Intergenerational egalitarianism

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Distributional equity deeply conflicts with the Pareto principle: efficient allocations cannot guarantee that i) each generation be assigned a consumption bundle that is at least as large as an arbitrarily small fraction of the bundle assigned to any other generation and that ii) each generation finds its assigned bundle at least as desirable as an arbitrarily small fraction of the bundle assigned to any other generation with same preferences. Overcoming such tension unveils a new ethical dilemma for intergenerational equity: the short-term/long-term inequality trade-off. The egalitarian ethical observer can choose between: i) "weak equity" among all generations (at the cost of possibly large inequalities among proximate ones) and ii) "strong equity" among few successive generations (at the cost of possibly large inequalities among distant ones). The last alternative is specific to the dynamic framework and provides a rationale to treat generations differently based on their time order. Terms of use: Documents in

Welfare as Equity Equivalents

“…These welfare frameworks can be comprised in the general framework of this paper. Other welfare concepts include egalitarianism (an even more extreme welfare concept in which equality across individuals is prioritized), rank-based welfare concepts (Zuber and Asheim, 2012), intergenerational egalitarianism (Piacquadio, 2014), and the Rawlsian maxmin welfare function. As these are based on more complex welfare functions going beyond the paradigm of weighted utilitarianism, we do not consider them herein.…”

Fair Intergenerational Utilitarianism: Risk, its Resolution Over Time, and Discounting

“…In particular, equal consideration for all generations can not be based on anonymity as permuting their risky prospects is not well-defined: generations living at different times are substantially different with respect to how much risk is revealed and disregarding such difference (as in a one-shot lottery setting) is inappropriate to assess intergenerational risk. Risk is a particularly powerful argument against intergenerational anonymity, complementary to the one based on multidimensional commodity spaces raised by Piacquadio (2014). 16 To see this, write the prospects in the classical matrix form and compare the outcomes, history by history, only in terms of inequality among the assigned outcomes.…”

Intragenerational Inequality Aversion and Intergenerational Equity

“…1 An exception is the literature on climate change, 2 which mainly adopts the discounted utility framework. This framework has been strongly criticized in the sustainability literature as poorly accounting for intergenerational equity concerns, leading to the definition of alternative criteria, such as maximin (Solow, 1974;Burmeister and Hammond, 1977;Cairns and Long, 2006;d'Autume and Schubert, 2008a;Cairns and Martinet, 2014;Fleurbaey, 2015a;Cairns et al, 2019), undiscounted utilitarianism (Ramsey, 1928;Dasgupta and Heal, 1979;d'Autume and Schubert, 2008b;d'Autume et al, 2010), the Chichilnisky criterion (Chichilnisky, 1996), the weighting of the worst-off generation (Alvarez-Cuadrado and Long, 2009;Adler and Treich, 2015;Adler et al, 2017), sustainable discounted utilitarianism (Asheim and Mitra, 2010;Dietz and Asheim, 2012), as well as intergenerational egalitarianism (Piacquadio, 2014). Botzen and Bergh (2014) report that applying (some of) these alternative criteria to the climate change issue would result in more stringent climate policies than under discounted utilitarianism.…”

“…It is based on the idea that "unequal distributions have something bad that equal distributions do not have" (Fleurbaey, 2015b, p. 205). Egalitarianism may not be the criterion selected for intergenerational equity and sustainable development, but it is an interesting benchmark for evaluating intertemporal inequalities in different theoretical frameworks (Piacquadio, 2014). Equality may result both from (intrinsic) egalitarianism or prioritarianism (which implies instrumental egalitarianism).…”