Marc Fleurbaey
Biographic Data
| ID | 376495 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marc Fleurbaey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marc |
| FAMILY NAME | Fleurbaey |
| SIGNATURE | FLEURBAEY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5342-8065 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 138 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 184 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 133 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Eliciting Preferences for Well-Being Measurement: A Comparison of Methods
Universal social welfare orderings and risk
Energy and Health: Global Climate Policy and the Future of Air Quality Co-Benefits in LMICs
Optimal enfranchisement
Inequality decomposition analysis, the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient
Optimal Enfranchisement
Within-Group Inequality: A Comparison of Different Definitions and a New Proposal of Decomposition
Intergenerational Equity and Infinite-Population Ethics: A Survey
An Analysis of Moral Motives in Economic and Social Decisions
The Right Numeraire or the Just Weights? How to Make BCA Rational and Fair
Unweighted benefit–cost analysis (BCA) based on aggregate willingness to pay might be, at long last, falling into disrepute, as it is widely recognized that it exhibits a bias toward the wealthy, and as alternatives are appearing more and more practicable. However, the choice of alternatives is often framed in terms of choosing an alternative metric to willingness to pay in money, such as willingness to pay in healthy life years, or a measure of …
Unequal inequality aversion within and among countries and generations
Pandemic preparedness and response: Beyond the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator
Nationalism has trumped solidarity, resulting in unnecessary loss of life and inequitable access to vaccines and therapeutics. Existing intellectual property (IP) regimens, trade secrets and data rights, under which pharmaceutical firms operate, have also posed obstacles to increasing manufacturing capacity, and ensuring adequate supply, affordable pricing, and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines and other health products in low-income and midd…
What do Happiness Data Mean? Theory and Survey Evidence
What utility notion—e.g. flow/lifetime, self/family-centered—do self-reported well-being (SWB) questions measure? Existing applications make different assumptions regarding the (i) life domains, (ii) time horizons, and (iii) other-regarding preferences captured by SWB data. To obtain relevant evidence, we ask survey respondents what they had in mind regarding (i)–(iii) when answering commonly used—life satisfaction, happiness, ladder—and new SWB …
Opposite ethical views converge under the threat of catastrophic climate change
The Stakeholder Corporation and Social Welfare
The stakeholder (or responsible) firm is dened in this paper as one that maximizes the (weighted or unweighted) sum of the surpluses of its customers and suppliers (including workers). We show that, although this objective is hard to empirically measure, it can be pursued by simple management rules that rely onconstrained profit maximization. We find that unconstrained prot maximization gives a competitive edge to ordinary firms, but that stakeho…
Is There a Proper Scope for Markets
Debra Satz's brilliant essay highlights that it is insufficient to study markets in terms of efficiency and potential market failures, as they have deep effects on people and societies. This line of thought could inspire the project of building a general theory of social interactions, in which the specific properties of market transactions would be identified, and their influence on society at large, depending on the surrounding institutions and …
Workplace Democracy, the Bicameral Firm, and Stakeholder Theory
Ferreras's bicameral governance proposal for the corporation contributes to a recent wave of interest in democratizing the workplace. In this article, I connect this to a related ongoing movement in favor of the stakeholder approach to corporate purpose. I argue that this connection sheds light on, and may provide remedies for, some issues with the bicameral proposal: first, the risk of gridlock between the two parties in the dual governance stru…
Equity and Efficiency Effects of Land Value Taxation
Climate change increases resource-constrained international immobility
A new puzzle in the social evaluation of risk
We highlight a new paradox for the social evaluation of risk that bears on the evaluation of individual well-being rather than social welfare, but has serious implications for social evaluation. The paradox consists in a tension between rationality, respect for individual preferences, and a principle of informational parsimony that excludes individual risk attitudes from the assessment of riskless situations. No evaluation criterion can satisfy t…
