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LIT-282: The Possibility of Social Choice

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Properties6
StatusActive — read in full 2026-09-28 (NOTE-263); worth reading as Sen's own map of how his social-choice work, his capability view and his poverty and famine work connect through one idea — informational broadening — though every formal claim in it is cited to earlier papers rather than shown, so it is a guide to the results, not a source for them.
Version2
Tagssociety-and-governance, social-science, ethics
ExtendsLIT-285 — The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-263 — The Possibility of Social Choice
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-025 — Neither utility information nor resource holdings, alone or together, can register claims that arise from how differently people convert resources into what they can do and be: equal resources leave unequal capabilities, and utility adapts to deprivation, THEORY-027 — Two individually decisive people, weak Pareto and an unrestricted domain cannot all hold, even when choice need only yield a best element; unlike Arrow's theorem, the conflict is not removed by interpersonal comparability

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Sen (1998), Nobel Lecture, Stockholm, 8 December 1998; printed in the Nobel Foundation’s volume for 1998 (pp. 178–215); also American Economic Review 89(3), June 1999, 349–378 — DOI-10.1257/aer.89.3.349

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-09-28 at the owner’s request, as one of nine texts assembled to represent Amartya Sen’s capability approach without a full reading of The Idea of Justice. published: is the first appearance (ADR-002).

It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-263 is the close reading of 2026-09-28, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as Sen’s own map of how his social-choice work, his capability view and his poverty and famine work connect through one idea — informational broadening — though every formal claim in it is cited to earlier papers rather than shown, so it is a guide to the results, not a source for them.

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