Choice, Welfare and Measurement

Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard University.

• Preface Introduction Part 1: Choice and Preference 1. Choice Functions and Revealed Preference 2. Behaviour and the Concept to Preference 3. Choice, Orderings and Morality 4. Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory Part 2: Preference Aggregation 5. A Possibility Theorem on Majority Decisions 6. Quasi-transitivity, Rational Choice and Collective Decisions 7. Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Rational Choice under Majority 8. Decision with P.K. Pattanaik 9. Social Choice Theory: A Re-examination Part 3: Welfare Comparisons and Social Choice 10. Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability 11. On Ignorance and Equal Distribution 12. On weights and Measure: Informational Constraints in Social Welfare Analysis 13. Interpersonal Comparisons of Welfare Part 4: Non-Utility Information The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal 14. Liberty, Unanimity and Rights 15. Personal Utilities and Public Judgments: or What's Wrong with Welfare 16. Economics 17. Equality of What Part 5: Social Measurement 18. Poverty: an ordinal Approach to Measurement 19. Real National Income 20. Ethical Measurement of Inequality: Some Difficulties 21. Description as Choice Name Index Subject Index

Amartya Sen, [the 1998] Nobel Prizewinner in Economics, has helped give voice to the world's poor. And that is no small matter, for the very lives of the world's poor may depend on having their voices heard. In a lifetime of careful scholarship, Sen has repeatedly returned to a basic theme: even impoverished societies can improve the well-being of their least advantaged members. Societies that attend to the poorest of the poor can save their lives, promote their longevity and increase their opportunities through education and productive work. Societies that neglect the poor, on the other hand, may inadvertently allow millions to die of famine--even in the middle of an economic boom, as occurred during the great famine in Bengal, India, in 1943, the subject of Sen's most famous case study...Sen [delivers a] powerful message: annual income growth is not enough to achieve development. Societies must pay attention to social goals as well, always leaning toward their most vulnerable citizens, and overcoming deep-rooted biases to invest in the health and well-being of girls as well as boys. In a world in which 1.5 billion people subsist on less than $1 a day, this Nobel Prize can be not just a celebration of a wonderful scholar but also a clarion call to attend to the urgent needs and hopes of the world's poor.