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There has been a long tradition of vigorously denying that utility can be 
compared across people, or even very cardinally within a person, which is 
what is implied by the standard indifference curve analysis. 
 
I would note that we may be moving away from this on several fronts as 
behavioral economics gets taken more seriously.  Three points:    
1)  The assumptions for the standard story do not seem to hold very well, 
including some of the simplest, such as, do people even know what their own 
preferences are ordinally? 
2)  Cardinal utility is creeping back in a funny way in the form of studies 
of happiness, for which there is even now a multi-disciplinary journal 
(Journal of Happiness Studies).  There is now a large data base on 
responses to surveys asking questions like "are you happy?" (scale of 1 to 
10 or whatever), with lots of papers now appearing even in econ journals on 
happiness over time, across countries, income groups, etc.  Although nobody 
is saying so, this looks a lot like a sneaky way to do cardinal utility.   
3)  In neuroeconomics we are now pinpointing specific areas of brains where 
people are feeling pleasure and also making certain kinds of decisions.   
We may be getting near having a "utility thermometer," although I suspect 
that we will never get there fully for lots of well known reasons.  
 
 
Barkley Rosser 
 
 
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