Title: The Measurement of Individual and Social Deprivation
Abstract: Choices are fundamental in explaining differences in the attainments of individuals. This paper addresses the challenge of measuring individual and social deprivation, when keeping individuals responsible for their choices. I show that intuitive principles of distributive justice force social deprivation to be measured by the sum of specific indices of individual deprivation which: (i) respect the preferences of individuals; (ii) compare individuals based on the set of attainments they are deprived of; and (iii) are continuous and convex. Furthermore, I extend the characterization results to differences in needs and categorical dimensions of deprivation and illustrate the criteria using the Norwegian register data.
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