Franz Nathan, Spears Dean
Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Economics Department and Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Economics and Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute - Delhi Centre; IZA.
Econ Lett. 2020 Nov;196. doi: 10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109547. Epub 2020 Sep 8.
Economic policy evaluations require social welfare functions for variable-size populations. Two important axioms in the population ethics literature are Mere Addition and avoidance of the Sadistic Conclusion, both of which focus on the sign of lifetime utility. The population ethics literature treats these axioms as closely related but distinct: one influential review calls avoidance of the Sadistic Conclusion "less controversial." Here, we provide weak, uncontroversial sufficient conditions for these two principles to be equivalent. Related results exist in prior literature, but these include only same-number utilitarian orderings and therefore exclude recent and theoretically important rank-dependent social evaluations that we include. [100 words].
经济政策评估需要针对规模可变人口的社会福利函数。人口伦理学文献中的两个重要公理是“纯粹加法”和避免“令人厌恶的结论”，二者都聚焦于终身效用的正负号。人口伦理学文献认为这些公理密切相关但又有所不同：一篇有影响力的综述称避免“令人厌恶的结论”“争议较小”。在此，我们给出了这两条原则等价的微弱、无争议的充分条件。先前文献中存在相关结果，但这些结果仅包括相同数量的功利主义排序，因此排除了我们纳入的近期且在理论上重要的基于排序的社会评估。 [100字]
