I like to think of things that ask for specifiers like “Pareto” as projects. There are Pareto projects that leave everyone involved better off. There might be some side channel externalities that end up indirectly entangling more parties into the project, thus a Pareto project could end up revealed as not Pareto after all.
A useful generalization of a project being Pareto is a project being Kaldor-Hicks, meaning that there exists a hypothetical redistribution scheme such that a project becomes Pareto if it’s somehow administered. Doesn’t have to be actually planned or feasible at all.
It captures the colloquial meaning of “positive sum” projects that grow the collective pie, far better than false similarities to “zero sum”. The useful thing about this concept is noticing when a project is not even Kaldor-Hicks. For example, an armed robbery is not Kaldor-Hicks, because there is expected damage and returning the spoils won’t make everyone involved better off than originally in expectation.
I like to think of things that ask for specifiers like “Pareto” as projects. There are Pareto projects that leave everyone involved better off. There might be some side channel externalities that end up indirectly entangling more parties into the project, thus a Pareto project could end up revealed as not Pareto after all.
A useful generalization of a project being Pareto is a project being Kaldor-Hicks, meaning that there exists a hypothetical redistribution scheme such that a project becomes Pareto if it’s somehow administered. Doesn’t have to be actually planned or feasible at all.
It captures the colloquial meaning of “positive sum” projects that grow the collective pie, far better than false similarities to “zero sum”. The useful thing about this concept is noticing when a project is not even Kaldor-Hicks. For example, an armed robbery is not Kaldor-Hicks, because there is expected damage and returning the spoils won’t make everyone involved better off than originally in expectation.