IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/sochwe/v19y2002i1p1-27.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Progress and conservation under Rawls's maximin principle

Author

Listed:
  • Joaquim Silvestre

    (Department of Economics, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616-8578, USA)

Abstract

I argue the compatibility of progress with Rawls's maximin principle when applied to individual utility functions which are "nonaltruistic" in the sense that any transfer of consumption goods from old to young (resp. from young to old) lowers (resp. increases) old people's utility. The paper shows that necessary conditions for that compatibility are: (A) a bound on the feasible transfers from young to old, and (B) a positive intergenerational stock externality. The analysis implies that the maximin principle has the drawback of making, under mild assumptions, conservation incompatible with progress.

Suggested Citation

  • Joaquim Silvestre, 2002. "Progress and conservation under Rawls's maximin principle," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 19(1), pages 1-27.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:19:y:2002:i:1:p:1-27
    Note: Received: 15 December 1999/Accepted: 17 April 2000
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/2019001/20190001.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Llavador, Humberto & Roemer, John E. & Silvestre, Joaquim, 2011. "“A dynamic analysis of human welfare in a warming planet”," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(11), pages 1607-1620.
    2. John E. Roemer & Roberto Veneziani, 2001. "What We Owe Our Children, They Their Children,..," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1326, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    3. Michele Lombardi & Kaname Miyagishima & Roberto Veneziani, 2016. "Liberal Egalitarianism and the Harm Principle," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 126(597), pages 2173-2196, November.
    4. Humberto Llavador & John E. Roemer & Joaquim Silvestre, 2013. "Should we sustain? And if so, sustain what? Consumption or the quality of life?," Chapters, in: Roger Fouquet (ed.), Handbook on Energy and Climate Change, chapter 30, pages 639-665, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    5. Llavador, Humberto & Roemer, John E. & Silvestre, Joaquim, 2011. "“A dynamic analysis of human welfare in a warming planet”," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(11), pages 1607-1620.
    6. Giorgos Galanis & Roberto Veneziani, 2017. "Equality of When?," Working Papers 812, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:19:y:2002:i:1:p:1-27. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.