welfare economics

welfare economics, branch of economics that seeks to evaluate economic policies in terms of their effects on the well-being of the community. It became established as a well-defined branch of economic theory during the 20th century.

Earlier writers conceived of welfare as simply the sum of the satisfactions accruing to all individuals within an economic system. Later theorists became skeptical of the possibility of measuring even one person’s satisfactions and argued that it was impossible to compare with precision the states of well-being of two or more individuals. In simple terms, the long-standing assumption that a poor man would derive more additional satisfaction than a rich man from any given increase in income could not be precisely maintained.

On the level of social policy, this meant that measures redistributing resources from rich to poor (as in the case of progressive income taxation) could not be said to increase the sum of individual satisfactions. A new and more limited criterion was then developed for judging economic policy: one economic situation was judged superior to another only if at least one person had been made better off without anyone else being made worse off. Alternatively, one economic state might be judged superior to a previous one even though some consumers were made worse off if the gainers could compensate the losers and still be better off than before. There would, however, be no way of judging among several alternatives of which all fulfilled this condition.