(13) These findings have seriously challenged Hicksian
welfare theory: Using a meta-analysis of over 200 WTA and WTP observations from 45 experiments and surveys, Horowitz and McConnell (forthcoming) found no preference structure in the Hicksian framework that is consistent with the observed WTA and WTP ratio.
Roth, Ethics, Economics, and Freedom: The Failure of Consequentialist Social
Welfare Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 2.
Robbins criticized the material welfare aspect of Pigou's work for the interpersonal welfare judgments that it required, and argued that
welfare theory must pull out policy precepts from theory without the introspection inherent in the material welfare approach.
* Family background is considered a determinant of welfare receipt by the culture of
welfare theory. One family background variable, the respondent's mother's work history, was created as a proxy for parents' work ethic.
By implication, the same conclusion applies to the consequentialist social
welfare theory.
Standard
welfare theory defines the purchase of poor quality products as simply a transfer of wealth rather than a cost.
However, in contrast to subsequent works, Pareto does not go on to assess critically Marshallian demand or
welfare theory. In fact, his writing here is uncharaeteristically respectful of Alfred Marshall, although it is by no means acritical.
While Edward Soule, a political philosopher, does not entirely reject the economist's theory of the state, he regards social
welfare theory (SWT) and other "monistic projects" as "incomplete and unsatisfying" theories of government regulation.
While most previous accounts of social policy or
welfare theory, as it is also known, are organized around major theoretical schools of thought, and examine the implications of these schools of thought for social policy, these two book approach the subject from the perspective of key concepts.
Utilitarian social
welfare theory (SWT), the genesis of the efficiency standard, contemplates theoretical constructs that cannot meaningfully be defined.
As Mark Blaug puts it in his comment: "Robbins was throughout all the interwar years the greatest and indeed the only Austrian economist outside Austria, having neither trained nor taught in Austria." Jeremy Shearmur would like to see a more powerful theory of welfare in order to do justice to Mises's and Hayek's arguments for markets, but it remains unclear what kind of
welfare theory he exactly has in mind.
Sherraden then describes his asset-based
welfare theory and the policy mechanisms that would support it.
