Extended sympathy in

welfare economics Welfare economics is a field of economics that applies microeconomic techniques to evaluate the overall well-being (welfare) of a society. The principles of welfare economics are often used to inform public economics, which focuses on the ...

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 ...

insofar as they affect an extended sympathy judgment. In his seminal work on

social choice theory Social choice theory is a branch of welfare economics that extends the Decision theory, theory of rational choice to collective decision-making. Social choice studies the behavior of different mathematical procedures (social welfare function, soc ...

Kenneth Arrow Kenneth Joseph Arrow (August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, mathematician and political theorist. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1957, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972, along with ...

(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 outcome or consequence of a sequence of actions or events. Possible results include gain, injury, value, and victory. Some types of results include the outcome of an action, the final value of a calculation ...

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; revised in 1963 and 2012) and a theorem within it created modern social choice theory, a rigorous melding of social ethics and voting theory with an economic flavor. Somew ...

'', 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. Sen has taught and worked in England and the United States since 1972. In 1998, Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions ...

, 1982, ''Choice, Welfare and Measurement'', ch. 11, 12, 15. *

Kotaro Suzumura was a Japanese economist and professor emeritus of Hitotsubashi University and Waseda University. He graduated from Hitotsubashi University in 1966. His research interests were in social choice theory and welfare economics. He was also a Fello ...

, "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