Well-Being and Fair Distribution Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis

InWell-Being and Fair Distribution: A Defense of the Social Welfare System, author Matthew D. Adler provides readers with a comprehensive philosophically grounded argument for the use of social welfare functions as a framework for governmental policy analysis. Well-Being and Fair Distributionaddresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the possibility of an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being, or "utility" metric; the moral value of equality, and how that bears on the form of the social welfare function; social choice under uncertainty; and the possibility of integrating considerations of individual choice and responsibility into the social-welfare-function framework. Adler's book also deals with issues of implementation, and explores how survey data and other sources of evidence might be used to calibrate both a utility metric and a social welfare function, and whether distributive goals are ever best pursued through regulation rather than the tax system. In working through this range of theoretical and practical issues,Well-Being and Fair Distributiondraws from a wide variety of literatures, including philosophical scholarship on equality, responsibility, the nature of well-being, and personal identity over time; the social choice literature within economics; applied economic literatures concerning the measurement of inequality and poverty; legal and policy-analysis scholarship on cost-benefit analysis, environmental justice, and the choice between regulation and taxation; and the burgeoning field of "happiness studies."

Matthew D. Adler is the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia, and is currently a visiting professor at Duke University. In 2007 he received the University of Pennsylvania Lindback Foundation Award for distinguished teaching. Adler is the author of many articles and several books on cost-benefit analysis, risk regulation, and equity. His work is interdisciplinary, integrating law, welfare economics, and moral philosophy. He is an editor of Legal Theory, a leading journal in the area of law and philosophy.