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Brown, D.G.
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UTILITARIAN AGGREGATION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2008
Abstract
There can be no relevant cardinal assessment of the welfares of individuals that would allow traditional comparisons of average and total welfare of whole societies to be made. Given that cardinally additive welfare measures are unavailable, I work out some of the implications of an ordinal utilitarian analysis of international distributional issues. I first address the general problem of utilitarian comparisons between aggregates, then the nature of ordinal transfers between groups or nations, and then the complications that population growth in impoverished nations entails for such comparisons. I conclude with remarks on the difficulties and the benefits of thinking ordinally in general.
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References
1 At this writing, Iceland's population is a bit more than three hundred thousand, and its GDP per capita is about $40,300. Bangladesh's population is about 150 million, and its GDP per capita is about $2,300.
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