding the taxation of bequests in general, there is a widely held view that accidental bequests should be subjected to a confiscatory tax. We reexamine the optimal taxation of accidental bequests by introducing a concern for compensating individuals for a premature death. Assuming that individuals care about what t...
The question of social discounting is central in intertemporal cost-benefit analysis that often shapes economists’ recommendations regarding climate policy. The practice of discounting has been the object of heated debates among economists and philosophers, revolving around the issue of intergenerational ethics. In this chapter, we review the diffe...
Existing estimates of optimal climate policy ignore the possibility that carbon tax revenues could be used in a progressive way; model results therefore typically imply that near-term climate action comes at some cost to the poor. Using the Nested Inequalities Climate Economy (NICE) model, we show that an equal per capita refund of carbon tax reven...
We find that if all countries adopt the necessary uniform global carbon tax and then return the revenues to their citizens on an equal per capita basis, it will be possible to meet a 2 °C target while also increasing wellbeing, reducing inequality and alleviating poverty. These results indicate that it is possible for a society to implement strong...
We develop a model of population dynamics accounting for the impact of climate change on mortality through five channels (heat, diarrhoeal disease, malaria, dengue, undernutrition). An age-dependent mortality, which depends on global temperature increase, is introduced and calibrated. We consider three climate scenarios (RCP 6.0, RCP 4.5 and RCP 2....
The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation,
For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, eve...
We highlight a new paradox for the social evaluation of risk that bears on the evaluation of individual well-being rather than social welfare, but has serious implications for social evaluation. The paradox consists in a tension between rationality, respect for individual preferences, and a principle of informational parsimony that excludes individ...
Climate change threatens irreversible and dangerous impacts, possibly leading to extinction. The most relevant trade-off then may not be between present and future consumption but between present consumption and the mere existence of future generations. To investigate this trade-off, we build an integrated assessment model that explicitly accounts...
Discounting future health benefits when computing the global burden of disease has been highly debated. This chapter reviews some arguments in favor of discounting. The authors first propose a general theory of discounting for health benefits, based on a social welfare approach. They review two well-known arguments in favor of discounting: the infi...
Utilitarianism plays a central role in economics, but there is a gap between theory, where utilitarianism is dominant, and applications, where monetary criteria are often used. For applications, a key difficulty is to define how utilities should be measured and compared. Drawing on Harsanyi’s (1955) approach, we introduce a new normalization of uti...
As in Fleurbaey and Maniquet (Math Soc Sci 90:119–126, 2017, Int J Econ Theory 14(1):35–50, 2018), we construct individual well-being measures that respect individual preferences and depend on the bundles of goods consumed by the individual. We show that the results obtained under the assumption that all available goods are desirable (more is prefe...
The health co-benefits of CO2 mitigation can provide a strong incentive for climate policy through reductions in air pollutant emissions that occur when targeting shared sources. However, reducing air pollutant emissions may also have an important co-harm, as the aerosols they form produce net cooling overall. Nevertheless, aerosol impacts have not...
We propose a new approach to multidimensional poverty measurement. To aggregate and weight the different dimensions of poverty, we rely on the preferences of the concerned individuals rather than on an arbitrary weighting scheme selected by the analyst. We provide an axiomatic characterization of an approach in which multidimensional poverty measur...
We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is too narrow. Other ethical issues are equally important to computing the social cost of carbon, and we highlight inequality, risk, and population ethics. Although the usual approach, in the economics of cost-...
This article presents an assessment of individual uncertainty about longevity. A survey performed on 3,331 French people enables us to record several survival probabilities per individual. On this basis, we compute subjective life expectancies (SLE) and subjective uncertainty regarding longevity (SUL), the standard deviation of each individual’s su...
The achievements and limitations of the classical theory of optimal labor-income taxation based on social welfare functions are now well known. Even though utilitarianism still dominates public economics, recent interest has arisen for broadening the normative approach and making room for fairness principles such as desert or responsibility. Fairne...
