On 5/10/05, Robert Scott Gassler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It is hard to refute because it is a notation or general logical > formulation, not a political point of view. though I hardly think there are > many Marxists who would bother with it.
I think you're right. And I think that you're right in saying that the general formulation allows for radical critics of capitalism to interject their own specification of the function. However, the general definition of a welfare function is not all there is to it. The point of having a welfare function is to be able to analyze social decision making in abstract models of "society" that resemble concrete historical societies as much as tractable. For that, you need -- inter alia -- the welfare function to have some basic properties. So not all welfare functions qualify. For example, you need it to allow for "consistent" choices. If a welfare function doesn't allow for some consistency, then you can derive all social choices from it, including mutually contradictory ones. Thus Arrow's emphasis on something akin to transitivity, which he found "impossible" to attain under what he believed were fairly reasonable "axioms." I asked you about Bergson's paper because his "reformulation" was written prior to Arrow's 1951 book. Hope you can find the Samuelson reference. Thanks, Julio
