Measuring Social Welfare, with Priority for the Worse Off

Matthew D. Adler (Duke University)

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk would like to invite you to attend a public lecture on "Measuring Social Welfare, with Priority for the Worse Off" with Professor Matthew Adler (Duke) on Monday 23rd May 5.30 pm at the Runcie Room, Faculty of Divinity, CB3 9BS. To register for in-person attendance, please use the below Eventbrite link.
 
In his lecture, Mathew Adler will be talking about the development and application of the social welfare function (SWF) framework for policy evaluation. The SWF is a powerful tool for evaluating governmental policies across a range of domains in light of human well-being, representing a major step beyond traditional cost-benefit analysis that currently dominate policy-assessment. While cost-benefit analysis quantifies well-being impacts in monetary units, the SWF framework does so using an interpersonally comparable well-being measure. In his lecture Professor Adler will talk about the use of Prioritarian SWFs, which represent a further development of this concept by giving extra weight to well-being changes affecting individuals at lower levels of well-being.
 
In conjunction with this lecture, Matthew has offered to run a manuscript workshop on a forthcoming book he is writing on "Risk, Death and Well-Being: The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation" which will take place on the same day from 1 pm-4 pm in the Mill Lane area of Cambridge. He has suggested that we focus on a few key chapters so people don’t need to read the whole book if they don’t want to. Please email [email protected] if you would like to attend so that we can send you a copy of the manuscript.

Register for the lecture below:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/327215709997