Abstract
This paper considers the problem of comparing two income distributions with different numbers of income recipients. The approach eschews the “replication of populations” of Dalton’s Population Principle which has been a fixture of the literature on income inequality since its inception. We start from a preorder which is a generalization of majorization, construct the “better-than” set and characterize the order-preserving welfare functions in a unified framework. The fixed population case falls off as a particular case.
