Since writing this post I have connected that then-unnamed-to-me-thing which is contrasted to pareto improvement is probably Kaldor-Hicks improvement .
Reflecting on the post topic and wikipedia criticisms section (quoted so it can’t be changed underneath)
Perhaps the most common criticism of the Kaldor-Hicks criteria is that it is unclear why the capacity of the winners to compensate the losers should matter, or have moral or political significance as a decision criteria, if the compensation is not actually paid.
If everybody keeps doing Kaldor-Hicks improvements then over different issues everybody racks minor losses and major wins. This is a little like a milder form of acausal trade. Its challenge is similarly to keep the modelling of the other honest and accurate. To actually compensate we might need to communicate consent and move causal goods etc. Taking personal damage in order to provide an anonymous unconsented gift with no (specified) expectation of reciprocity can be psychologically demanding. And in causing personal gain while costing others it would be tempting to downplay the effect on others. But if you can collectively do that you can pick up more money than pareto-efficiency and get stuck in fewer local optima. If the analysis fails it actually is a “everybody-for-themselfs” world while everybody deludes themselfs that they are prosocial or a world of martyrs burning down the world. The middle zone of this and pareto-efficiency is paretists lamenting a tragedy of coordination failure of lacking reassurances.
Since writing this post I have connected that then-unnamed-to-me-thing which is contrasted to pareto improvement is probably Kaldor-Hicks improvement .
Reflecting on the post topic and wikipedia criticisms section (quoted so it can’t be changed underneath)
If everybody keeps doing Kaldor-Hicks improvements then over different issues everybody racks minor losses and major wins. This is a little like a milder form of acausal trade. Its challenge is similarly to keep the modelling of the other honest and accurate. To actually compensate we might need to communicate consent and move causal goods etc. Taking personal damage in order to provide an anonymous unconsented gift with no (specified) expectation of reciprocity can be psychologically demanding. And in causing personal gain while costing others it would be tempting to downplay the effect on others. But if you can collectively do that you can pick up more money than pareto-efficiency and get stuck in fewer local optima. If the analysis fails it actually is a “everybody-for-themselfs” world while everybody deludes themselfs that they are prosocial or a world of martyrs burning down the world. The middle zone of this and pareto-efficiency is paretists lamenting a tragedy of coordination failure of lacking reassurances.