  The ingredients of Ramsey’s theory are individuals’ lifetime well-beings. Government House in his world maximizes the expected sum of the lifetime well-beings of all who are here today and all who will ever be born, subject to resource constraints. The optimum distribution of lifetime well-beings across generations is derived from that maximization exercise. Of course, the passage of time is not the same as the advance of generations. An individual’s lifetime well-being is an aggregate of the flow of well-being she experiences, while intergenerational well-being is an aggregate of the lifetime well-beings of all who appear on the scene. It is doubtful that the two aggregates should have the same functional form. On the other hand, there is little evidence to suggest that we would be way off the mark in assuming they do have the same form. As a matter of practical ethics, it helps enormously to approximate by not distinguishing the functional form of someone’s well-being over time from that of well-being across the generations. Ramsey adopted this short-cut. People were also taken to be identical, so we may as well assume that there is a single individual at each date. The move removes any distinction between time and generations. An alternative interpretation would have us imagine that the economy consists of a single dynasty, where parents in each generation leave bequests for their children (Meade, 1966, adopted this interpretation). Ramsey also assumed, probably because the mathematics is simpler, that time is a continuous variable, not discrete.