Transnational Land Deals and Gender Equality: Utilitarian and Human Rights Approaches

Transnational land deals pose vexing normative (ethical) questions, not least concerning gendered participation and outcomes. This article explores utilitarian and human rights approaches to gender equality in selected policy initiatives on the land deals. While global policy literature manifests growing attention to women in agriculture, the review found the analysis of gender in early policy initiatives to be absent or weak. Utilitarian arguments were used to justify deals but rarely presented women's participation as a means of social progress or so-called smart economics. Human rights documents were more likely to be critical of the deals and to mention gender, though with little elaboration. While to some extent amended by the emphasis on gender equality in the 2012 Voluntary Guidelines on tenure governance, failures to mobilize the feminist potential in utilitarian and human rights approaches call for more proactive gender analysis and advocacy when addressing transnational land deals as gendered power struggles.     

ENERGY UTILITIES, CONSERVATION, AND ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY

Academic and policy debate has centered around an apparent "underinvestment in conservation." This paper outlines traditional explanations for underinvestment and presents a prospect theory analysis of individual conservation behavior. On the basis of investment criteria, individuals seem to discriminate against conservation investments. While these decisions might appear rational as life style decisions, individual choice across different household appliances shows little consistency. For policymaking purposes, understanding and modeling actual behavior is crucial to maximizing social welfare. The insight of certain positive models of human behavior supports economic efficiency arguments for marketplace intervention. This paper argues that because individuals making conservation investment decisions apparently do not act according to the dictates of utilitarian economics, utility sponsored conservation programs are justified on economic efficiency grounds. Finally, in light of prospect theory considerations, the paper suggests marketing guidelines for conservation investments sponsored by electric utilities.     

Ethics and Banking

Usually moral conscience has been forgotten after the individualist and utilitarian analysis. However, many people guide their behavior by a value system that is sensitive to social problems, such as equilibrium with nature, respect of human rights, and the equality of opportunities. People have the power to change the society: As consumers and as savers. As savers, people have the opportunity to choose, in financial markets, between institutions and products. In this paper, we will summarize the economic trends that observe a moral conscience in humans. Then, we will analyze if this moral conscience can have a translation in the financial sector. Can ethical banks and investment funds survive in the competitive financial sector? Can moral conscience be incorporated into financial business?     

Sympathy and its discontents: ‘Greatest happiness’ versus the ‘general good’

The paper explicates the utilitarian principle of sympathy in terms of the shape of what has been called the ‘sympathetic gradient’, which determines the allocation of goods to those close by and afar. It examines challenges to the utilitarian impartial weighting scheme that emerged in the literary community, and from evolutionary biology. As sympathy came to be seen as an impediment to evolutionary perfection, voices urged that sympathy be suppressed. Darwin's Descent of Man explicitly countenanced the suppression of sympathy in a trade-off of happiness for the perfection of the race. A post-Darwinian argument concerning a different capacity for pleasure accompanied the demise of sympathy in utilitarian economic analysis. Utilitarians then moved from the early presumption of ‘everyone to count for one’ to counting ‘every equal increment of pleasure’ equally.     

Utilitarianism and the role of utility in Adam Smith

Abstract

In this paper we confront attempts to bring Smith closer to utilitarianism. We show that Smith's conception of utility is not utilitarian. While the pursuit of ‘pleasure’ could lie behind human behaviour, it is not the pleasure referred to by utilitarianism. Instead, utility, in its colloquial sense, plays a greater role that suggests a type of consideration which is foreign to utilitarianism and which also introduces a rationalist element to Smith's moral analysis. Thus, utility, in the utilitarian sense, is neither a guide to action nor a means for moral evaluation.     

Intergenerational externalities,sustainability and welfare—The ambiguous effect of optimal policies on resource depletion

This paper studies an endogenous growth model with exhaustible resources, overlapping generations and human capital externalities. In the competitive equilibrium, selfish behavior and inefficient skills accumulation may prevent sustained growth. Implementing the utilitarian optimum likely induces sustainability via increased knowledge formation, but resource depletion may be faster or slower than under laissez-faire depending on the social discount rate. Heavy (modest) social discounting delays (anticipates) the achievement of net welfare gains for newborn agents and successors. The reason is that human capital accumulation magnifies the positive growth effects of policies that lower the rate of resource destruction, preserving the welfare of newborn agents. Resource-depleting policies, instead, hamper growth and reduce lifetime welfare of early-in-time generations—the first loser being the currently young.     

