The relevance of Pareto optimality

In his basic paper, On Welfare Theory and Regions,2 Professor Ragnar Frisch has properly emphasized the necessity for specifying carefully the constraints that confine the Pareto Region, that region within which the criterion for classifying positions is to be employed. As he demonstrates, the region will depend upon the nature of the constraints introduced, and the set of points or positions that may be classified as optimal will vary with these constraints. I propose here to discuss the nature of the appropriate constraints in a somewhat different manner and from a different philosophy than that of Frisch. His view, which is that social value judgments must be introduced in order to determine