IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/elg/eechap/17573_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

What is efficiency?

In: Morality and Power

Author

Listed:
  • .

Abstract

Chapter 8 is a central critical conceptual section of the book, dealing with the major ethical weapon of mainstream economics – the politically influential concept of economic efficiency, derived from the Pareto principle. It is the distributional value judgment inherent in the notion of ‘Pareto improvement’ that enables the seemingly (misleadingly) technical meaning of ‘efficiency’ to overwhelm alternative ethical drivers of public policy. The chapter draws out the limitations of the Pareto principle in both its strong and weak forms before addressing the controversial subjects of the theory of second best and the compensation principle. The latter expresses what I have called the ‘super strong’ Pareto principle providing the normative justification for the economists’ familiar tool – cost benefit analysis. This tool when applied routinely to policy biases outcomes in favour of the well-off and effectively zero values – in both monetary and non-monetary terms – outcomes that are difficult or impossible to ascribe monetary values to.

Suggested Citation

  • ., 2017. "What is efficiency?," Chapters, in: Morality and Power, chapter 8, pages 92-125, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:17573_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781786435552.00015.xml
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Löschel, Andreas & Lutz, Benjamin Johannes & Massier, Philipp, 2017. "Credit constraints, energy management practices, and investments in energy saving technologies: German manufacturing in close-up," CAWM Discussion Papers 98, University of Münster, Münster Center for Economic Policy (MEP).
    2. Firth, Anton & Zhang, Bo & Yang, Aidong, 2019. "Quantification of global waste heat and its environmental effects," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 235(C), pages 1314-1334.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Politics and Public Policy;

    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:elg:eechap:17573_8. 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: Darrel McCalla (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.e-elgar.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.