NE&EP webinar (Monday 14th): Gabriel Carroll presents "Is Equal Opportunity Different from Welfarism?"

[may...@gmail.com]

Dear all,

 

Our next Normative Economics and Economic Policy webinar will take place on Monday April 14th, at 5pm Paris time (11am EDT).

 

Gabriel Carroll (University Toronto) will present:

"Is Equal Opportunity Different from Welfarism?” (Abstract and link below)

 

Link to the webinar: https://uio.zoom.us/j/65136081786

 

We look forward to seeing you all on Monday next week!

 

All the best, 

Maya Eden and Paolo Piacquadio

Abstract: Equal opportunity, widely invoked in popular discourse as a goal for policy, seems at odds with the welfarist approach that is standard in economics.  But are they really different?  We consider a canonical class of resource allocation problems and ask whether the allocations chosen by an equal-opportunity criterion could also have been chosen under some welfarist criterion.  Typically, no such welfarist criterion exists.  However, for a rich class of problem specifications, it does exist, and we characterize this class.  When the welfarist criterion does exist, it can use either the sum or the min to aggregate individual welfares; the freedom to use more exotic aggregators does not expand the possibilities.

Link: https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/gabriel.carroll/eopvswelf.pdf