Book: Choice, Welfare and Measurement

Overview
Amartya Sen's 1982 Choice, Welfare and Measurement delivers a rigorous rethinking of the foundations of welfare economics by examining how individual choices, social judgments, and measurable indicators can or cannot be combined to produce defensible welfare conclusions. The work interrogates the standard reliance on preference satisfaction and utilitarian aggregation and pushes for an explicit account of the informational and ethical inputs required for welfare judgments. Mathematical precision and philosophical reflection are brought together to show where familiar criteria succeed, where they fail, and what trade-offs are inevitable.

Core critique of welfarism
The central thrust is a sustained critique of welfarism, the view that social evaluation can be fully grounded in individual utilities or preferences. Revealed preferences and ordinal utility, while informative about choice behavior, are shown to be inadequate for many normative questions because they leave out crucial interpersonal comparisons and substantive fairness concerns. Sen stresses that welfare assessments cannot be procedurally neutral: deciding what information counts , whether utilities, real incomes, capabilities, or freedoms , is itself a normative choice with measurable consequences.

Interpersonal comparison and measurement
A focal concern is the possibility and limits of interpersonal comparisons. Sen distinguishes between what can be inferred from choice data and what requires supplementary ethical or empirical assumptions. He demonstrates that certain welfare judgments presuppose comparability across individuals, and that different comparability assumptions lead to different social evaluations. Rather than treating interpersonal comparability as a taboo or a mere technicality, the argument demands explicit acknowledgment of the comparators used and careful analysis of their implications for social rankings and policy prescriptions.

Choice theory and social choice insights
Choice theory and social choice theory are woven into the analysis to expose paradoxes and constraints. Arrow-like impossibility results are revisited with an emphasis on the informational foundations that underlie them: changing the informational basis , for example, allowing certain interpersonal welfare comparisons , alters the scope of possible social orderings and can evade some impossibilities at the cost of new normative commitments. Sen clarifies trade-offs between collective rationality, individual rights, and distributive equity, showing that appealing to purely procedural aggregation often masks substantive value judgments.

Beyond utility: opportunities and assessment
The work argues for broadening the evaluative space beyond mere preference satisfaction toward considerations of opportunities and capabilities. Well-being is treated not only as experienced utility but also as the real freedoms people have to achieve valuable states of being and doing. This reorientation emphasizes that equal preference satisfaction can mask stark inequalities in what people are actually able to do, and that assessments sensitive to functionings or capabilities provide a more informative basis for many policy-relevant judgments.

Methodological contribution and legacy
Methodologically, the book insists on explicitness: welfare economics must state its informational assumptions and normative premises rather than hide them in technical apparatus. That emphasis influenced later work in development economics, social choice, and welfare measurement, encouraging the creation of indices and evaluative frameworks that make underlying judgments transparent. The ideas advanced here paved the way for a richer discourse about poverty, inequality, and public policy, and they helped frame debates that led to the capability approach and to more careful use of welfare indicators in practical policy design.

Concluding perspective
Choice, Welfare and Measurement stands as a demanding synthesis of technical analysis and moral reasoning that challenges econ­omists to be clearer about what is being measured and why. By uncovering the hidden value choices in standard methods and by proposing alternative evaluative horizons, the work reshapes how social welfare problems are formulated and how policy-relevant comparisons are justified.