On the Concept of WelfareAuthor(s): David M. SmithSource: Area, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1975), pp. 33-36Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20000927 .

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On the concept of welfare David M. Smith, Queen Mary College (University of London)

Summary. The term' welfare ' has a variety of meanings in common use. Defining welfare as the state of society in its broadest sense, as is usual in welfare economics, requires the empiricist to specify what social well-being actually depends on. It also reminds the geographer that what varies spatially with respect to human life chances is a component of welfare, not welfare itself. Any attempt to judge particular (spatial) arrangements of human activity as better or worse than others involves values, and these should be recog nized explicitly.

The current professional preoccupation with matters of social relevance and public policy is bringing the term 'welfare' more frequently into geographical literature. However, 'welfare' has a number of different meanings, embracing not only the state of society but also policy instruments designed to alter that state. Thus we have the rather confusing possibility that ' social welfare' (in the sense of the ' well-being' of society) can be enhanced by ' social welfare '

(in the sense of a set of social programmes). Individual welfare may be im proved by being ' on welfare'. In addition, welfare is sometimes held to be subject to spatial variations. Thus the general welfare may be advanced by a

more even territorial distribution of welfare, perhaps accomplished by welfare policies which increase welfare payments to people on welfare in poor areas. The abuse of the term reaches its highest level in dogmatic statements which associate particular social changes with ' the general welfare ', in just the same

meaningless way as politicians attempt to bestow some kind of sanctity on their divergent policies by deeming them to be 'in the national interest'.

Clearly, the term welfare might be more helpful to us if its meaning was more clearly and narrowly defined. It seems most useful as a general rubric for an intellectual process which assists in judging states of society as ' better' or ' worse'. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines welfare as ' satisfactory state,

health and prosperity, well-being', and the concept of welfare in this sense may be thought of as incorporating everything that can distinguish one social state

from another. In a nutshell, this is the meaning adopted in modern welfare economics-the only field of inquiry in which a rigorous attempt is made to

provide a basis for judging the desirability of alternative states of society. The level of welfare is not held to be an observable phenomenon subject to cardinal

measurement, but capable of assignment to an ordinal scale at best. Thus, according to Mishan (1964, 5-6), theoretical welfare economics ' endeavours to formulate propositions by which we may rank, on the scale of better or

worse, alternative economic situations open to society'. The 'best' of the

alternatives would be that which maximizes welfare. While the instinctive urge of the geographer is usually to seek some concrete

identity for abstractions such as welfare, economists have felt no similar inclina tion. Like ' utility', welfare is viewed simply as a conceptual device to facilitate the analysis of people making choices. Winch (1971, 25) puts it as follows: 'We assume that individuals attempt to maximize utility, and define utility as that

which the individual attempts to maximize. We can similarly assume that a society attempts to maximize welfare, and define welfare as that which society attempts to maximize. The nature of utility or welfare rests entirely on the value judg

ments of the individual or society concerned.'

33

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34 On the concept of welfare

If this is so, we can be somewhat more precise about what is involved in welfare by setting down the kind of things on which society makes value judg ments in general. This is normally done symbolically in the form of a social welfare function (SWF), which simply states what welfare is dependent on. Although of an undefined form, a SWF is in theory capable of yielding measures of the desirability of alternative states of society, given values for the terms in the equation and given the necessary relational statements. The fact that such an operational approach may be well-nigh impossible in practice does not prevent the SWF from guiding us towards the things which have to be taken into account in making judgments between alternative states of society. It can also assist in defining necessary and sufficient conditions for welfare improvements and for the attainment of an optimal state.

A SWF may be written in various ways. If W represents the level of welfare and U the utility level of the individual members of society (1, 2, . . ., m), then welfare may be expressed as a function of individual utility levels as follows:

W = W(Ul, U2, .. ., Ur) (1)

Differential weighting of individual utilities is implicit in the above, thus accommodating the fact that, in distributing its benefits and penalties, society may recognize different claims by different members of the community on the basis of work contributed, merit, need, and so on. Thus an increment of utility to one individual may enhance welfare more than the same increment to another, unless perfect equalitarianism prevails. Individual utility levels are dependent on the goods (and bads) consumed or avoided, the utility of any member of society being:

U = U(ql, q2, * qg) (2)

where q is any source of utility or disutility (i.e. positive or negative), including work or foregone leisure. The general welfare is thus some function of the quantity of all these goods and bads in aggregate, so expression (1) above may be written alternatively as:

W= W(Q1, Q2... Qg) (3)

Expressing welfare in terms of both individuals and goods:

W -= W(qll, . . ., qlm, * ., qgl, * * *, qgm) (4)

This shows how the various sources of satisfaction are distributed among the members of society, or who gets what. The ' goods' can include anything from

' economic' commodities such as food and cars to social disutilities like air pollution and loss of leisure time in traffic jams. Differential weighting of different goods or bads is implicitly recognized; society values some things more than others just as it differentiates between individuals and groups. Any change in the quantity of any good(s) going to any individual(s) will change the welfare level; to what extent such a change is for the better (or worse) depends on the

weights attached to the goods and individuals concerned, and the nature of the relationships through which they are connected. Given optimal use of resources (in a technical sense), the ' best' or welfare-maximizing distribution of the 'best' combination of goods is simply that which society prefers; how this collective preference is arrived at is another matter, beyond the scope of

this paper, as is the question of how conflicting preferences are resolved.