How much should the present generations sacrifice to reduce emissions today, in order to reduce the future harms of climate change? Within climate economics, debate on this question has been focused on so-called “ethical parameters” of social time preference and inequality aversion. We show that optimal climate policy similarly importantly depends...
We construct individual well-being measures that respect individual preferences and depend on the bundles of goods consumed by the individual. Building on previous work in which general families of well-being measures are identified, we introduce basic transfer principles that apply either to bundles or directly to indifference sets, and we charact...
en Social decisions in risky contexts raise a number of difficult questions, such as: (1) Should social decisions be more or less risk averse than the average person? (2) Should we try to avoid large catastrophes more than frequent but limited harms with similar expected impact? (3) Should social decisions be ambiguity averse or stick to the expect...
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. With the Nested Inequalities Climate Economy model (NICE) (Dennig et al. PNAS 112:15,827–15,832, 2015), which is based on Nordhaus’s Regional Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy (RICE), but also includes i...
Significance
We investigate how future population growth is relevant to climate change policy. The answer depends importantly on ethical questions about whether our ultimate goal should be to increase the number of people who are happy or rather to increase the average level of people’s happiness. We calculate the best (optimal) emissions reduction...
In Fleurbaey and Maniquet (2017), we develop a theory of well-being measurement that relies on the lattice structure of the set of upper contour sets in Euclidean spaces. In this addendum, we explain the formal relationships between our results and several results previously obtained in the literature, mainly Miller and Chambers' (2014a) analysis o...
We evaluate the introduction of various forms of antihypertensive treatments in France with a distribution-sensitive cost-benefit analysis. Compared to traditional cost-benefit analysis, we implement distributional weighting based on equivalent incomes, a new concept of individual well-being that does respect individual preferences but is not subje...
We provide a general method for extending 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). The method guarantees ex pos...
Standard measures of multidimensional inequality (implicitly) assume common preferences for all individuals, and hence are not sensitive to preference heterogeneity among members of society. In this paper, we measure the inequality of the distribution of equivalent incomes, which is a preference-sensitive multidimensional wellbeing measure. To quan...
We assume that economic justice requires resources to be allocated fairly, and we construct individual well-being measures that embody fairness principles in interpersonal comparisons. These measures are required to respect agents’ preferences. Across preferences well-being comparisons are required to depend on comparisons of the bundles of resourc...
A premature death unexpectedly brings a life and a career to their end, leading to substantial welfare losses. We study the retirement decision in an economy with risky lifetime and compare the laissez-faire with egalitarian social optima. We consider two social objectives: (1) the maximin on expected lifetime welfare, allowing for a compensation f...
This paper questions the distinction between egalitarianism and prioritarianism, arguing that it is important to separate the reasons for particular social preferences from the contents of these preferences, that it is possible to like equality and separability simultaneously, and that some egalitarians and prioritarians may therefore share the sam...
In this paper, we study interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing. We show that using subjective wellbeing (SWB) levels can be in conflict with individuals' judgments about their own lives. We propose therefore an alternative wellbeing measure in terms of equivalent incomes that respects individual preferences. We show how SWB surveys can be used to d...
The common practice consists in using a unique value of the discount rate for all public investments. Endorsing a social welfare approach to discounting, we show how different public investments should be discounted depending on: the risk on the returns on investment, the systematic risk on aggregate consumption, the distribution of gains and losse...
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. The authors question the unique status of discounted utilitarianism and...
When forming their preferences about the distribution of income, rational people may be caught between two opposite forms of “tyranny.” Giving absolute priority to the worst-off imposes a sort of tyranny on the rest of the population, but giving less than absolute priority imposes a reverse form of tyranny where the worst-off may be sacrificed for...
We evaluate the introduction of various forms of antihypertensive treatment in France with a distribution-sensitive cost-benefit analysis. Compared to traditional cost-benefit analysis, we implement distributional weighting based on equivalent incomes, a new concept of individual well-being that does respect individual preferences but is not subjec...
