Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is notoriously insensitive to distributional concerns, favoring a policy with a positive sum of monetary equivalents, even if better-off individuals are benefitted at the expense of worse-off ones. This problem is sometimes mitigated, in practice, by monetizing goods...

Well-Being and Fair Distribution provides a rigorous and comprehensive defense of the “social welfare function” as a tool for evaluating governmental policies. In particular, it argues for a “prioritarian” social welfare function: one that gives greater weight to well-being changes...

Standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is insensitive to distributional concerns. A policy that improves the lives of the rich, and makes the poor yet worse off, will be approved by CBA as long as the policy’s aggregate monetized benefits are positive. Distributional weights offer an apparent...

Can we measure inequity? Can we arrive at a number or numbers capturing the extent to which a given society is equitable or inequitable? Sometimes such questions are answered with a “no”: equity is a qualitative, non-numerical consideration. This Article offers a different perspective. The...

Conventionally, benefit-cost analysis focuses on economic efficiency, summing the values of a policy’s costs and benefits based on the preferences of those affected. There is widespread agreement that it should be supplemented with information on how the impacts are distributed across...