Choice, Welfare and Measurement

by Amartya Sen

Harvard University Press, 1999
Paper: 978-0-674-12778-4
Library of Congress Classification HB846.S46 1999
Dewey Decimal Classification 330.1556

ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Choice, Welfare and Measurement contains many of Amartya Sen's most important contributions to economic analysis and methods, including papers on choice, preference, rationality, aggregation, and measurement. A substantial introductory essay interrelates his diverse concerns, and also analyzes discussions generated by the original papers, focusing on the underlying issues.

REVIEWS

Amartya Sen, [the 1998] Nobel Prizewinner in Economics, has helped give voice to the world's poor. And that is no small matter, for the very lives of the world's poor may depend on having their voices heard. In a lifetime of careful scholarship, Sen has repeatedly returned to a basic theme: even impoverished societies can improve the well-being of their least advantaged members. Societies that attend to the poorest of the poor can save their lives, promote their longevity and increase their opportunities through education and productive work. Societies that neglect the poor, on the other hand, may inadvertently allow millions to die of famine--even in the middle of an economic boom, as occurred during the great famine in Bengal, India, in 1943, the subject of Sen's most famous case study...Sen [delivers a] powerful message: annual income growth is not enough to achieve development. Societies must pay attention to social goals as well, always leaning toward their most vulnerable citizens, and overcoming deep-rooted biases to invest in the health and well-being of girls as well as boys. In a world in which 1.5 billion people subsist on less than $1 a day, this Nobel Prize can be not just a celebration of a wonderful scholar but also a clarion call to attend to the urgent needs and hopes of the world's poor.
-- Jeffrey Sachs Time

Many of these papers are classics that one consults again and again. But [the collection] is more than a convenience: one gains something from reading these essays together.
-- Robert Sugden Times Higher Education Supplement

Sen’s mastery in the fields of social choice, the foundation of welfare economics, and, more broadly, distributive ethics and the measurement problems associated with these fields is unquestioned. This selection of articles fully reflects his work in these areas… A number of papers are classics.
-- Kenneth J. Arrow

TABLE OF CONTENTS





Preface                                                          vii
Introduction                                                     1

Part I: Choice and Preference
1 Choice Functions and Revealed Preference                      41
2 Behaviour and the Concept of Preference                       54
3 Choice, Orderings and Morality                                74
4 Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of
    Economic Theory                                              84

Part II: Preference Aggregation
5 A Possibility Theorem on Majority Decisions                  109
6 Quasi-transitivity, Rational Choice and Collective Decisions  118
7 Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Rational Choice under 
  Majority Decision with P. K. Pattanaik                        134
8 Social Choice Theory: A Re-examination                       158

Part III: Welfare Comparisons and Social Choice
9 Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability      203
10 On Ignorance and Equal Distribution                          222
11 On Weights and Measures: Informational Constraints in Social
    Welfare Analysis                                            226
12 Interpersonal Comparisons of Welfare                         264





Part IV: Non-utility Information
13 The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal                     285
14 Liberty, Unanimity and Rights                               291
15 Personal Utilities and Public Judgements: or What's Wrong
    with Welfare Economics?                                    327
16 Equality of What?                                           353

Part V: Social Measurement
17 Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement                 373
18 Real National Income                                        388
19 Ethical Measurement of Inequality: Some Difficulties      416
20 Description as Choice                                      432

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