Sufficientarianism
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Publisher
Journal
Theoretical Economics
ISSN
1933-6837
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Sufficientarianism is a prominent approach to distributive justice in political philosophy and in policy analyses. However, it is virtually absent from the formal normative economics literature. We analyze sufficientarianism axiomatically in the
context of the allocation of 0–1 normalized well-being in society. We present three
characterizations of the core sufficientarian criterion, which counts the number of
agents who attain a “good enough” level of well-being. The main characterization
captures the “hybrid” nature of the criterion, which embodies at the same time
a threshold around which the worst off in society is prioritized, and an indifference to equality in other regions. The other two characterizations relate sufficientarianism, respectively, to a liberal principle of noninterference and to a classic
neutrality property.
Authors
Veneziani, RCollections
- Economics and Finance [356]