This book explores how different ideas of the common good may be compared, contrasted and ranked.

Parts three and four are devoted to algebraic and combinatorial aspects of social choice theory, including analyses of Arrow's Theorem, consensus functions, and the role of geometry. Part five deals with the application of cooperative game theory to social choice.

This book covers the main topics of welfare economics — general equilibrium models of exchange and production, Pareto optimality, un certainty, externalities and public goods — and some of the major topics of social choice theory — compensation criteria, fairness, voting. Arrow's Theorem, and the theory of implementation. The underlying question is this: "Is a particular economic or voting mechanism good or bad for society?" Welfare economics is mainly about whether the market mechanism is good or bad; social choice is largely about whether voting mechanisms, or other more abstract mechanisms, can improve upon the results of the market. This second edition updates the material of the first, written by Allan Feldman. It incorporates new sections to existing first-edition chapters, and it includes several new ones. Chapters 4, 6, 11, 15 and 16 are new, added in this edition. The first edition of the book grew out of an undergraduate welfare economics course at Brown University. The book is intended for the undergraduate student who has some prior familiarity with microeconomics. However, the book is also useful for graduate students and professionals, economists and non-economists, who want an overview of welfare and social choice results unburdened by detail and mathematical complexity. Welfare economics and social choice both probably suffer from ex cessively technical treatments in professional journals and monographs.

Andy Blunden’s Hegel Marx & Vygotsky, Essays in Social Philosophy uses a series of essays to demonstrate how the cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky and the Soviet Activity Theorists can be used to renew Hegelian Marxism as an interdisciplinary science.

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, leisure and so on. This approach resonates with the current concern to go 'beyond the GDP' in the measurement of social progress. Compared to technical studies in welfare economics, this book emphasizes constructive results rather than paradoxes and impossibilities, and shows how one can start from basic principles of efficiency and fairness and end up with concrete evaluations of policies. Compared to more philosophical treatments of social justice, this book is more precise about the definition of social welfare and reaches conclusions about concrete policies and institutions only after a rigorous derivation from clearly stated principles.

This volume presents interviews that have been conducted from the 1980s to the present with important scholars of social choice and welfare theory. Starting with a brief history of social choice and welfare theory written by the book editors, it features 15 conversations with four Nobel Laureates and other key scholars in the discipline. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part presents four conversations with the founding fathers of modern social choice and welfare theory: Kenneth Arrow, John Harsanyi, Paul Samuelson, and Amartya Sen. The second part includes conversations with scholars who made important contributions to the discipline from the early 1970s onwards. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of economics, and the history of social choice and welfare theory in particular.

The Handbook of Rational and Social Choice provides an overview of issues arising in work on the foundations of decision theory and social choice over the past three decades. Drawing on work by economic theorists mainly, but also with contributions from political science, philosophy and psychology, the collection shows how the related areas of decision theory and social choice have developed in their applications and moved well beyond the basic models of expected utility and utilitarian approaches to welfare economics. Containing twenty-three contributions, in many cases by leading figures in their fields, the handbook shows how the normative foundations of economics have changed dramatically as more general and explicit models of utility and group choice have been developed. This is perhaps the first time these developments have been brought together in a manner that seeks to identify and make accessible the recent themes and developments that have been of particular interest to researchers in recent years. The collection will be of particular value to researchers in economics with interests in utility or welfare but it will also be of interest to any social scientist or philosopher interested in theories of rationality or group decision-making.

This volume brings together papers, which were ?rst presented at the International Conference on Rational Choice, Individual Rights and Non-Welfaristic Normative Economics, held in honour of Kotaro Suzumura at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, on 11–13 March 2006, and which have subsequently gone through the usual process of review by referees. We have been helped by many individuals and institutions in organizing the conference and putting this volume together. We are grateful to the authors of this volume for contributing their papers and to the referees who reviewed the papers. We gratefully acknowledge the very generous fundings by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, through the grant for the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program on the Normative Evaluation and Social Choice of Contemporary Economic Systems, and by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, through the grant for International Scienti?c Meetings in Japan, and the unstinted effort of the staff of the COE Program at Hitotsubashi University, without which the conference in 2006 would not have been possible. We thank Dr. Martina Bihn, the Editorial Director of Springer-Verlag for economics and business, for her advice and help. Finally, we would like to mention that it has been a great pleasure and privilege for us to edit this volume, which is intended to be a tribute to Kotaro Suzumura’s - mense intellectual contributions, especially in the theory of rational choice, welfare economics, and the theory of social choice. Riverside Prasanta K.

How should we evaluate the ethics of procreation, especially the environmental consequences of reproductive decisions on future generations, in a resource-constrained world? While demographers, moral philosophers, and environmental scientists have separately discussed the implications of population size for sustainability, no one has attempted to synthesize the concerns and values of these approaches. The culmination of a half century of engagement with population ethics, Partha Dasgupta’s masterful Time and the Generations blends economics, philosophy, and ecology to offer an original lens on the difficult topic of optimum global population. After offering careful attention to global inequality and the imbalance of power between men and women, Dasgupta provides tentative answers to two fundamental questions: What level of economic activity can our planet support over the long run, and what does the answer say about optimum population numbers? He develops a population ethics that can be used to evaluate our choices and guide our sense of a sustainable global population and living standards. Structured around a central essay from Dasgupta, the book also features a foreword from Robert Solow; correspondence with Kenneth Arrow; incisive commentaries from Joseph Stiglitz, Eric Maskin, and Scott Barrett; an extended response by the author to them; and a joint paper with Aisha Dasgupta on inequalities in reproductive decisions and the idea of reproductive rights. Taken together, Time and the Generations represents a fascinating dialogue between world-renowned economists on a central issue of our time.

This collection of thirteen essays on social ethics and normative economics honouring Serge-Christophe Kolm's seminal contributions to this field addresses the following questions: How should the public sector price its production and services? What are the normative foundations of criteria for comparing distributions of riches and advantages? How should intergenerational social immobility and inequality in circumstances be measured? What is a fair way to form partnerships? How vulnerable to manipulation is the Lindahl rule for allocating public goods? What are the properties of Kolm's ELIE tax proposal? Would the addition of EU-level income taxes enhance equity? How should we compare different scenarios for future societies with different population sizes? How can domain conditions in social choice theory be justified using Kolm's epistemic counterfactuals? How can Kolm's distributive liberal contract be implemented? What are the implications of norms of reciprocity for the organization of society? The answers to these questions give major insight into the state-of-the-art of social ethics and normative economics and are thus an indispensable source for researchers in both of these fields.