Two Concluding Remarks
Let us conclude with two brief remarks.
In the first place, this paper is a humble attempt to identify the services rendered by Hicks in the history of welfare economics since Pigou.
He was one of the major leaders of the ordinalist renovation of the crumbling “old” welfare economics in the form of the “new” welfare economics. In our judgments, the “new” welfare economics, not only of the compensationist school of Kaldor, Hicks, Scitovsky, and Samuelson, but also of the social welfare function school of Bergson and Samuelson, is hardly sustainable as the foundation of welfare economics of well-being, freedom, and equality. Hicks also caused a stir in the profession by proclaiming an esoteric non-welfarist manifesto. In this paper, we tried to argue that his manifesto has far-reaching implications in that it recommends us to escape from the narrow cage of welfarism and of consequentialism, and adopt the richer informational basis of non- consequentialism in order to make progress in the analysis of wellbeing, freedom, and equality. Furthermore, Hicks was a historian of welfare economics who tried to locate Pigou's “old” welfare economics in historical perspective by identifying the parallelism between the classical theory of Production and Distribution and Pigou’s Economics of Welfare. Although the parallelism he identified is intellectually interesting, Hicks was reticent on the effect of this recognition on the construction of post-exodus welfare economics.In the second place, two major contributions to the contemporary analyses of well-being, freedom, and equality, viz., the theory of justice by Rawls, and the capability approach by Sen, are briefly expounded and critically examined. The informational basis of Rawls’s theory focuses on the general purpose means to be called the social primary goods rather than on the ends in the pursuit of rational life plans of individuals, which dissociates him from welfaristic theories of social evaluation. The informational basis of Sen’s capability approach is Aristotelian in nature, which consists of the achievement of valuable functionings, and the capability to achieve them, where functionings are various things that he/she manages to do or be in leading a life, whereas his/her capability consists of the alternative combinations of functionings he/she can achieve, from which he/she can choose one combination. The assessment of an individual’s welfare and of freedom is based on the functionings achieved, as well as on the capability to achieve these functionings. Although our treatment of these non-welfarist approaches to well-being and freedom remains sketchy, it is hoped that it may still be of some use in exemplifying the possibility of the post-exodus welfare economics.
The purpose of this paper will be served well if it can constitute at least a part of the reasonable answer to the mystery of welfare economics, which Hicks (1975/1981) posed and left unresolved.