ABSTRACT
The project of the New Welfare Economics was then to recover some of the prescriptions of A. C. Pigou on the allocation or “distribution of resources among a great number of different industries and occupations” without, however, any judgments on the distribution of those resources among individuals or groups. The emergence of what would be called the New Welfare Economics took place within the context of a broader critique of the prior utilitarian approaches in economics. For ordinalist economists, it would be important to reconstruct those aspects of Pigou’s welfare economics without any reference to utilitarian values as they understood utilitarian values. In short, J. R. Hicks has added an unsupported assumption to replace one that was at least probable on other grounds in the theory of Marshall and Pigou. The transitivity of indifference is an assumption independent of the transitivity of preference.
