Quality, Quantity and Duration of Lives
The
evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons
of social states that differ in income distributions, population sizes and life
longevity. This may require social evaluation principles to be sensitive to the
quality, the quantity and the duration of lives. This paper 1) reviews some of
the normative issues at stake, 2) proposes and discusses some specific methods
to address them in a generalized utilitarian framework, and 3) briefly
illustrates the application of some of these methods to the global distribution
of incomes, population sizes and longevity over the last century. Depending on
the approach taken, it is found inter alia that global social welfare in
2010 can be deemed to be between 1.8 and 407 times that of 1910, the role given
to the quantity of lives being particularly important in that assessment.
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