Showing papers by "Amartya Sen published in 1979"

Issues in the Measurement of Poverty

Abstract: The paper is concerned with discussing some of the basic issues in the measurement of poverty. The measurement of poverty can be split into two distinct operations, viz. identification (who are the poor?) and aggregation (how are the poverty characteristics of different people to be combined into an aggregate measure?). The nature of the exercise of poverty measurement is examined in Section I. Section II is devoted to the identification issue, including the fixation of a “poverty line”. Section III goes into the aggregation problem. Some concluding remarks are made in the last section.

Interpersonal Comparisons of Welfare

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses alternative interpretations of interpersonal comparisons and alternative formal structures of the type of comparability. To begin with, statements on interpersonal comparisons can be broadly classified into descriptive and prescriptive types. Several descriptive interpretations of interpersonal comparisons are possible and these different interpretations must also be distinguished from each other. At least three distinct descriptive interpretations can be distinguished, based respectively on behaviorism, introspective welfare comparison, and introspective as if choice. Also another way to interpret the above mentioned interpersonal comparisons is the normative interpretation method, as proposed by Robbins (1935). It is worth noting that any normative interpretation is entirely relative to the maximand chosen. In utilitarianism, being concerned with maximizing the sum of individual welfares, comparison of units is crucial and that of levels irrelevant. On the other hand, criteria of equity use a comparison of levels of welfare and sometimes ignore comparison of units. The central problem in the theory of interpersonal comparisons of welfare seems to be the embarrassment of riches observed in comparative analysis—there are many reasonable ways of making such comparisons, and they need not coincide. In addition to this problem of interpretation and procedure, there is also the question of the type of comparability to be used.

Chapter 3 – COLLECTIVE RATIONALITY

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the different aspects of collective rationality. Rational and systematic way of thinking about social welfare is to try to define an ordering for the society over all possible alternative states. This fundamental idea, among others, was expressed in a seminal paper by Bergson, though he put it somewhat differently. Social welfare can be thought to be a real valued welfare function, W, the value of which is understood to depend on all the variables that might be considered as affecting welfare. Such a social welfare function W may subsume the Pareto relation, if Pareto catches fancy, though there is no real compulsion to assume even this. It can be defined in many alternative ways using many alternative criteria. The concept of a Bergson welfare function is simple, perhaps deceptively so, and some observations in clarification may be called for. The form of the welfare function is not yet specified, and only a framework of rational thought is suggested.