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Social Choice and Welfare

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01-12-2005 | Original Paper

The launching of ‘social choice and welfare’ and the creation of the ‘society for social choice and welfare’

Author: Maurice Salles

Published in: Social Choice and Welfare | Issue 2-3/2005

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I wish to ask the readers to forgive me for what could appear as a partial scientific autobiography. May I convince them that all I have written is not the result of a paranoid behaviour. …

previous article Measurement theory and the foundations of utilitarianism

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Structuralism pervaded then every discipline in France, including economics.

In the table of contents, the title is in a different order, Accumulation du capital, décisions individuelles et décisions collectives.

Regarding pure collective goods, there are some interesting remarks about the poetry of interstellar space—nothing in common with the great record by John Coltrane—, which could justify the public expenditure in spatial programs.

Though the definitions were almost correctly stated, it was said that K.J. Arrow proved that the only rules (more or less, social welfare functions) that satisfied the Axiom 1 and 2 were those that defined the social preference as the preference of an individual (they assumed individuals had linear orderings). As far as I have been able to guess, their Axiom 1 is generally known as non-imposition and Axiom 2 is a monotonicity property (positive association). Of course, this statement was obviously false, which I did not know at that time.

North-Holland had launched quite a lot of economics journals in the 1970's, which explains why we wrote to them in the first place.

I suspected that, for them, health and welfare were two concepts covering the same idea. Since that time, as the Secretary of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, it happened that I received various documents related to retirement homes or hospitals indicating that welfare was (only) a question of good health.

Public Choice had special issues devoted to the more mathematical aspects of voting theory and had published important papers in this area. However, questions related to, say, social justice, for instance, was out of the scope we could perceive.

We wrote to Masson and to Dunod who were respected French publishers. However, they were French, i.e., not ready to take any risk at the international level. You may find funny that Dunod is today part of Vivendi-Universal, but probably not for long!

Thanks to North-Holland, we were authorized to use for the journal the title of the Caen 1980 conference volume.

Previous conferences were organized by Jean-Jacques Laffont in Paris in 1977 and a mainly French round table in Aix-en-Provence by Pierre Batteau, Eric Jacquet-Lagrèze and Bernard Monjardet in 1979, see Laffont (1979) and Batteau et al. (1981).

The journal had 372 pages in 1992 against more than 900 in 2002. We must be very grateful to Dr. Müller and to Springer-Verlag for their support during all these years, in fact, for their support since 1982.

The 1994 meeting took place in Rochester thanks to William Thomson, the 1996 meeting in Maastricht—organized by Hans Peters, the 1998 meeting in Vancouver—organized by John Weymark—, the 2000 meeting in Alicante—organized by Carmen Herrero—and the 2002 meeting in Pasadena—organized by Matthew Jackson.

A selection of the papers presented in Caen appeared in Barnett et al. (1995).

An ‘Association “loi de 1901”’ is the French equivalent of a ‘non-profit organization.’

The ratio of participants in the international meetings to members is rather strange, since the number of participants in the meetings exceeds 200.

Mas-Colell being one of the authors of the first one, this was not surprising. The other, from this point of view, is more interesting.

Abraham C, Thomas A (1966) Microéconomie. Dunod, Paris

Arrow KJ (1963) Social choice and individual values, 2nd edn. Wiley, New York

Batteau P, Jacquet-Lagrèze E, Monjardet B (eds) (1981) Analyse et agrégation des préférences. Economica, Paris

Cotta A (1967) Théorie générale du capital, de la croissance et des fluctuations. Dunod, Paris

Fishburn PC (1970) Conditions for simple majority decision functions with intransitive individual indifference. J Econ Theory 2:354–367CrossRef

Hart O, King M (1981) Editorial. Rev Econ Stud 48:1

Inada K-i (1969) The simple majority decision rule. Econometrica 37:490–506

Inada K-i (1970) Majority rule and rationality. J Econ Theory 2:27–40CrossRef

Jehle GA, Reny PJ (2001) Advanced microeconomic theory. Addison-Wesley, Boston

Laffont J-J (ed) (1979) Aggregation and revelation of preferences. North-Holland, Amsterdam

Mas-Colell A, Sonnenschein H (1972) General possibility theorems for group decisions. Rev Econ Stud 39:185–192

Mas-Colell A, Whinston MD, Green JR (1995) Microeconomic theory. Oxford University Press, New York

Murakami Y (1968) Logic and social choice. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London

Pattanaik PK (1971) Voting and collective choice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Pattanaik PK, Salles M (1983) Social choice and welfare. North-Holland, Amsterdam

Sen AK (1970) Collective choice and social welfare. Holden-Day, San Francisco

Sonnenschein H (1979) Report of the editor. Econometrica 47:226–229

Title: The launching of ‘social choice and welfare’ and the creation of the ‘society for social choice and welfare’
Author: Maurice Salles
Publication date: 01-12-2005
Publisher: Springer-Verlag
Published in: Social Choice and Welfare / Issue 2-3/2005
Print ISSN: 0176-1714
Electronic ISSN: 1432-217X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-005-0018-6

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De jure naturae et gentium: Samuel von Pufendorf's contribution to social choice theory and economics

The news of the death of welfare economics is greatly exaggerated

Measurement theory and the foundations of utilitarianism

The work and life of Robin Farquharson