Notes
Hukukane Nikaido (1923-2001) used to be a colleague of Michio Morishima (1923-2004) at the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Osaka University. Subsequently, he moved to the Department of Economics, Hitotsubashi University, where Suzumura was a third-year graduate student. Thus, he could belatedly but fortunately study mathematical economics under Nikaido’s supervision.
The Far Eastern Meeting of the Econometric Society in the 1960s was started by Michio Morishima, but it was soon discontinued. After a long and big sleep, it resurged in 1987. It was Suzumura who played a crucial role in its revival. See Suzumura (1999b) for the history of the Far Eastern Meeting of the Econometric Society.
Observe that Suzumura’s Introduction to Arrow et al. (2002) used the Economic Planning Controversy as the basic frame of reference in order to give a clear structure to the multifaceted developments of the theory of social choice.
The basic reference to the Economic Planning Controversy is Hayek (1935).
A zaibatsu is a family-dominated financial combine that supposedly exerted strong controls over the Japanese economy in the prewar period.
When Arrow first presented his General Impossibility Theorem in the Cleveland Meeting of the Econometric Society held in 1949, there was a contentious Canadian political economist among the audience by the name of David McCord Wright. He harshly criticized Arrow and his theorem, because Arrow did not include the respect for individual liberty among the axioms to be satisfied by the Arrow social welfare function. When Suzumura read this episode in Kelly (1987) “An Interview with Kenneth Arrow,” he asked Arrow what was his spontaneous response to Wright’s criticism. Although Arrow didn’t remember his initial response, he could have answered Wright’s criticism simply by saying: “Give me your definition of individual liberty in the form of an axiom, then the augmented set of axioms would be all the more inconsistent.” Nevertheless, the fact is that nobody actually tried to formulate the concept of individual liberty until Sen’s paper (Sen 1970a) was published in the Journal of Political Economy more than 20 years later.
Let \(R \) and \(R^{*}\) be two binary relations on the universal set \(X. R^{*}\) is said to be an ordering extension of \(R\) if we have (i) \(R\subseteq R^{*}\), (ii) \(P(R) \quad \subseteq P(R^{*})\) and (iii) \(R^{*}\) is an ordering on \(X,\) where \(P(R)\) [resp. \(P(R^{*})\)] is the asymmetric part of \(R\) [resp. \(R^{*}\)].
The extended sympathy approach will be discussed further in the context of interpersonal comparisons of well-being.
The axiom (FE) requires that the social choice set \(C(S)\) should coincide with the fair set \(F(S)\), which is defined by the intersection of the Pareto efficient set \(E_{f}(S)\) and the no-envy set \(E_{q}(S)\), whenever \(S\) is such that \(F(S)\) is non-empty. The axiom (SUA) is a weak choice-consistency condition to the effect that \( [S_{1}\subseteq S_{2 }\, \& \,C(S_{2})\,{\subseteq }\, C(S_{1})]\) implies \(C(S_{1})=C(S_{2})\), which is much weaker than Arrow’s collective rationality condition.
According to Suzumura’s “Introduction” to the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 1 (Arrow et al., eds. 2002, pp. 1–32), “[s]ocial choice theory is concerned with the evaluation of alternative methods of collective decision-making, as well as with the logical foundations of welfare economics. In turn, welfare economics is concerned with the critical scrutiny of the performance of actual and/or imaginary economic systems, as well as with the critique, design and implementation of alternative economic policies.”
B-P is the abbreviation of Bentham and Pigou.
B-S is the abbreviation of Bergson and Samuelson.
This issue is discussed more in detail in Chap. 28 of Suzumura (forthcoming).
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Bossert, W., Fleurbaey, M. An Interview with Kotaro Suzumura. Soc Choice Welf 44, 179–208 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-014-0827-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-014-0827-6