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Extended sympathy in
welfare economics Welfare economics is a branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to evaluate well-being (welfare) at the aggregate (economy-wide) level. Attempting to apply the principles of welfare economics gives rise to the field of public ec ...
refers to interpersonal value judgments of the form that social state ''x'' for person ''A'' is ranked better than, worse than, or as good as social state ''y'' for person ''B'' (Arrow, 1963, pp. 114–15). (For example: it would, perhaps, be preferable to lower a wealthy person's income in order to increase a poorer person's income by the same amount.) Here any characteristics that define each person (skills, aptitudes, etc.) are distinguished from the rest of the social state and put on a par with conventional measures of
wealth Wealth is the abundance of valuable financial assets or physical possessions which can be converted into a form that can be used for transactions. This includes the core meaning as held in the originating Old English word , which is from an I ...
insofar as they affect an extended sympathy judgment. In his seminal work on
social choice theory Social choice theory or social choice is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a ''collective decision'' or ''social welfare'' in some sense.Amartya Sen (2008). "Soci ...
,
Kenneth Arrow Kenneth Joseph Arrow (23 August 1921 – 21 February 2017) was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972. In economi ...
(1963) mentions the ancient lineage of extended sympathy in ethical writings and its basic, if informal, character in many welfare judgments. Arrow's book itself (p. 9) uses individual preference orderings rather than real-valued measures of preferences. This excludes ''interpersonal comparisons of welfare'' in a precise sense (invariance of social choices to linear cardinalizations of individual preference orderings). Extended-sympathy interpersonal comparisons of welfare relax that constraint (Arrow, 1983, pp. 151–2). Such comparisons expand the informational base of welfare-theoretical decisions, as Amartya Sen (1982) has emphasized. Still, variants of Arrow's dictatorial
result A result (also called upshot) is the final consequence of a sequence of actions or events expressed qualitatively or quantitatively. Possible results include advantage, disadvantage, gain, injury, loss, value and victory. There may be a rang ...
persist in reformulation (Suzumura, 1997, p. 221).


References

* Kenneth J. Arrow, 1951, 2nd ed.,1963, ''
Social Choice and Individual Values Kenneth Arrow's monograph ''Social Choice and Individual Values'' (1951, 2nd ed., 1963, 3rd ed., 2012) and a theorem within it created modern social choice theory, a rigorous melding of social ethics and voting theory with an economic flavor. ...
'', ch
VIII
pp. 114–15. * _____, 1977, "Extended Sympathy and the Possibility of Social Choice," ''American Economic Review'', 67(1), pp
p. 219
225. Reprinted in ''Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow'', 1983, v. 1, ''Social Choice and Justice'', pp. 14
-61.
*
Amartya Sen Amartya Kumar Sen (; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economi ...
, 1982, ''Choice, Welfare and Measurement'', ch. 11, 12, 15. * Kotaro Suzumura, "Interpersonal Comparisons of the Extended Sympathy Type and the Possibility of Social Choice," in K. J. Arrow, A. Sen, and K. Suzumura, ed., 1997, ''Social Choice Re-Examined'', v. 2, pp. 202–29. {{ISBN, 0-312-12741-3 Social choice theory Welfare economics