Generalized Social Marginal Welfare Weights for Optimal Tax Theory
提出用广义社会边际福利权重评估税制改革，使最优税收公式与标准福利主义形式一致，但权重直接反映社会公平关切，无需依赖个人效用，有助于调和福利主义与实际税收实践的差异。
This paper proposes to evaluate tax reforms by aggregating money metric losses and gains of different individuals using “generalized social marginal welfare weights.” Optimum tax formulas take the same form as standard welfarist tax formulas by simply substituting standard marginal social welfare weights with those generalized weights. Weights directly capture society's concerns for fairness without being necessarily tied to individual utilities. Suitable weights can help reconcile discrepancies between the welfarist approach and actual tax practice, as well as unify in an operational way the most prominent alternatives to utilitarianism such as Libertarianism, equality of opportunity, or poverty alleviation.