ABSTRACT
The ideas of Henry Sidgwick deserve some comment, if only because it has been suggested that he anticipated A. C. Pigou’s foundation of welfare economics. The influence of Alfred Marshall largely eclipsed the issues Fisher raised, and in any case Marshall’s ideas were the principal influence on Pigou. Pigou’s welfare economics rests on two propositions for which he argues consistently in works written over half a century: “first, any additions to the real income of an individual makes satisfaction larger; secondly, transfers of money income from better-to-do people to worse-to-do people make satisfaction larger”. Pigou’s utilitarianism is illustrated by his comment on the “telescopic faculty.” The utilitarianism that Pigou inherited from Marshall was neither Benthamism nor the “ordinal” preference utilitarianism of modern microeconomics but satisfaction utilitarianism, that is, a utilitarianism that associated a quantity of subjective utility with the satisfaction of a want.
