Lucas (2004) asserts that ""Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production...

Lucas (2004) asserts that Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution ... The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current...

This paper builds a welfare measure encompassing household disposable income, unemployment and longevity, while using two different sets of “shadow prices” for non-income variables. The valuations of vital and unemployment risks estimated from life satisfaction data (“subjective shadow...