Welfare Economics Quotes

I'm no enthusiast for the Coase Theorem. I don't like it, but it's widely used.

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting.

When we give a subsidy, the benefits to the public ought to exceed the benefits to the company. When it doesn't, that's our definition of corporate welfare.

Thus we seem to be on the verge of an expansion of welfare economics into something like a social science of ethics and politics: what was intended to be a mere porch to ethics is either the whole house or nothing at all. In so laying down its life welfare economics may be able to contribute some of its insights and analytical methods to a much broader evaluative analysis of the whole social process.

The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists'; the problem is how to 'find' it.

The income effects in an economy always sum to zero.

Means-tested benefits have one incredible feature in that they impose huge poverty traps.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

No increase in the welfare of the member of society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money.

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

There is a divergence between private and social accounting that the market fails to register. One essential task of law and government is to institute the necessary conditions.

In the name of compassion, Obama advocates seemingly endless extensions of unemployment benefits because his economic theology holds that by paying people not to work, you will create jobs. It not only fails to factor in the obvious deterrent that extended benefits have on their recipients but also falsely assumes that transferring money from one pocket to the next generates more spending - by some mythical multiple factor, no less. Back on planet Earth, studies reveal that extending unemployment benefits results in more unemployment.

You can't reward people who don't want to work with more money than they would make while they were working.