Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis

In Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis, author Matthew D. Adler provides readers with a comprehensive philosophically grounded argument for the use of social welfare functions as a framework for governmental policy analysis. Well-Being and Fair Distribution addresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the possibility of an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being, or "utility" metric; the moral value of equality, and how that bears on the form of the social welfare function; social choice under uncertainty; and the possibility of integrating considerations of individual choice and responsibility into the social-welfare-function framework. Adler's book also deals with issues of implementation, and explores how survey data and other sources of evidence might be used to calibrate both a utility metric and a social welfare function, and whether distributive goals are ever best pursued through regulation rather than the tax system. In working through this range of theoretical and practical issues, Well-Being and Fair Distribution draws from a wide variety of literatures, including philosophical scholarship on equality, responsibility, the nature of well-being, and personal identity over time; the social choice literature within economics; applied economic literatures concerning the measurement of inequality and poverty; legal and policy-analysis scholarship on cost-benefit analysis, environmental justice, and the choice between regulation and taxation; and the burgeoning field of "happiness studies."