Welfare economists typically measure social good in terms of Pareto efficiency. A distribution of utility β is said to be Pareto superior over another distribution δ just in case from state δ there is a possible redistribution of utility to β such that at least one player is better off in β than in δ and no player is worse off. Failure to move from a Pareto-inferior to a Pareto-superior distribution is inefficient because the existence of β as a possibility, at least in principle, shows that in δ some utility is being wasted. Now, the outcome (3,3) that represents mutual cooperation in our model of the PD is clearly Pareto superior to mutual defection; at (3,3) both players are better off than at (2,2). So it is true that PDs lead to inefficient outcomes. This was true of our example in Section 2.6 as well.
Source: §2.7 On Interpreting Payoffs: Morality and Efficiency in Games in Game Theory (First published Sat Jan 25, 1997; substantive revision Sun Sep 3, 2023) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy