The ‘Mindless Society’

Abstract

In the last chapter I introduced the concept of the social welfare function – that is, a function describing what variables contribute to the welfare of society as a whole. But the British Prime Minister in the 1980s, the late Baroness Thatcher, is famously misreported as having said that there is no such thing as ‘society’. What she actually said is ‘Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families…’ It is not clear what exactly she had in mind. One possibility is that she was simply referring to the view expressed by Jeremy Bentham in 1789 that ‘the community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members’.