This paper explores, in the context of the Atkinson inequality measure, attempts to make interpretations of orders of magnitude transparent. One suggestion is that the analogy of sharing a cake among a very small number of people provides a useful intuitive description for people who want some...

This paper examines the discounting of money values in social evaluations using a social time preference rate (defined as the sum of a pure time preference rate and the product of the elasticity of marginal valuation and a growth rate). It is shown that this procedure can give a different...

This paper is concerned with the use of social welfare functions in evaluating changes. In particular, it considers suggestions that welfare weights to be used in comparing the gains and losses of different individuals (or other appropriate units of analysis), and a social time preference rate...