Welfare and Replaceability | Nicolas Treich

Nicolas Treich will be discussing the paper ‘Welfare and Replaceability’.

Abstract

‘Are many short lives just as good as one long life? Applied to animals, the controversial “replaceability argument” (Singer 1993) claims that they are. In this paper, we identify the conditions on the social welfare function and individual lifetime utilities under which such welfare equivalence holds, and more generally, when replacing a long life with short lives increases or decreases social welfare. Our results show that replaceability is favored under several circumstances, including higher per-period utility levels, stronger inequality aversion, and lower critical levels. This analysis thus clarifies when social welfare is, or is not, better advanced by extending existing lives rather than creating new ones.’

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