Intergenerational egalitarianism

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Piacquadio, Paolo G.
• 署名单位: University of Oslo
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2014.06.001
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 117-127
• 关键词: Intergenerational justice; allocation rules; fairness

摘要

I study the egalitarian way of distributing resources across generations. 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 the 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). (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.