Premature deaths, accidental bequests, and fairness
While there is little agreement regarding the taxation of bequests in general, there is a widely held view that accidental bequests should be subjected to a confiscatory tax. We re‐examine the optimal taxation of accidental bequests by introducing a concern for compensating individuals for a premature death. Assuming that individuals care about what they leave to their children, we show that, whereas the 100 percent tax view holds under the utili…
Equity and Efficiency Effects of Land Value Taxation
It is a well-known result in economics that land value taxation is efficient since it does not distort the supply of the tax base. Considering only efficiency, land value should thus be fully taxed. Using optimal taxation theory with heterogeneous households, we show that it may be optimal not to tax land value fully for distributional reasons. The decisive variable is the covariance of land value held by households and their social welfare weigh…
The Value of a Life-Year and the Intuition of Universality
When considering the social valuation of a life-year, there is a conflict between two basic intuitions: on the one hand, the intuition of universality, according to which the value of an additional life-year should be universal, and, as such, should be invariant to the context considered; on the other hand, the intuition of complementarity, according to which the value of a life-year should depend on what this extra life-year allows for, and, hen…
Values, Volumes, and Price-Volume Decompositions: On Some Issues Raised (Again) by the Health Crisis
Blanchet Didier, Fleurbaey Marc. Valeurs, volumes et partages volume‐prix : sur quelques questions (re)soulevées par la crise sanitaire / Values, Volumes and Price‐Volume Decompositions: On Some Issues Raised (Again) by the Health Crisis. In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°532-33, 2022. pp. 73-90
Just allocation of Covid-19 vaccines
Authorized COVID-19 vaccines must be distributed fairly. Several proposals have emerged offering guidelines for how to do this. However, insofar as the aim is to have the greatest health impact, these proposals fall short. We offer three suggestions to strengthen them The most advanced attempt at coordinating vaccine distribution is the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) facility, a collaboration that brings together governments, companies, …
Democracy and Proportionality
D EMOCRACY is commonly conceived of in political theory in terms of equality of power among the relevant population. 1 This conception of democracy is, however, known to be plagued with difficulties.In particular, democratic equality is typically associated with some use of the majority rule, and is thereby linked to the related conundrums: unleashed majorities may oppress minorities and crush basic liberal rights; majority cycles may lead to cha…
Building Indicators for Inclusive Growth and its Sustainability: What Can the National Accounts Offer and How Can They Be Supplemented
Blanchet Didier, Fleurbaey Marc. Construire des indicateurs de la croissance inclusive et de sa soutenabilité : que peuvent offrir les comptes nationaux et comment les compléter ? / Building Indicators for Inclusive Growth and its Sustainability: What Can the National Accounts Offer and How Can They Be Supplemented?. In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°517-519, 2020. Numéro spécial : Au-delà et autour du PIB : questions à la…
Egalitarianism and the Separateness of Persons
The difference between the unity of the individual and the separateness of persons requires that there be a shift in the moral weight that we accord to changes in utility when we move from making intra personal trade-offs to making inter personal trade-offs. We examine which forms of egalitarianism can, and which cannot, account for this shift. We argue that a form of egalitarianism which is concerned only with the extent of outcome inequality ca…
Assessing Risky Social Situations
This paper reexamines the welfare economics of risk. It singles out a class of criteria, the "expected equally distributed equivalent," as the unique class that avoids serious drawbacks of exiting approaches. Such criteria behave like ex post criteria when the final statistical distribution of well-being is known ex ante and like ex ante criteria when risk generates no inequality. The paper also provides a new result on the tension between inequa…
Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Equality of Opportunity
