Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editor's preface
- Introduction
- Part I Soviet socialism
- Part II Economic welfare
- 9 Bergsonian welfare economics
- 10 Optimal and voluntary income distribution
- 11 A note on production structure and aggregate growth
- 12 Optimal education, occupation, and income distribution in a simplist model
- 13 The welfare economics of product quality under socialism
- Abram Bergson: Biographical sketch and bibliography
- Index
10 - Optimal and voluntary income distribution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editor's preface
- Introduction
- Part I Soviet socialism
- Part II Economic welfare
- 9 Bergsonian welfare economics
- 10 Optimal and voluntary income distribution
- 11 A note on production structure and aggregate growth
- 12 Optimal education, occupation, and income distribution in a simplist model
- 13 The welfare economics of product quality under socialism
- Abram Bergson: Biographical sketch and bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction and summary
The concept of the social welfare function was introduced by Bergson in his classic paper (1938) to express preferences over resource allocations to all individuals in society. Just as the commodity bundles of an individual are supposed to be compared by his or her individual preference ordering, so the alternative allocations of commodity bundles to all individuals can be ordered by a social welfare ordering over this entire space. As with any ordering satisfying certain regularity properties, the social welfare ordering can be represented by a real-valued function, the social welfare function. Its significance is essentially ordinal, but under additional conditions of separability the function representing an ordering can be chosen to be additive in an appropriate choice of variables.
The optimization of a social welfare function should determine the entire allocation of resources among individuals and therefore includes the normative problems of income distribution. To concentrate on this topic, I will confine attention to the special case where there is only one commodity in the economic system. A resource allocation is then simply a vector with a (nonnegative) component for every individual in the economy.
To combine attention to the simplest normative aspects, I will further abstract from incentive questions. It will simply be assumed that the total available of the one commodity is given and is not diminished by any transfers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Economic Welfare and the Economics of Soviet SocialismEssays in honor of Abram Bergson, pp. 267 - 288Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981
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