SEMAINE D'ÉTUDE SUR LE ROLE DE L’ANALYSE ECONOMETRIOUE ETC. 
This does not mean that political science is without interest but 
t does mean that we economists must remain very cautious about 
what the interest of the community, social justice and so on really 
are. Excuse me for having been so long and thank you. 
DORFMAN 
I do not wish to enter into the important and heated discussion 
detween Professor FRISCH and Professor ALLAIS on the role and 
propriety of social planning, but merely to point out the relationship 
petween Professor FRISCH’s paper and my own in two respects. 
However one feels about social planning, one must concede that 
political decisions that influence the development of an economy have 
io be made. For this purpose one needs some criterion for judging 
whether social effects are good, or moderately good, or bad and this 
s what Professor FRISCH’s capital F function does. One must have 
something of this sort or no social decisions can be made on any 
rational basis. 
[ do not believe that this social preference function can be ascer 
tained, however, by the method that Professor Frisch proposes, 
namely by artfully constructed interviews designed to disclose how 
people evaluate various possible states of their societies. In general, 
people do not know how they will make an important decision until 
‘hey are confronted with it, and they cannot tell you. Therefore ] 
proposed that we attempt to determine social welfare functions by 
inspecting how people have decided in the past rather than by asking 
them how they would decide in the future. My purpose, however, 
was the same as FRISCH’s: to determine a scale of social values. 
There is another significant divergence between us. Professor 
FRISCH distinguishes sharply between the problems of selection and 
implementation. But I do not feel that this distinction can be 
maintained. The preference ordering of two economic policies de- 
pends not only on their consequences in terms of rate of economic 
growth, per capita income, level of employment, and so on, but also 
on the implementation side of the policies themselves, for example 
[17] Frisch - pag. 17