ABSTRACT
The growing literature based on surveys and experiments, and consequent greater learning about the relation of decisions to preferences and of non-market activities to well-being, certainly complicate the job of a welfare economist. Economic welfare is not the sole criterion for the assessment of public policy. Like marital happiness, they are instances of what A. C. Pigou called non-economic welfare. Economic welfare is an important component of welfare, and so the study of the impacts of public policy decisions on economic welfare is an important tool for the criticism and formation of public policies. In dealing with distribution, there are essentially two possibilities that arise from twentieth-century welfare economics, and it seems unavoidable that the theorist must choose between them. Welfare economics should again become part of the core of economics, so that the term “welfare economics” would be seen as the redundancy it is.
