This book provides an accessible yet rigorous overview of the social welfare function (SWF) as a tool for evaluating governmental policies.

Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy, and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from both welfare economics and normative ethics.
Adler is the author of New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis (Harvard, 2006; co-authored with Eric Posner) and Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis (Oxford, 2012). He edited the Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy with Marc Fleurbaey (2016). He was an editor of the journal Legal Theory until 2017, and is now an editor of the journal Economics and Philosophy.

• Acknowledgments


• Introduction


• Chapter 1: The Social Welfare Function: An Overview


• Chapter 2: Measuring Well-Being


• Chapter 3: The Landscape of SWFs


• Chapter 4: Which SWF Should We Choose? A Debate


• Chapter 5: Implementing the SWF Framework: A Case Study


• Chapter 6: The Institutional Role of the SWF Framework


• Chapter 7: Research Frontiers


• Appendix


• References