We study the difference between the ex post and ex ante perspectives in equality of opportunity. We show that the well documented conflicts between compensation and reward are but an aspect of a broader conflict between ex ante and ex post perspectives. The literature that takes the goal of providing equal opportunities as the guiding principle generally considers that this is implemented only when, ex post , all individuals with the same effort …
Happiness, Equivalent Incomes and Respect for Individual Preferences
In this paper, we study interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing. We show that using subjective wellbeing (SWB) levels can be in conflict with individuals' judgments about their own lives. We propose therefore an alternative wellbeing measure in terms of equivalent incomes that respects individual preferences. We show how SWB surveys can be used to derive the ordinal information about preferences needed to calculate equivalent incomes. We illustrat…
Any Non‐welfarist Method of Policy Assessment Violates the Pareto Principle: A Comment
Mesurer la pauvreté
LâBt sich Armut messen? Bei der Messung der Armut stôBt man auf die gleichen Schwierigkeiten wie bei der Untersuchung der Ungleichheit: Heterogenitât der individuellen Situationen, Vielfalt der Bedùrfnisse und der Pràferenzen. MuB die Messung dies berùcksichtigen? Falls ja, wie? Mu8 sie aile Elemente der Lebensweise oder lediglich bestimmte grundlegende Gùter heranziehen? Hinzu kommen die Fragen im ZusammenhangmitderBesonderheitderVerhaltensweise…
What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion
The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation, For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living. (Parfit 1984: 388)
Multidimensional poverty measurement with individual preferences
Individual Uncertainty About Longevity
This article presents an assessment of individual uncertainty about longevity. A survey performed on 3,331 French people enables us to record several survival probabilities per individual. On this basis, we compute subjective life expectancies (SLE) and subjective uncertainty regarding longevity (SUL), the standard deviation of each individual’s subjective distribution of her or his own longevity. It is large and equal to more than 10 years for m…
The importance of what people care about
Happiness studies have rekindled interest in the measurement of subjective well-being, and often claim to track faithfully ‘what people care about’ in their lives. It is argued in this article that seeking to respect individuals’ preferences in the context of making intrapersonal and interpersonal comparisons for social evaluation has important and somewhat surprising implications, which shed light, in particular, on subjective measures and their…
Freedom with forgiveness
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 help the regretful spendthrift and argues that the possibility of changing one’s mind is an important freedom. The second part examines the disincentives ind…
The facets of exploitation
This paper proposes four concepts of exploitation that encapsulate common uses of the word in social interactions: unfair advantage, unequal exchange, using persons as means, and free-riding. It briefly discusses how these concepts appear in the literature (the first two are prominent in Roemer’s classical work), and then examines how these forms of exploitation are related and how they can occur
Évaluation économique en santé: Qui a Peur De l'Étalon Monétaire
L’évaluation économique des politiques de santé effraie ceux qui ne veulent pas assimiler la santé à un bien monétisable. Nous défendons la thèse que cette peur est justifiée face à certains critères mais ne saurait constituer une objection de principe. À l’aide d’un exemple de critère fondé sur le revenu équivalent, nous montrons comment la valeur de la santé et les considérations d’équité peuvent trouver leur place dans une analyse coût-bénéfic…
Fair allocation with unequal production skills: The No Envy approach to compensation
Wellbeing Inequality and Preference Heterogeneity
Standard measures of multidimensional inequality (implicitly) assume common preferences for all individuals, and hence are not sensitive to preference heterogeneity among members of society. In this paper, we measure the inequality of the distribution of equivalent incomes, which is a preference‐sensitive multidimensional wellbeing measure. To quantify the contribution of preference heterogeneity to wellbeing inequality, we use a decomposition me…
Justice sociale ou lutte des classes
Development, capabilities, and freedom
Transfer principles and inequality aversion, with an application to optimal growth
Admissibility and Feasibility in Game Forms
