Walter Froehlich’s Review of Ansatzpunkte der Wohlstandsökonomik (1961)

Walter Froehlich’s journal book review assesses Reimut Jochimsen’s attempt to reorient normative welfare economics. Its central concern is the distance between formally consistent welfare analysis and the substantive judgments needed to give that analysis practical meaning. Froehlich values the book’s historical survey, but locates its originality in its second part: an inquiry into how economists might establish explicit normative premises through cooperation with other disciplines.

The review begins with terminology. Jochimsen chooses Wohlstand as the German equivalent of “welfare,” despite its earlier association with “wealth,” and argues against Wohlfahrt. This distinction introduces the larger methodological question of how economic welfare should be defined and evaluated. Invoking Viner, Froehlich observes that economists’ theoretical reluctance to enter ethics has not prevented value judgments from informing their research and teaching. The appropriate response is therefore greater methodological care, not an attempt to eliminate evaluation:

However, recognition of the special nature of value judgments and care in their use is indispensable, and thus a methodological discussion in this field has significance.

Froehlich describes the book’s first part as a concise survey of modern welfare economics. Its trajectory runs from the classical identification of welfare with wealth through marginalist attempts to aggregate utility, and from psychological accounts of utility to the formal Paretian language of preference. Subsequent developments progressively restrict assumptions and clarify logical difficulties while generating further doubts about interpersonal comparisons, compensation, and the consistency of majority decisions. This history makes explicit normative assumptions appear necessary rather than optional.

Jochimsen’s proposed foundation is a welfare function, expressible either conventionally or through social indifference curves. Froehlich emphasizes that such curves cannot be obtained by simply adding individual preference maps. More importantly, formalizing the normative framework does not supply its substantive content:

The difficulties, though, only begin at this point because all substantial problems are now moved into the function which remains conveniently all-embracing and not well defined.

This is the review’s pivotal qualification. A welfare function makes the place of evaluation explicit, but risks becoming an inclusive container for unresolved questions. The methodological advance therefore creates a further obligation: to determine the premises governing judgments of social welfare.

The book’s second part addresses that task. Froehlich regards it as especially valuable for American readers because comparable discussion has been relatively neglected in Anglo-American literature. Jochimsen offers starting points rather than settled solutions, identifying four areas requiring normative determination: personal liberty, social minima for individuals, democratic societal order, and the economy’s minimum capacity to adapt to internal and external change. These concerns give welfare evaluation a broader content than preference aggregation alone.

The proposed means of developing that content is interdisciplinary cooperation, expressly including philosophers and theologians. Froehlich presents this as a cautiously promising procedure. Economists have reasons to distrust heavily advertised interdisciplinary projects, and the participating professions bring their own biases. Jochimsen nevertheless hopes that these biases can counterbalance one another; philosophy and theology may also check an excessively narrow conception of scientific inquiry.

Thus, though collaboration is not the automatic solution, it is an operational base from which we may hope to achieve something more than ever more formal generalizations.

Froehlich’s endorsement remains practical and qualified. Collaboration might prove more fruitful than improvised philosophizing, particularly when addressing public purposes and national goals—the substantive concerns represented by the welfare function. His closing observation that the bibliography is overwhelmingly Anglo-American situates Jochimsen’s intervention within the field’s dominant technical literature. The review’s contribution is to distinguish the achievement of formal consistency from the harder work of establishing defensible normative content, and to identify organized interdisciplinary inquiry as a possible bridge between them.