Review of Matthew D. Adler, Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction
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Review of Matthew D. Adler, Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019. Pp. 328. ISBN: 978–0–190-64,302-7 Domenico Moramarco 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Economics scholars often face the need of vulgarizing the complex theories they have been working on or studying. With this book, Matthew Adler has once again proved to have a special talent for doing so. Since the first pages, Adler is clear about the main scope of the book: to communicate the essence of the social welfare function (SWF) methodology without too many mathematical technicalities. It is true that the SWF literature has the tendency to be technical and the author’s efforts to make it more accessible are more than welcome. This book serves as main text for the social choice theory seminar at Duke University, but its structure and content make it accessible to a wider, even non-academic, audience. A second declared objective of the book is to criticize the current use of Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) for policy choice in favour of the SWF framework. The book is composed by seven chapters in addition to one introductory section and an extended formal appendix. It is written with a parsimonious use of mathematical notation and terminology. Concepts are explained in an intuitive and clear way and the topic coverage serves well the main scope of the book. The introductory section proposes five stylized examples of policy choices involving environmental protection, redistributive taxation, infrastructure planning, climate change, and health policy. These examples illustrate that policies can affect multiple dimensions of individual well-being and generate well-being changes (gains and losses) that heterogeneously affect individuals starting at different well-being levels. Moreover, policy makers would often have to make a choice between overall well-being and inequality. The examples motivate the use of the SWF framework which is able to take these recurrent policy features into account and is applicable to a wide range of policy domains. Chapter 1 is meant to be an overview of the SWF framework and is, de facto, a useful introductive summary of the book. In its first part, the chapter presents the three building blocks of the SWF framework, which are then better developed in the following two chapters. * Domenico Moramarco [email protected]
1
European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARESS), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium
D. Moramarco
At the very base of this framework there is an interpersonally comparable measure of wellbeing. This mathematical object converts the outcome distribution into a well-being distribution by assigning well-being numbers to each individual in the population. The second component of the framework is a rule, that we call SWF, to order well-being distributions from the most to the least preferable. The SWF framework adopts, therefore, a welfareconsequentialist approach because it orders policies a
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