Are you referring to the Arrow impossibility theorem? Samuelson says that the theorem does not refer to a social-welfare function but to a voting rule. If you go back to the original Bergson article (written under the pseudonym Burke), you find the social welfare function formulated in a way that makes it virtually impossible to refute.
Or to measure.
The main point about GNP or GDP is that it is supposed to be a measure of how much junk is produced. Like the horizontal axis in the widget market, its units of measure are things. For happiness or well-being -- or survival -- you need another variable or two. Or ten.
At 17:39 9/05/05, you wrote:
One of the problems with a GPI-type measure is that it assumes that there's a social welfare function, something that economists have shown cannot exist (though they then go on to use it or similar, implicitly or explicitly). The only way I know to aggregate "preferences" is through democracy, not by adding things up using fixed weights (or whatever).
> >But if the government started using the GPI (or similar) to measure > >the economy's success, it wouldn't last -- unless there were a mass > >movement to back it up. > > It would also be really really hard to calculate. There are enough > imputations already in the NIPAs.... > > Doug -- Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine
Robert Scott Gassler Professor of Economics Vesalius College of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2 B-1050 Brussels Belgium
32.2.629.27.15
