This volume revisits the history of welfare economics, showing that economists have regularly drawn on ethical values for practical issues.

Outcomes–based, procedurally –detached social welfare theory is found to be indeterminate, irreconcilable with the moral force of rights, and non–accommodative of alternative understandings of justice. The author argues, therefore, for an explicitly normative, contractarian approach to economic theory and institutional appraisal.

This is the second edition of a well-established study of perhaps the most controversial and contested concept in the social sciences. The book traces the historical origins of welfare to eighteenth-century sources in moral and social philosophy and shows how, in the evolution of the concept, doctrines of welfare have been associated with a variety of social philosophies, including utilitarianism, rights, individualism and collectivism. The result is a well-rounded text for students of politics, sociology and social policy, and an essential reference for researchers as well as those with a wider interest in the welfare state.

Research on well-being reveals the significance of personal relationships, trust and participation to sustain quality of life, yet it is the economic model that remains the dominant basis for political and social institutions and policy. In this original book, Bill Jordan presents a new analysis of well-being in terms of social value, and outlines how it could be incorporated into public policy decisions. He argues that the grandiose attempt to maximise welfare and regulate social relations through contract, in line with the economic theory of information and incentives, is counterproductive for well-being. Instead, both the quality of personal experience and the restraints necessary for a convivial collective life would be better served by a focus on cultures and institutions. This book will be an essential text for academics and students in social theory, social welfare, public policy and governance. Bill Jordan is Professor of Social Policy at Plymouth and Huddersfield Universities. He has held visiting chairs in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Slovakia and Hungary. He worked for 20 years in the UK social services, and is the author of 25 books on social policy, social theory, politics and social work.

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.

Originally published in 1976 Talking About Welfare is a collection of essays providing a general survey of the problems facing social welfare. The book introduces a number of philosophers, social workers and social administrators, concentrating on problems in describing a general philosophical orientation to social work, what it means to understand another person, and to problems in describing and justifying social work and social welfare activity. The essays collected contribute to discussion of a wide range of welfare issues, principally that of personal and social welfare, the moral justification of welfare provision, and conceptions of community.

Disputes over government policies rage in a number of areas. From taxation to climate change, from public finance to risk regulation, and from health care to infrastructure planning, advocates debate how policies affect multiple dimensions of individual well-being, how these effects balance against each other, and how trade-offs between overall well-being and inequality should be resolved. How to measure and balance well-being gains and losses is a vexed issue. Matthew D. Adler advances the debate by introducing the social welfare function (SWF) framework and demonstrating how it can be used as a powerful tool for evaluating governmental policies. The framework originates in welfare economics and in philosophical scholarship regarding individual well-being, ethics, and distributive justice. It has three core components: a well-being measure, which translates each of the possible policy outcomes into an array of interpersonally comparable well-being numbers, quantifying how well off each person in the population would be in that outcome; a rule for ranking outcomes thus described ; and an uncertainty module, which orders policies understood as probability distributions over outcomes. The SWF framework is a significant improvement compared to cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which quantifies policy impacts in dollars, is thereby biased towards the rich, and is insensitive to the distribution of these monetized impacts. The SWF framework, by contrast, uses an unbiased measure of well-being and allows the policymaker to consider both efficiency (total well-being) and equity (the distribution of well-being). Because the SWF framework is a fully generic methodology for policy assessment, Adler also discusses how it can be implemented to inform government policies. He illustrates it through a detailed case study of risk regulation, contrasting the implications of results of SWF and CBA. This book provides an accessible, yet rigorous overview of the SWF approach that can inform policy-makers and students.