Ethically robust comparisons of bidimensional distributions with an ordinal attribute

We provide foundations for robust normative evaluation of distributions of two attributes, one of which is cardinally measurable and transferable between individuals and the other is ordinal and non-transferable. The result that we establish takes the form of an analogue to the standard Hardy–Littlewood–Pólya theorem for distributions of one cardinal attribute. More specifically, we identify the transformations of the distributions which guarantee that social welfare increases according to utilitarian unanimity provided that the utility function is concave in the cardinal attribute and that its marginal utility with respect to the same attribute is non-increasing in the ordinal attribute. We establish that this unanimity ranking of the distributions is equivalent to the ordered poverty gap quasi-ordering introduced by Bourguignon [12]. Finally, we show that, if one distribution dominates another according to the ordered poverty gap criterion, then the former can be derived from the latter by means of an appropriate and finite sequence of such transformations.     

Social security, retirement age and optimal income taxation

It is often argued that implicit taxation on continued activity of elderly workers is responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or of first-best efficiency, there would be no such implicit taxation. The point of this paper is that, when first-best redistributive instruments are not available, because some variables are not observable, the optimal policy does imply a distortion of the retirement decision. Consequently, the inducement of early retirement may be part of the optimal tax-transfer policy. We consider a model in which individuals differ in their productivity and their capacity to work long and choose both their weekly labor supply and their age of retirement. We characterize the optimal non-linear tax-transfer that maximizes a utilitarian welfare function when weekly earnings and the length of active life are observable while individuals' productivity and health status are not observable.     

The welfare consequences of strategic behaviour under approval and plurality voting

This paper studies the welfare consequences of strategic behaviour under approval and plurality voting by comparing the utilitarian efficiencies obtained in simulated voting under two behavioural assumptions: expected utility-maximising behaviour and sincere behaviour. Under approval voting utilitarian efficiency is relatively high irrespective of the behavioural assumption, and under the plurality rule strategic voting significantly increases utilitarian efficiency.     

顾客参与对顾客感知虚拟价值的影响研究

本研究将广义虚拟经济的二元价值容介态理论引入到顾客价值的研究框架中,将顾客感知价值分为实体价值(即实用价值)和虚拟价值(即享乐价值),构建了参与情境下对不同的顾客感知价值类型的影响差异模型。研究结果表明:(1)顾客参与的三个维度:信息分享、责任行为和人际互动都对实用价值有显著正向的影响;(2)信息分享、责任行为和人际互动都对享乐价值有显著正向的影响;(3)实用价值和享乐价值都对顾客忠诚有显著正向的影响。     

Morally ruled behaviour: The neglected contribution of Scholasticism *

Abstract

In the analysis of ‘justice’ in market exchanges, the scholastic doctors made some contributions to the theories of prices and money. But probably the most important (and neglected) contribution lies in the domain of anthropology, i.e. in the explanation of human nature and human behaviour. In this paper the authors are going to work out two scholastic ideas that provide an alternative to the individualist and utilitarian approach of neoclassical economics. (1) Persons are morally ruled beings; a sense of ‘duty’ is a key element in their behaviour; (2) Persons are social beings competing and cooperating to achieve certain goals. Dominant positions and privileged information grant them special powers that should not be abused.     

The Ethics of Intertemporal Distribution in a Warming Planet

This paper evaluates, from the ethical viewpoint, current work by economists on intergenerational resource allocation in the presence of global warming. We begin by attempting to elucidate the debate that has recently occurred on the appropriate choice of the discount rate. We offer three justifications for maximizing the discounted sum of generational utilities, and find only one of these to be a satisfactory justification of that practice: the possibility that the human species may become extinct. This implies that a very small discount rate (large discount factor) should be used. We argue that the justification for discounting, inherent in the approaches taken by many economists, is that of ‘the present generation of hegemon,’ which is unacceptable. The role of the Ramsey equation in deducing the discount rate in these theories is explained. As an alternative to discounted utilitarianism, we propose a principle of sustainability; we describe optimal paths that have been calculated for the sustainabilitiarian (Rawlsian) objective function, and paths that will sustain growth in welfare, at a positive rate. We report results concerning optimal paths when the uncertainty of existence of future generations is taken into account. In sharp contrast to the utilitarian model, it turns out that under some conditions, the ‘sustainabilitarian’ can ignore the uncertainty regarding the date at which humans become extinct. There is a striking difference between the solutions of the discounted utilitarian program and the sustainabilitarian program under uncertainty.     

