Well-Being, Inequality and Time: The Time-Slice Problem and its Policy Implications

Should equality be viewed from a lifetime or sublifetime perspective? In measuring the inequality of income, for example, should we measure the inequality of lifetime income or of annual income? In characterizing a tax as progressive or regressive, should we look to whether the annual tax burden increases with annual income, or instead to whether the lifetime tax burden increases with lifetime income? Should the overriding aim of anti-poverty programs be to reduce chronic poverty: being badly off for many years, because of low human capital or other long-run factors? Or is the moral claim of the impoverished person a function of her current state - meaning that someone who is badly nourished, badly housed, or in pain at present has a strong claim on our aid regardless of whether this is a chronic or transient state? Should we think of the aged as a suspect class, a low-well-being group? From the sublifetime perspective, the aged are indeed a kind of suspect class, because they tend to have low current incomes and health and to be socially isolated. But the aged have lived for many years and are therefore, as a matter of lifetime well-being, relatively rich compared to the rest of the population. This Article addresses the time-slice question. I use the framework of welfarism and the formal apparatus of social welfare functions to sharpen analysis. The first half of the Article argues for the lifetime perspective. The second half surveys the implications of that perspective for a host of legal and policy issues: the measurement of equality; the measurement of poverty; the design of redistributive taxes; the question whether non-tax instruments, such as environmental regulations or tort law, should also be used for redistribution; and how the suspect class framework and other distributively sensitive policy tools should be structured. Above all, the Article aims to raise the profile of a foundational question which has been insufficiently discussed - a question that anyone who cares about equality should grapple with

Well-Being, Inequality and Time: The Time-Slice Problem and its Policy Implications

Should equality be viewed from a lifetime or sublifetime perspective? In measuring the inequality of income, for example, should we measure the inequality of lifetime income or of annual income? In characterizing a tax as progressive or regressive, should we look to whether the annual tax burden increases with annual income, or instead to whether the lifetime tax burden increases with lifetime income? Should the overriding aim of anti-poverty programs be to reduce chronic poverty: being badly off for many years, because of low human capital or other long-run factors? Or is the moral claim of the impoverished person a function of her current state - meaning that someone who is badly nourished, badly housed, or in pain at present has a strong claim on our aid regardless of whether this is a chronic or transient state? Should we think of the aged as a suspect class, a low-well-being group? From the sublifetime perspective, the aged are indeed a kind of suspect class, because they tend to have low current incomes and health and to be socially isolated. But the aged have lived for many years and are therefore, as a matter of lifetime well-being, relatively rich compared to the rest of the population. This Article addresses the time-slice question. I use the framework of welfarism and the formal apparatus of social welfare functions to sharpen analysis. The first half of the Article argues for the lifetime perspective. The second half surveys the implications of that perspective for a host of legal and policy issues: the measurement of equality; the measurement of poverty; the design of redistributive taxes; the question whether non-tax instruments, such as environmental regulations or tort law, should also be used for redistribution; and how the suspect class framework and other distributively sensitive policy tools should be structured. Above all, the Article aims to raise the profile of a foundational question which has been insufficiently discussed - a question that anyone who cares about equality should grapple with

Equity and Justice in Global Warming Policy

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such as the international Kyoto Protocol, post-Kyoto negotiations, regional initiatives, and unilateral actions. Although most studies on climate change policies in economics have considered efficiency aspects, there is a growing literature on equity and justice. Climate change policy has important dimensions of distributive justice, both within and across generations, but in this paper we survey only studies on the intragenerational aspect, i.e., within a generation. We cover several domains including the international, regional, national, sectoral and inter-personal, and examine aspects such as the distribution of burdens from climate change, climate change policy negotiations in general, implementation of climate agreements using tradable emission permits, and the uncertainty of alternatives to emission reductions.Economics of Climate Change, Intragenerational Equity, Distributive Justice

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don\u27t: A Logical Analysis of Moral Dilemmas

This project explores the logical structure of moral dilemmas. I introduce the notion of genuine contingent moral dilemmas, as well as basic topics in deontic logic. I then examine two formal arguments claiming that dilemmas are logically impossible. Each argument relies on certain principles of normative reasoning sometimes accepted as axioms of deontic logic. I argue that the principle of agglomeration and a statement of entailment of obligations are both not basic to ethical reasoning, concluding that dilemmas will be admissible under some logically consistent ethical theories. In the final chapter, I examine some consequences of admitting dilemmas into a theory, in particular how doing so complicates assignment of blame

Equity and justice in global warming policy

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such as the international Kyoto Protocol, post-Kyoto negotiations, regional initiatives, and unilateral actions. Although most studies on climate change policies in economics have considered efficiency aspects, there is a growing literature on equity and justice. Climate change policy has important dimensions of distributive justice, both within and across generations, but in this paper we survey only studies on the intragenerational aspect, i.e.., within a generation. We cover several domains including the international, regional, national, sectoral and inter-personal, and examine aspects such as the distribution of burdens from climate change, climate change policy negotiations in general, implementation of climate agreements using tradable emission permits, and the uncertainty of alternatives to emission reductions.Economics of climate change, intragenerational equity, distributive justice

Exceeding Expectations: Stochastic Dominance as a General Decision Theory

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized

Equality of Opportunity

This forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Income Distribution (eds., A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon) summarizes the literature on equality of opportunity. We begin by reviewing the philosophical debate concerning equality since Rawls (sections 1 and 2), present economic algorithms for computing policies which equalize opportunities, or, more generally, ways of ordering social policies with respect to their efficacy in opportunity equalization (sections 3, 4 and 5), apply the approach to the conceptualization of economic development (section 6), discuss dynamic issues (section 7), give a preamble to a discussion of empirical work (section 8), provide evidence of population views from surveys and experiments concerning conceptions of equality (section 9), and a discuss measurement issues, summarizing the empirical literature on inequality of opportunity to date (section 10). We conclude with mention of some critiques of the equal-opportunity approach, and some predictions (section 11)

Shaping Translation: A View from Terminology Research

This article discusses translation-oriented terminology over a time frame that is more or less congruent with META’s life span. Against the backdrop of the place of terminology in shaping professional issues in translation, we initially describe some stages in the process by which terminology has acquired institutional identity in translator training programmes and constituted its knowledge base. We then suggest a framework that seeks to show how theory construction in terminology has contributed to a better understanding of technical texts and their translation. A final section similarly illustrates how this overarching theoretical scheme has driven, or is at least consistent with, products and methods in the translation sector of the so-called language industries.Cet article aborde la terminologie dans l’optique de la traduction (profession, pratique, théorie) durant les cinquante dernières années - période correspondant à la vie de META. Après avoir esquissé ce que le profil contemporain du traducteur doit à la terminologie, l’article examine à tour de rôle: (a) les étapes dans la constitution de cette science des termes, (b) comment cette science a acquis droit de cité dans les programmes de formation des traducteurs, (c) le cadre explicatif contemporain qu’elle propose pour rendre compte des textes techniques et de leur traduction, (d) les retombées de ce cadre pour les secteurs des industries de la langue qui se justifient largement par rapport à la traduction