tdh@frog.UUCP (T. Dave Hudson) (12/03/84)
Marginal utility cannot be objectively measured. It cannot be measured in terms of the marginal utility of some fungible good. If I have two alternative courses of action, say the having of an apple and the having of a pear, and I choose having the apple, its marginal utility is inferred from my choice as having greater m.u. than having the pear. I can then pick two amounts of, say, pure gold, such that the prospects of having one of the two amounts of gold and having the apple are indifferent to me, and similarly with the pear. However, the marginal utilities of the two amounts of gold cannot be presumed to be in direct proportion to the amounts; in fact, the marginal utility of the greater amount is usually less than in proportion, due to the fact that marginal utility usually decreases with the increasing having of a good. Furthermore, there can be no such thing as infinitesimal marginal utility. The preceding argument is given at greater length in Ludwig von Mises' *The Theory of Money and Credit*. If marginal utility cannot be measured in terms of things being chosen among, then perhaps it might be measured in terms of the psychological process of choosing. Some have alleged that the measurement of pain and pleasure, the presently infeasibly physically measureable emotional response to the prospects of choices, would suffice. However, it has long been known that ideas can be stronger than emotions. Those of great willpower can choose to endure excruciating emotional pain over great emotional pleasure, if they think that is the right thing to do, without being compensated by emotional joy about their doing what they think is right. Even the ordinary human can be taught to ignore emotions, to treat them as unreal and to act in disregard of them. Granted, this type of action may be viewed as a reflecting a personality disorder, a divided soul, and very likely as the consequence of having partially accepted an evil moral standard. But its existence and even frequency cannot be denied. Greater and lesser emotions, and pleasurable and painful emotions, do not necessarily conform in the expected way with the preferring and setting-asides of action. That leaves the possibility of a non-emotional pshychological measurement of marginal utility, for there are no further aspects of the process of choosing that could relate to something measurable. Is there a graded response to the holding of ideas, whether they allow emotions as input or not? Whatever it might be, the response would have to be something physically measureable. What would prevent the intense mental activity of solving a difficult but minor problem from outweighing that of a simple but major problem? How (by what standard) would you normalize the activity taking place at different times (ignoring the idiocy of normalizing activity taking place in different people) in the same person? Should you take a multiple decision being made by binary elimination and presume that the same winning alternative will bring about the same physical reaction each step of the way, or are you really dealing with multiple marginal utilities of the same alternative (So which one would be used to measure the actualizing of the alternative?)? Should mental fatigue be compensated for? Will the reaction only be differential, therefore requiring an explanation of how to separate the marginal utility of one alternative from that of the other and from unconsidered alternatives? Do recognizedly impossible and therefore rejected alternatives have any marginal utility (since there is corresponding mental activity)?? Perhaps one could play witch-doctor so as to allow oneself to pretend to measure marginal utility :-). David Hudson