 This Samuelson does in 51 pages, including his exposition of what became known as the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function.Theorems derived in welfare economics, he notes, are deductive implications of assumptions that are not refutable, thus not meaningful in a certain sense.Still, the social welfare function can represent any index (cardinal or not) of the economic measures of any logically possible ethical belief system that is required to order any (hypothetically) feasible social configurations as "better than", "worse than", or "indifferent to" each other (p. 221).