Towards a Post-Keynesian Welfare Economics: 35 Years Later

I re-visit the two arguments in my original paper, published in this journal in 1989. Pleasingly (but perhaps suspiciously) I have no reason to challenge them, but the insights that have come from behavioural economics over the intervening 35 years provide important new sources of support for both. The insights with respect to endogenous preferences add weight to the first argument for why collective/social choice is important (i.e., why welfare economics matters). In the second argument over the specific egalitarian flavour of post-Keynesian welfare proposals, I now fine tune this suggestion with the aid of behavioural insights so as to focus on the egalitarian character of the rules (and not the outcomes in society).