Intertemporally Consistent Population Ethics: Birth-date Dependent Classical Principles

This paper shows that, in a partially welfarist framework that permits discounting, perperiod social evaluations can be consistent with a timeless social ordering only if social principles lead to the repugnant conclusion . The same result applies if per-period social evaluations are replaced by forward-looking evaluations (social orderings that, in a given period, depend on present and future utilities only). This is the case because geometric classical generalized utilitarian principles are the only social principles satisfying these intertemporal consistency conditions together with some basic assumptions. The conclusion to be drawn from this paper is that history must matter to some extent if social-evaluation principles are to be ethically acceptable.
JEL Classification Numbers: D63, D71     

An Overlapping Generations Model of Climate-Economy Interactions

A numerically calibrated overlapping generations model of climate change and the world econommy is examined in this paper. In the absence of intergenerational transfers, efficient rates of greenhouse gas emissions abatement rise from 16% in the present to 25% in the long run, while mean global temperature increases by 7.4°C relative to the preindustrial norm. A utilitarian optimum, which attaches equal weight to each generation's life-cycle utility, yields abatement rates that rise from 48% to 89%, with a long-run temperature increase of 3.4°C. A second-best utilitarian path, in which intergenerational transfers are by assumption institutionally infeasible, also supports stringent abatement measures.     

Equally-distributed equivalent utility,ex post egalitarianism and utilitarianism

We provide an axiomatization of expected equally-distributed equivalent-utility social welfare functions in the context of Harsanyi?s impartial observer theorem. For this family of social welfare functions, we show what additional axiom is necessary and sufficient for the observer to exhibit aversion to ex post inequality. We also relate this axiomatization to our axiomatization in a companion paper of generalized utilitarian social welfare functions. Given certain richness assumptions, the only social welfare functions that belong to both families are the utilitarian.     

A note on redistributive fairness and economic reform

To understand reasons for possible failures of ‘good’ economic reforms, we consider an institution which is always successful in making the best public decision from the utilitarian perspective. We show it is bound to introduce inequality if costs of a reform are privately known: the losers can not be always compensated. Thus, if equity is a primary concern, then some reforms with positive aggregate net gain might not be undertaken. If the utilitarian welfare is the only guide for making public decisions, implementing a reform might require the ability to ignore the associated social costs of inequality.     

劳动力市场与大学毕业生人力资本投资决策

大学毕业生就业难问题已成为了社会关注的热点,文章从劳动力市场角度出发,通过运用人力资本投资决策模型对大学毕业生人力资本投资行为进行分析,得出工资水平、劳动力市场的流动性、信息渠道的畅通性和毕业生的保留价格对大学毕业生的决策行为有着重大的影响。文章还根据我国劳动力市场的实际情况,提出了一系列解决大学生就业难问题的意见和建议。     

Age-related taxation of bequests in the presence of a dependency risk

This paper studies the properties of the optimal taxes on bequests when individuals differ in wage and in their risks of mortality and old-age dependance. Survival is positively correlated to income but dependency is negatively correlated with it. The government cannot distinguish between bequests motives, that is whether bequests resulted from precautionary reasons or from pure joy of giving reasons. Instead, it observes the timing of bequests and the health status at death. Under the utilitarian social welfare criterion, we show that bequests taxation results from a combination of equity, insurance, and public revenue motives. If redistribution concerns dominate insurance concerns, it is desirable to tax the most bequests of those individuals living long in good health and to tax the least bequests of those dying early. This is a direct consequence of the socio-demographic structure we assumed where richer agents live longer and in better health than poorer agents. To the opposite, if insurance concerns dominate redistributive concerns, early bequests should be the most taxed and, bequests under dependency the least taxed. Under the Rawlsian criterion, we find that early bequests should be the least taxed and bequests left by the healthy long-lived individuals should be the most taxed.     

In defense of health-based standards

This paper explores the utilitarian ethical foundations underlying two standards for pollution control: an efficiency standard and a health-based standard. The main point is that a health-based standard can be defended quite easily on utilitarian grounds; safety proponents need not be self-serving, irrational nor ignorant. Criticism of health-based standards as “too costly” is not always persuasive since material consumption is not the only component of social welfare, nor do consumption increases necessarily increase social welfare.     

Neuroeconomics as a Natural Extension of Bioeconomics: The Shifting Scope of Standard Economic Theory

Synopsis Neuroeconomics rightly has been claimed to be a natural extension of bioeconomics. One of the things bioeconomics investigates is what behavioral dispositions and what behavioral patterns evolutionary processes have produced. Neuroeconomics extends this to the study of evolved mechanisms that are at work in decision-making at the neural level of the brain. The paper argues that in another respect neuroeconomics and bioeconomics are discontinuous, however. Bioeconomics maintains that the applicability of standard economic theory’s constrained maximization framework is not confined to human behavior. The constrained maximization framework is believed to be suitable to describe behavior throughout the animal kingdom. By contrast, despite some minor internal disagreements all neuroeconomists seem to agree that human behavior is predicted poorly by standard economic theory in several social and economic situations. Neuroscience is believed to hold out the hope of an advanced understanding of when and why this is the case.