ABSTRACT
The ideas developed in this paper represent a continuation - a person less restrained than the writer might say, hopefully, a culmination - of the debate on welfare criteria that began in the late 1930s, was rekindled by Little in 1950, and flared up again in the early 1960s. 1 Today, bogged down by now familiar paradoxes, these welfare criteria continue to receive attention from time to time, but the excitement they once generated among the profession is a thing of the past. The excuse I offer for wilfully disturbing the somnolence that has gathered over the subject in the last few years is the belief that the apparent paradoxes can easily be resolved and, in being resolved, throw a more searching light on allocative propositions.
