Premium
Social evaluations when populations differ in size
Author(s) -
Duclos JeanYves,
Zabsonré Agnès
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
canadian journal of economics/revue canadienne d'économique
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.773
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1540-5982
pISSN - 0008-4085
DOI - 10.1111/caje.12085
Subject(s) - utilitarianism , welfare , dominance (genetics) , social welfare , poverty , affect (linguistics) , population , rank (graph theory) , economics , public economics , population size , econometrics , positive economics , sociology , mathematics , political science , economic growth , law , demography , biochemistry , chemistry , communication , combinatorics , market economy , gene
Assessments of “social welfare” do not usually take into account population sizes. This can lead to serious social evaluation flaws, particularly in contexts in which policies can affect demographic growth. We develop in this paper a little‐known though ethically attractive approach to correcting the flaws of traditional social evaluations, an approach that is sensitive to population sizes and that is based on critical‐level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). Traditional CLGU is extended by considering arbitrary orders of welfare dominance and ranges of “poverty lines,” as well as values for the “critical level” of how much a life must be minimally worth to contribute to social welfare. We apply these social evaluation methods to rank Canada across 1976, 1986, 1996 and 2006 and to estimate normatively and statistically robust lower and upper bounds of critical levels over which these rankings can be made.