Harsanyi (1955) proved that, in the context of uncertainty, social rationality and the Pareto principle impose severe constraints on the degree of priority for the worst-off that can be adopted in the social evaluation. Since then, the literature has hesitated between an ex ante approach that relaxes rationality (Diamond, 1967) and an ex post appro...
We investigate the problem of how to perform comparisons of income distributions across families of different sizes. We argue that social welfare ought to be computed as the average individual utility instead of the average household utility as in most known criteria. We provide dominance criteria which allow for some indeterminacy about the averag...
We propose a new class of multidimensional poverty indices. Aggregation of the different dimensions relies on individual preferences. The Pareto principle is, therefore, satisfied among the poor. The indices add up individual measures of poverty that are computed as a convex transform of the fraction of the poverty line vector to which the agent is...
The aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of individual uncertainty regarding length of life. We have collected original data through a survey performed in 2009 on a representative sample of 3,331 French people aged 18 or more. The survey design recorded several survival probabilities per individual, which makes it possible to compute (i) s...
Some factors leading to health inequalities point to unfairness (e.g., socioeconomic status, race, and access to health care); others may reflect individual responsibility (e.g., lifestyle) and may, therefore, offer less reason for concern. A coherent framework is presented to integrate these different aspects in the measurement of unfair health in...
We compare two approaches to measuring inequity in the health distribution. The first is the concentration index. The second is the calculation of the inequality in an overall measure of individual well-being, capturing both the income and health dimensions. We introduce the concept of equivalent income as a measure of well-being that respects pref...
A premature death unexpectedly brings a life and a career to their end, leading to substantial welfare losses. We study the retirement decision in an economy with risky lifetime, and compare the laissez-faire with egalitarian social optima. We consider two social objectives: (1) the maximin on expected lifetime welfare (ex ante), allowing for a com...
Behavioral economics has shaken the view that individuals have welldefined, consistent, and stable preferences. This raises a challenge for welfare economics, which takes asa key postulate that individual preferences should be respected. We argue, in agreement with Bernheim (2009) and Bernheim and Rangel (2009), that behavioral economics is compati...
Common sense supports prevention policies aimed at improving survival prospects among the population. It is also widely acknowledged that an early death is a serious disadvantage, and that attention should be paid to the compensation of short-lived individuals. This paper re-examines the compatibility of those two concerns: prevention against early...
We argue that the economic evaluation of health care (cost-benefit analysis) should respect individual preferences and should incorporate distributional considerations. Relying on individual preferences does not imply subjective welfarism. We propose a particular non-welfarist approach, based on the concept of equivalent income, and show how it hel...
We study the difference between the ex post and ex ante perspectives in equality of opportunity. We show that the well documented conflicts between compensation and reward are but an aspect of a broader conflict between ex ante and ex post perspectives. The literature that takes the goal of providing equal opportunities as the guiding principle gen...
Happiness studies have rekindled interest in the measurement of subjective well-being, and often claim to track faithfully ‘what people care about’ in their lives. It is argued in this article that seeking to respect individuals’ preferences in the context of making intrapersonal and interpersonal comparisons for social evaluation has important and...
Preliminary versions of most of the papers in this special issue of Annals of Economics and Statistics were presented at the annual conference of the ADRES (Association pour le Développement de la Recherche en Economie et Statistiques). This conference, untitled ``New Developments in Social Choice and Welfare Theories - Conferences in Honor of Maur...
The standard analysis of procedures (mechanisms), in the theory of implementation, focuses on the properties of the subset of possible outcomes. But since a given procedure may yield very different outcomes in different circumstances (preference profile, information or rationality of players), it may be useful to rely on fine-grained social prefere...
