Scholars have long debated the appropriate balance between efficiency and redistribution. But recently, a wave of critics has argued not only that efficiency is less important, but that efficiency analysis itself is fundamentally flawed. Some say that efficiency is incoherent because there is no neutral baseline from which to judge inefficiency. Others say that efficiency is biased toward those best able to pay (generally, the rich). This essay contends that efficiency is not meaningfully incoherent or biased. The most widely discussed forms of efficiency do not require any particular baseline, and even those that do require a baseline can still serve as useful approximations of more theoretically sound but computationally demanding measures. Moreover, arguments of bias do not account for the source of funds in public projects, produce unintuitive results, and draw an arbitrary cutoff between bias and non-bias that elides important distributional details. Ultimately, the tradeoff between efficiency and redistribution remains the most useful frame for policy debate.

中文翻译：

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对效率的有限辩护，反对不连贯和偏见的指控

长期以来，学者们一直在争论效率与再分配之间的适当平衡。但最近，一波批评者不仅认为效率不再那么重要，而且效率分析本身也存在根本缺陷。有人说效率是不连贯的，因为没有中立的基线来判断效率低下。其他人则说，效率偏向于那些最有能力支付的人（通常是富人）。本文认为，效率并不是有意义的不连贯或有偏见。最广泛讨论的效率形式不需要任何特定的基线，即使那些确实需要基线的效率形式仍然可以作为理论上更合理但计算要求更高的措施的有用近似值。此外，偏见的争论并不能解释公共项目的资金来源，产生不直观的结果，并在偏见和非偏见之间任意划分界限，从而忽略了重要的分布细节。最终，效率和再分配之间的权衡仍然是政策辩论最有用的框架。