This paper examines the exercise of individual or group rights within the game form approach. It focuses in particular on what it means for a strategy or action to be feasible and admissible. Admissibility is best discussed in relation to two basic distinctions among rights, passive and active rights on the one hand and negative and positive rights on the other. It is argued that while there are quite a few cases in which the outcomes of mutual r…
The Right Numeraire or the Just Weights? How to Make BCA Rational and Fair
Unweighted benefit–cost analysis (BCA) based on aggregate willingness to pay might be, at long last, falling into disrepute, as it is widely recognized that it exhibits a bias toward the wealthy, and as alternatives are appearing more and more practicable. However, the choice of alternatives is often framed in terms of choosing an alternative metric to willingness to pay in money, such as willingness to pay in healthy life years, or a measure of …
Unequal inequality aversion within and among countries and generations
The Stakeholder Corporation and Social Welfare
The stakeholder (or responsible) firm is dened in this paper as one that maximizes the (weighted or unweighted) sum of the surpluses of its customers and suppliers (including workers). We show that, although this objective is hard to empirically measure, it can be pursued by simple management rules that rely onconstrained profit maximization. We find that unconstrained prot maximization gives a competitive edge to ordinary firms, but that stakeho…
Workplace Democracy, the Bicameral Firm, and Stakeholder Theory
Ferreras's bicameral governance proposal for the corporation contributes to a recent wave of interest in democratizing the workplace. In this article, I connect this to a related ongoing movement in favor of the stakeholder approach to corporate purpose. I argue that this connection sheds light on, and may provide remedies for, some issues with the bicameral proposal: first, the risk of gridlock between the two parties in the dual governance stru…
Nozick - La théorie de l'État minimal
Questions sur la baisse de la productivité du capital dans l'industrie manufacturière
Algunos aspectos vinculados con la baja de la productividad del capital en la industria manufacturera - En el marco de la Contabilidad National la medida de la productividad aparente del capital y particularmente del stock de capital productivo reposa sobre una série de convenciones estadisticas que suponen una duración de vida constante de los equipos. Ahora bien, ¿ en que aspectos la evaluación de esta productividad es sensible a taies convenci…
La reprise de la productivité à la fin des années quatre-vingt n'est-elle qu'apparente
El despegue de la productividad al fin de los anos ochenta es solo aparente?. El papel desempenado por el progreso técnico - La productividad aparente, medida en términos de producción por unidad de factor, se ha invertido desde 1983: la productividad del capital aumenta luego de haber experimentado una caída durante aproximadamente diez años; la productividad del trabajo y la productividad global de los factures se aceleran vertiginosamente. Sin…
Une théorie générale de l'exploitation et des classes
Exploitation et inégalité: Du Côté Du Marxisme Analytique
Compétitivité, croissance et emploi: La France de l'an 2000 en perspective
Competitividad, crecimiento y empleo: perspectivas de Francia para el ano 2000 - ¿ Cuál sera crecimiento de la economía francesa desde ahora hasta el año 2000? Teniendo en cuenta los recursos en capital y en trabajo y la evolución futura del progreso tecnico, el crecimiento potencial de Francia, deberia situarse dentro de una gama que se extendería desde un 2,8% hasta un 4,8%. Sobre estas bases, la evolución efectiva del crecimiento dependerá ese…
Qu'est-ce qu'une société juste ? » de Philippe Van Parijs
Qu'est-ce qu'une société juste? Philippe van Parijs
An Egalitarian Democratic Private Ownership Economy
L'absence d'envie dans une problématique «post-welfariste»
Le critère d'absence d'envie dérivait traditionnellement sa pertinence de la difficulté d'égaliser le bien-être des individus dans un cadre purement ordinal. Les développements récents des théories de l'égalité (Rawls, Dworkin, Sen, etc.), conduisant à préconiser l'égalité des ressources ou des chances, et non du bien-être, mettent en lumière la véritable signification du critère d'absence d'envie et lui confèrent une valeur nouvelle. Cet article…
Optimal Growth and Transfers between Generations
Given the difficulties of utilitarian and egalitarian social welfare functions in the context of intergenerational equity, an analysis directly based on the potential transfers that can be made between generations is proposed. A consumption path may be rejected if some transfers with infinite returns can be made. It is shown that such potential transfers are unlikely in the short run in ordinary growth models, but that the returns to sacrifice ar…
Equal Opportunity or Equal Social Outcome?
