Birth-date dependent population ethics: critical-level principles

Area of Science:

• Social Choice Theory
• Intertemporal Economics
• Population Economics

Background:

• Traditional social evaluation often overlooks the impact of birth timing on societal welfare.
• Intertemporal frameworks typically assume fixed population sizes or non-varying birth cohorts.
• The strong Pareto principle, a cornerstone of social ordering, does not inherently account for birth dates.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and characterize birth-date dependent social evaluation principles.
• To integrate the timing of births into intertemporal social welfare analysis.
• To explore generalizations of utilitarian principles that incorporate population dynamics.

Main Methods:

• Modification of the strong Pareto principle to include birth-date considerations.
• Application of the axiom of independence of the utilities of the dead.
• Characterization of population principles using recursive structures.
• Introduction of individual substitution and intertemporal equivalence axioms.

Main Results:

• A recursive structure for population principles where birth dates are significant.
• Birth-date dependent generalizations of critical-level generalized utilitarian principles.
• Identification of stationarity as leading to geometric discounting within this framework.

Conclusions:

• Social welfare analysis can be enhanced by considering the temporal aspect of individual births.
• The proposed framework offers a more nuanced approach to intertemporal social choice, especially with varying populations.
• The findings provide a theoretical basis for incorporating demographic changes into economic policy evaluations.