Talk:Social welfare function

non sequitir
Taken from the text:

''Often choice of such a function is considered part of political economy. The choice may be a matter of tolerances versus preferences, or some broader political or ethical issue that may be resolveable within economics at all. ''

''A related issue is the need of individual capital for rest and recreation, which prevents anyone from actually maximimizing their total income. This renders moot many of the balanced growth assumptions of macro-economics: Unless a uniform social welfare function is chosen across an entire society, growth is not balanced. Due in part to this concern, more direct means of measuring well-being than "total incomes" or GDP are required by modern human development theory.''

Amartya Sen makes the point more directly:



Without answering this question, income and welfare are only indirectly related.

These paragraphs seem like a complete non sequitir from the previous material, which is comprehensible. It does not aid me, nor I imagine anybody else, in understanding what a social welfare function is.


 * That is not the sole concern of the article. This is not a textbook, so the nature of what "is" is is up for debate.  While the above text is weak I think, the question of how one selects such a social welfare function, whether "income" is actually a valid indicator of welfare, and the ability of the society to optimize such a function at all (given need for rest, recreation, etc.) must be in there.  As it is, the article has a POV problem in assuming that incomes are in fact indicators of general welfare, as the article claims this is the purpose of a social welfare function, and that idea is unchallenged in the text now.  While the text provided for balance was weak, it had some merits:  notably, it cited Amartya Sen who is the foremost welfare economics guru, it asked the question about the relation between wealth and "living as we would like" very directly, it mentioned the other issues.  It should be rewritten and the existing claim that social welfare functions actually do what the intro says they do should be qualified.  If you wish to write a textbook, go write one at this address.  Else, accomodate the views of a wider range of people, some of whom seem not to believe in this "function" or offer valid challenges to its usefulness. EofT

Talk:Social Choice and Individual Values
Announcement: The above is the discussion tab for a new article Social Choice and Individual Values. Input is welcome through the article, the Talk page, or to me. The plan is to gather comment, corrections, or suggestions for probably at least a couple of weeks, make final changes, then go from there. Links to related articles (including the present one) would come after revision. Thanks for your help.

Thomasmeeks 22:59, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

What's up with those boxes?
Are they necessary? radek 21:33, 24 April 2007 (UTC)


 * They might at least be handy for different uses and readers, including:
 * examples or digressions that might be interesting in themselves but unboxed might interrupt the flow for some readers
 * material more detailed than a typical footnote which might otherwise be overlooked to the disadvantage of the reader
 * more technical stuff, like an appendix of an article, except more accessible. --Thomasmeeks 09:17, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Interpretation of Sen's Gini-based function
It is widely overlooked that also Sen's proposal of a social welfare function based on the Gini index has a concrete interpretation: It is the expected value of the minimum of the incomes of two randomly selected persons. In other words: If we pick two persons (independently and uniformly) at random and take the smaller of the two incomes, the average value of this is Sen's function.

This leads to a straightforward generalization of Sen's function if we use k>2 instead of 2 persons: W := expected value of the minimum of the incomes of k randomly selected persons. The higher k, the more weight is put on the small incomes.

Sounds like a textbook - Introduction/Welfare economics
I'm relatively new here, so I may be wrong, but the introductory three paragraphs reads more like a textbook rather than an encyclopedic article. I had to read it twice to grasp the content. Thanks. --Ratha K (talk) 10:23, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Gabriel morin
Propriétaire Gabriel6666 (talk) 07:54, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

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