I’ve been dipping back into a lot of my collection on welfare economics, for various reasons. I.M.D. Little (A Critique of Welfare Economics) has a wonderfully spiky style, absent from modern academic writing (well, any kind of style really):

“It is clear that if one accepts behaviour as evidence for other minds, then one must admit that one can compare other minds on the basis of such evidence. Therefore those who ‘deny’ interpersonal welfare comparisons must deny the existence of other minds. The only possible alternative is that by some extraordinary kind of intuition, they can get to know that other minds exist but that the cannot know anything about them.”

(I’m having what I believe we now call an Adonis Day of idling around ….)

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