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Justice (economics)


Justice in economics is a subcategory of welfare economics with models frequently representing the ethical-social requirements of a given theory, whether "in the large," as of a just social order, or "in the small," as in the equity of "how institutions distribute specific benefits and burdens." That theory may or may not elicit acceptance. In the Journal of Economic Literature classification codes 'justice' is scrolled to at JEL: D63, wedged on the same line between 'Equity' and 'Inequality' along with 'Other Normative Criteria and Measurement'. Categories above and below the line are Externalities and Altruism.

Some ideas about justice and ethics overlap with the origins of economic thought, often as to distributive justice and sometimes as to Marxian analysis. The subject is a topic of normative economics and philosophy and economics. In early welfare economics, where mentioned, 'justice' was little distinguished from maximization of all individual utility functions or a social welfare function. As to the latter, Paul Samuelson (1947), expanding on work of Abram Bergson, represents a social welfare function in general terms as any ethical belief system required to order any (hypothetically feasible) social states for the entire society as "better than," "worse than," or "indifferent to" each other. Kenneth Arrow (1963) showed a difficulty of trying to extend a social welfare function consistently across different hypothetical ordinal utility functions even apart from justice. Utility maximization survives, even with the rise of ordinal-utility/Pareto theory, as an ethical basis for economic-policy judgments in the wealth-maximization criterion invoked in law and economics.


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