The second part of the paper is devoted to the non-monetary indicators of social welfare. Various approaches to the study of subjective well-being and happiness are described. The author shows what problems a researcher would encounter trying to analyze welfare on the micro-level and to take account of the cognitive and affective aspects of the ind...
The first part of the paper is devoted to the monetary indicators of social welfare. It is shown which methods of quantitative estimating the aggregate wealth and well-being are available in the modern economic theory apart from the traditional GDP measure. The limitations of the methods are also discussed. The author shows which measures of welfar...
What is a fair distribution of resources and other goods when individuals are partly responsible for their achievements? This book develops a theory of fairness incorporating a concern for personal responsibility, opportunities and freedom. With a critical perspective, it makes accessible the recent developments in economics and philosophy that def...
Deux methodes sont generalement envisagees pour l’evaluation des politiques de sante. L’approche cout-benefice s’appuie sur la somme des consentements individuels a payer : elle respecte les preferences individuelles mais elle donne une priorite aux preferences des plus riches car leurs consentements a payer sont en general plus eleves. L’approche...
We suggest to include equity considerations in the computation of the social discount rate used to assess climate policies. In general, the social discount rate modified in that way depends on the distribution of costs and benefits among individuals. In the long run however, the social discount rate is close to the one that would prevail if costs a...
Many distributive issues involve situations in which initial characteristics make individuals unequal. In view of prevailing moral sentiments, some of these characteristics call for compensating transfers, and some do not. We study the literature on this problem of compensation. This literature follows the distinction between the ethical principle...
Harsanyi invested his Aggregation Theorem and Impartial Observer Theorem with deep utilitarian sense, but Sen redescribed them as "representation theorems" with little ethical import. This negative view has gained wide acquiescence in economics. Against it, we support the utilitarian interpretation by a novel argument relative to the Aggregation Th...
An early death is, undoubtedly, a serious disadvantage. However, the compensation of short-lived individuals has remained so far largely unexplored, probably because it appears infeasible. Indeed, short-lived agents can hardly be identified ex ante, and cannot be compensated ex post. We argue that, despite those difficulties, a compensation can be...
In several of his recent contributions, most notably Kolm (2004), Serge-Christophe Kolm has developed a solution to the macro-justice
problem which he calls Equal Labor Income Equalization (ELIE). It consists in a particular labor income taxation scheme that
he advocates as the ideal compromise between freedom and equality requirements.
Serge-Christophe Kolm is a prominent member of the French community of ingénieurs-économistes (engineer-economists). Trained in the elite French grandes écoles (great schools), these individuals, motivated by practical problems of the public sector, have made distinguished contributions
to the study of normative eco nomics. Kolm, more so than other...
Although economists have long stressed the limitations of using GDP to evaluate standards of living, the debate was recently reignited by the publication of the Stiglitz report. In 2006, the CEPII proposed an indicator incorporating certain social data items, in terms of equivalent incomes, such as leisure time, poverty associated with unemployment...
This paper describes the evaluation of individual situations in terms of equivalent incomes (or money-metric utilities) computed from ordinary income by adding or subtracting various terms of willingness-to-pay. It discusses the origin of the approach and its connection with social choice theory, fair allocation theory, and philosophical principles...
This paper examines how to satisfy a separability condition related to "independence of the utilities of the dead" (Blackorby et al., 1995; Bommier and Zuber, 2008) in the class of "expected equally distributed equivalent" social orderings (Fleurbaey, 2010). It also inquires into the possibility to keep some aversion to inequality in this context....
Although economists have long stressed the limitations of using GDP to evaluate standards of living, the debate was recently reignited by the publication of the Stiglitz report. In 2006, the CEPII proposed an indicator incorporating certain social data items, in terms of equivalent incomes, such as leisure time, poverty associated with unemployment...
The definition and measurement of social welfare have been a vexed issue for the past century. This book makes a constructive, easily applicable proposal and suggests how to evaluate the economic situation of a society in a way that gives priority to the worse-off and that respects each individual’s preferences over his or her own consumption, work...