social welfare functions

A social welfare function is a way to combine everyone's well-being into a single measure to evaluate how well a society is doing. It considers individual benefits or utilities and sums or arranges them to assess overall social welfare. This helps policymakers decide which policies improve collective well-being, balancing different people's interests. Different functions prioritize fairness or efficiency, guiding decisions toward equitable or optimal outcomes based on societal values. Essentially, it's a tool to quantify and compare the quality of life across different groups or policies.