Francis Bator, RIP

His article “The Simple Analytics of Welfare Maximization” (1957) presents the graphical version of basic welfare economics that many of us have taught to our undergrad intermediate micro students pretty much ever since. I doubt that it's been improved upon.

Taking a quick look after many years, the following passage from Bator's discussion of the utility-possibility frontier (p. 28) jumped out at me:

To designate a single best configuration we must be given a Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function that denotes the ethic that is to "count" or whose implications we wish to study. Such a function– it could be yours, or mine, or Mossadegh's, though his is likely to be non-transitive– is intrinsically ascientific.

The only "Mossadegh" I know of is Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the prime minister of the democratically-elected Iranian government that was overthrown in 1953 with the help of the CIA, to be succeeded by the Shah. Given that non-transitive amounts to irrational, is this a racist dig, or am I missing something?

Bator was very clear on the importance of distributional questions, as well as market failures due to externalities and non-convexities. Yet the beauty of the efficiency properties of markets under ideal conditions easily distracts our attention from these problems, as if they were second-order. For this reason, the very effectiveness of his masterly exposition may have contributed to the tendency of well-trained economists toward free-market ideology. We can give Bator himself the last word here: "The Pareto conditions are necessary, but never sufficient" (p. 58).