Food security and fiscal laxity

For a long time, the economics literature on public policy assumed that (democratically elected) governments were benevolent maximisers of the collective welfare of the people who elected them. Although the seminal work of Kenneth Arrow and others pointed to the difficulty of defining a formal social welfare function which satisfies some basic internal consistency properties, the idea of benevolence was a useful construct, because it suggested that normative policy advice, on the best course of action in any particular situation, would immediately be acted upon by the benevolent government to which it was addressed.

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