Conclusion
Pareto’s work on welfare theory for policy purposes treated the role of values with both clarity and caution.
In the economics of welfare theory, the most significant value attributes are excised from economics and assigned to the Ministry of Justice, which is an ‘extra-economic’ institution.
But even within this economic theory of welfare, the role played by the Ministry of Production still reflects some basic value principles, including the propositions that: private property rights should be retained (except for the case of taxation to fund the activities of the Ministry of Justice), that an increase in economic welfare is good and that the Pareto test and the compensation principle are acceptable value propositions that can be employed when determining economic maximisation. But interpersonal comparisons of utility are prohibited from economic assessments of welfare. In the sociology of welfare theory, however, the two distinct roles allocated to the Ministry of Production and the Ministry of Justice in the economics of welfare collapse to form a single analytical assessment of welfare by removing the prohibition on interpersonal comparisons for the purposes of analysis.A significant question in this chapter is: Did Pareto, in moving from an economic analysis of welfare to a sociological analysis of welfare, anticipate Hicks's movement from economic welfarism to non-welfarism? He did so to the extent that the prohibition on interpersonal comparisons of utility is abandoned and the behaviour of individuals relative to social norms is admitted in the Sociologia. Notwithstanding this, however, Pareto's sociological approach to welfare does not abandon the requirement for the policy advisor to take an ethically neutral approach to his or her consideration of the values of others when providing advice on improving welfare, which is an important feature Hicks has in mind for his non-welfarism. As a result, Pareto's sociology of welfare does not fully reflect Hicks's non-welfarism. Hicks's approach emphasised the transition from the general to the particular or practical problem, whereas Pareto's sociology of collective welfare was a highly abstract general theory. Hicks was of the view that law and other social sciences will fill the policy void if economists treat practical matters with the framework of economic welfarism. There is, however, very limited scope for Pareto's sociological formulation of collective welfare, formalised using abstract mathematical symbols, to help economists compete against lawyers and other social scientists when providing advice on the minutiae associated with the detail of concrete policy matters.