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On the concept of welfare 35

The above formulation implicitly assumes a spaceless (and timeless) world. If the community in question is one of a number occupying different territories or locations, and if the differential effect of societal changes on these communi ties matters when making normative judgments, then the meaning of welfare

must be modified. Welfare judgments must now be made on the basis of who gets what where (Smith, 1974). It might be argued that location in space, like race, religion or sex, is but one of a large number of attributes of the individuals

whose experiences of life are built into the SWF, and that the capacity to group individuals on any attribute is implicit in the conventional formulation, but

welfare judgments in geography require explicit spatial aggregation of indi viduals. This could be done by adding locational subscripts to the terms on the right hand side of the SWF in expression (4) above, but the result would be rather cumbersome. The point can be made more simply by considering (4) to refer to one of a number of communities in different locations (1, 2, . . ., n), changing W to, say, S, so that what is represented is something other than welfare (e.g. ' social well-being',) and writing the general SWF as:

W = W(S1, S2, . * ., SO) (5)

Welfare is now some function of the distribution of goods and bads between individuals identified by location or territory. This seems an obvious and neces sary spatial extension of the conventional welfare formulation (Smith, 1973). Just as society operates in a way which values some goods and individuals more than others, so some territories attract more favourable treatment. This may be a result of their occupation by favoured people or groups, but there can be explicitly territorial discrimination, as in regional development policy and differences in local taxes.

The reason why welfare should not be considered a spatially-variable condi tion should now be apparent. If the concept of welfare provides a framework for making judgments between alternative states of society, as was suggested at the outset, that which varies spatially (S above) and to which we might be tempted to attach the label 'welfare' is but one of a number of conditions determining the comparative desirability of alternative states. The concept of welfare advocated here subsumes the spatial allocation of the goods and bads from which individual members of society derive their satisfaction. Whatever

we choose to term aggregate life quality of people in one of a number of com munities occupying distinct locations or territories, let it not be welfare. The term

'real income' in the broad sense adopted by Harvey (1971) is appropriate, provided that this includes psychic income gains or losses from the experience of externalities, as well as the value of the conventional goods and service; consumed. Other possibilities are ' social well-being', ' level of living' or even ' quality of life', all of which seem incomplete unless they include every source

of human satisfaction, positive and negative. The use of ' welfare ' to describe aspects of social policy is too firmly established to change; all we can do is make sure that the context renders the meaning clear if we employ it in this sense.

In attempting to clarify the meaning of welfare in this paper, nothing specific has been said about what the state of society depends on, except for the general itv of 'who gets what where'. To be more precise requires a definite value position which would enable the relative importance of the various individuals (or groups), the goods and the territories to be expressed by actual weights in the SWF. This raises the ethical question of who should get what where, which

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36 On the concept of welfare

is implicit in any real-world attempt to differentiate between alternative spatial arrangements of society on a better-worse scale. This even applies to the well known Pareto criterion, whereby any change which makes some individuals (or territories in our case) better off while no-one becomes worse off is a welfare improvement, acceptance of which requires approval of the rich (regions) getting richer while the poor stay where they are. Making practical welfare judgments in geography can never be value free; the question is, whose values are adopted? Whether made by academics, politicians, or TV pundits, assertions as to what social arrangements or courses of action will enhance 'welfare' or be ' in the national interest' should be treated with utmost scepticism unless accompanied by the value assumptions on which they rest. Such a statement should be obligatory in any geographical welfare evaluations.

References Harvey, D. (1971) 'Social process, spatial form, and the redistribution of real income in an

urban system', in Chisholm, M. et al. (eds) Regional forecasting (Colston Papers 22), 270-300

Mishan, E. J. (1964) Welfare economics: five introductory essays (New York) Smith, D. M. (1973) 'An introduction to welfare geography', Occasional Papers in Environ

mental Studies, 11 (Dept. of Geography and Environmental Studies, Univ. of the Witwaters rand)

Smith, D. M. (1974) ' Who gets what where, and how ? A welfare focus for human geography', Geography, 59, 289-97

Winch, D. M. (1971) Analytical welfare economics

Three-hundred years of scientific hydrology

Report of a conference organized by UNESCO, WMO and IAHS in Paris, 9-12 September, 1974.

It was three-hundred years ago in 1674 that the book De l'origine des fontaines by Pierre Perrault was published in Paris. Perrault's ideas presented in his book are held by many to mark a breakthrough in hydrological thought and the beginnings of scientific hydrology. In particular, Perrault demonstrated quantitatively that rainfall and snowfall were responsible for river flow and his measurements taken on the Upper Seine constitute the first attempt to derive a quantitative water balance. The year 1974 also marks the end of the International Hydrological Decade which has afforded a

major impetus in the recent development of hydrology. It was therefore fitting that 1974 and Paris should be chosen as the time and place for an international meeting to celebrate the Tercentenary of Scientific Hydrology. Convened jointly by UNESCO, the World Meteorological Organization and the International Association of Hydro logical Sciences, this conference was held at UNESCO House from 9-12 September 1974 and was attended by over 350 participants.

The main programme of the meeting consisted of several key papers, reviewing historical developments in hydrology, present trends and future prospects, which have

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