This article defends the principle of giving a fresh start to individuals who come to consider that they have mismanaged their share of resources at an earlier stage of their life. The first part challenges the ethical intuition that it would be unfair to tax the steadfast frugal in order to...

In The Myth of Ownership - Taxes and Justice, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel (2002) launch an attack against a straw man, the economist who believes that taxation should minimally interfere with property rights and should seek to preserve the market distribution of wealth and income. Instead they...

An early death is, undoubtedly, a serious disadvantage. However, the compensation of short-lived individuals has remained so far largely unexplored, probably because it appears infeasible. Indeed, short-lived agents can hardly be identified ex ante, and cannot be compensated ex post. We argue...

It is shown that the Pazner-Schmeidler social ordering appears as a very natural solution to the problem of defining social preferences over distributions of a fixed bundle of divisible goods. The paper follows an approach to preference aggregation which relies only on interpersonally...

This paper studies the ethical underpinnings of two social criteria which are prominent in the literature dealing with the problem of evaluating allocations of several consumption goods in a population with heteregenous preferences. The Pazner-Schmeidler criterion (Pazner-Schmeidler 1978) and...

It is shown that the Pazner-Schmeidler social ordering appears as a very natural solution to the problem of defining social preferences over distributions of divisible goods. The paper analyses various ways of deriving this social ordering from minimally egalitarian conditions and informational...

Behavioral economics has shaken the view that individuals have well-defined, consistent and stable preferences. This raises a challenge for welfare economics, which takes as a key postulate that individual preferences should be respected. We agree with Bernheim (2009) and Bernheim and Rangel...