福利经济学之死:一场争论的历史

Herrade Igersheim
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引用次数: 14

摘要

福利经济学的死亡已经被宣告了好几次。这些多重死亡的原因之一是,肯尼斯·阿罗在1951年开创性的《社会选择与个人价值》中提出的不可能性定理表明,社会福利函数——由艾伯拉姆·柏格森(Burk)于1938年定义、保罗·萨缪尔森在《经济分析基础》(1947年,第八章)中阐明的新福利经济学的主要概念之一——在合理条件下不存在。事实上,从一开始,阿罗就坚持认为,他那著名的不可能结果会对柏格森-萨缪尔森社会福利函数(1948,1950,1951,1963)产生直接的、毁灭性的影响,尽管他在80年代初似乎软化了自己的立场。在他这方面,特别是从70年代开始,萨缪尔森在这个问题上一直很活跃,并继续不遗余力地捍卫他与柏格森设计的概念,反对阿罗的攻击(1967年,1977年,1981年,1987年,2005年)。本文的目的正是要研究这一相当奇怪的争论,它在科学界几乎是不为人知的,尽管它持续了50多年,见证了阿罗和萨缪尔森这两位经济巨头之间的冲突,以及他们背后两个截然不同的群体——衰落的福利经济学与新兴的社会选择理论——处理福利经济学中数学工具的两种冲突方式,最重要的是,两种不同的社会福利概念。通过不同类型的材料,我试图把握阿罗、萨缪尔森和其他人之间的交流,无论是公开的还是幕后的,都揭示了我的两个主要角色的动机。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
The Death of Welfare Economics: History of a Controversy
The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function – one of the main concepts of the new welfare economics as defined by Abram Bergson (Burk) in 1938 and clarified by Paul Samuelson in the Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947, ch. VIII) – does not exist under reasonable conditions. Indeed, from the very start, Arrow kept asserting that his famous impossibility result has direct and devastating consequences for the Bergson-Samuelson Social Welfare Function (1948, 1950, 1951a, 1963), though he seemed to soften his position in the early eighties. On his side, especially from the seventies on, Samuelson remained active on this issue and continued to defend the concept he had devised with Bergson, tooth and nail, against Arrow’s attacks (1967, 1977, 1981, 1987, 2005). The aim of this paper is precisely to examine this rather strange controversy, which is almost unknown in the scientific community, even though it lasted more than fifty years and saw a conflict between two economic giants, Arrow and Samuelson, and behind them two distinct communities–the fading welfare economics against the emerging social choice theory–, two conflicting ways of dealing with mathematical tools in welfare economics and, above all, two different conceptions of social welfare. By relying on different kinds of material, I attempt to grasp what the exchanges between Arrow, Samuelson and others, both overtly and behind the scenes, reveal regarding the motivations of my two main actors.
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