The Death of Welfare Economics
回顾了阿罗与萨缪尔森之间长达五十多年的争论，阿罗的不可能定理被认为动摇了福利经济学的核心概念：社会福利函数，而萨缪尔森则坚决捍卫该概念。这场争论反映了福利经济学与社会选择理论在数学工具运用和社会福利观念上的分歧。
The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, as set out in his pathbreaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function—one of the main concepts of the new welfare economics as defined by Abram Bergson (Burk) in 1938 and clarified by Paul Samuelson in the Foundations of Economic Analysis—does not exist under reasonable conditions. Indeed, from the very start, Arrow kept asserting that his famous impossibility result has direct and devastating consequences for the Berg-son-Samuelson social welfare function, though he seemed to soften his position in the early eighties. On his side, especially from the seventies on, Samuelson remained active on this issue and continued to defend the concept he had devised with Bergson, tooth and nail, against Arrow’s attacks. The aim of this article is precisely to examine this rather strange controversy, which is almost unknown in the scientific community, even though it lasted more than fifty years and involved a conflict between two economic giants, Arrow and Samuelson, and, behind them, two distinct communities—welfare economics, which was on the wane, against the emerging social choice theory—representing two conflicting ways of dealing with mathematical tools in welfare economics and two different conceptions of social welfare.