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As a corrective to the "utils" nonsense that they had so often been exposed to in previous
courses (you have heard, though never delivered I'm sure, the lecture that compressed
about fifty or seventy-five years of the subject's history into a single throw-away line -
"in the olden days economists thought that utility could be measured cardinally, isn't
that absurd, ha ha ha, what did they use? utils? ha ha ha ha , now we are so much more
enlightened") when I used to teach Economics 212 at the University of Saskatchewan, I
regularly assigned a slim red
book on demand theory whose title and author, alas, elude me. It was one of the few places
in the secondary lit that correctly (IMHO) positioned and treated seriously the
utility->price discussion. (If the inestimable Peter Dooley is on the list, he may
remember the book's title and author.)
 
The argument goes something like this - the discussion of whether utility is measurable or
not is no more nor less far fetched than the discussion of whether other theoretical
concepts - like time or distance, for example - are measurable. It's just a matter of
correctly defining a unit. The (perhaps Marshallian?) view that  utility is cardinally
measurable in terms of money (measuring how much money you will part with, assuming
constant MU of money, measures the utility you are receiving) comes apart when income and
substitution effects are acknowledged, whence Slutsky and Hicks. In other words, we can't
consistently define a unit.
 
That being said, the discussion of how we (or societies) determine what something is worth
- i.e. the theory of value - surely is no less than the core of our subject. Or at least
appears to have been for its first three hundred years or so.
 
Ken Gordon  
 
 
 
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