John Rawls's work (1971) has greatly contributed to rehabilitating equality as a basic social value, after decades of utilitarian hegemony,particularly in normative economics, but Rawls also emphasized that full equality of welfare is not an adequate goal either. This thesis was echoed in Dworkin's famous twin papers on equality (Dworkin 1981a,b), and it is now widely accepted that egalitarianism must be selective. The bulk of the debate on ‘Equa…
Equality and responsibility
Admissibility and Feasibility in Game Forms
This paper examines the exercise of individual or group rights within the game form approach. It focuses in particular on what it means for a strategy or action to be feasible and admissible. Admissibility is best discussed in relation to two basic distinctions among rights, passive and active rights on the one hand and negative and positive rights on the other. It is argued that while there are quite a few cases in which the outcomes of mutual r…
Fair allocation with unequal production skills: The No Envy approach to compensation
Mesurer la pauvreté
LâBt sich Armut messen? Bei der Messung der Armut stôBt man auf die gleichen Schwierigkeiten wie bei der Untersuchung der Ungleichheit: Heterogenitât der individuellen Situationen, Vielfalt der Bedùrfnisse und der Pràferenzen. MuB die Messung dies berùcksichtigen? Falls ja, wie? Mu8 sie aile Elemente der Lebensweise oder lediglich bestimmte grundlegende Gùter heranziehen? Hinzu kommen die Fragen im ZusammenhangmitderBesonderheitderVerhaltensweise…
Quelques réflexions sur la croissance optimale
Michel Philippe, Fleurbaey Marc. Quelques réflexions sur la croissance optimale. In: Revue économique, volume 50, n°4, 1999. pp. 715-732
On Rights in Game Forms
Choix social: Une difficulté et de multiples possibilités
[fre] L'article de 1950 publié par Arrow sous le titre « A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare », ainsi que la monographie qui a été publiée l'année suivante, ont fondé la théorie du choix social. Cette théorie a longtemps été marquée par le caractère négatif de la plupart de ses résultats, confirmant la solidité du théorème d'Arrow. Mais elle est aujourd'hui riche de perspectives de développements positifs, grâce aux propositions de mesu…
Transfer principles and inequality aversion, with an application to optimal growth
Equality Among Responsible Individuals
Economists have long since understood that, unless one is willing to accept big efficiency losses, equality cannot be achieved because the agents have some influence over their own outcomes. But political philosophers argue that equality is not desirable in the first place, for exactly the same reason. Equality would remove most of the expression of agency by free agents; and/ or it would unduly relieve them from the burden of the consequences of…
Equality of Resources Revisited
Freedom in Economics: New Perspectives in Normative Analysis
This book presents a range of papers by philosophers and economists who consider the definition and value of liberty; freedom in rights and equality of opportunity. Until recently freedom has played no explicit role in the conceptual framework of economists, however freedom seems to be at the heart of economics. The book provides a substantial contribution to the fruitful dialogue between the philosophy and economics in this area. Each chapter is…
Development, capabilities, and freedom
Mesure des effets redistributifs d'une réforme des minima sociaux à l'aide d'un nouveau critère de dominance
Nous étudions une réforme des minima sociaux généralisant les conditions du cumul avec une activité rémunérée. Plus précisément, il s’agit d’octroyer une allocation dégressive à taux constant en fonction des revenus d’activité du type de l’allocation compensatrice de revenu. La modulation de cette aide en fonction de la taille du ménage et du loyer est explicitée en détail. Plusieurs variantes de la réforme sont analysées et chiffrées par le biai…
Economics (93 works) · Political science (81 works) · Sociology (54 works) · Law (48 works) · Mathematics (38 works) · Income, Poverty, and Inequality (33 works) · Microeconomics (33 works) · Psychology (33 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Positive economics (32 works)