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      Mat Forstater's point that the original meaning of "utility" for many of the
classical economists was simply the dictionary meaning, which is "usefulness."  Of course
this raises the question of "useful for what?"  OTOH, Bentham already predated the later
more clearly subjective "ophelimity" view of Pareto and Fisher that utility is "pleasure."
     I think the remark made in another post (sorry, I forget by whom) about Kahneman's
recent remark is useful ("utilitarian"?).  There may be a serious contradiction between
pleasure and utility, however defined.  The problem may be one of time perspective and
relates to the question of measuring utility as well.
     Thus, I have noted two current approaches that seem to be going on that could be
labeled as efforts to measure utility, indeed a form of cardinal utility arguably.  One is
the neuroeconomics approach of McCabe, Zak and others that uses magnetic resonance imaging
(very little of this has appeared yet in economics journals, with the key original paper
in 2001 by McCabe, Houser, Ryan, Smith, and Trouard being in the Proceedings of the US
National Academy of Sciences, with much of the rest of it in neurology journals such as
Neuron).  This can get at the momentary pleasure sort of thing.  Someone who smokes crack
will show up about ten minutes later with the pleasure centers of their brains buzzing
away brightly, although they are likely to be not feeling so pleased an hour later.  Or to
follow the McCabe et al stuff, someone thinking about cooperating with others will fire
neurons in the prefontal cortex more than someone who is thinking about shafting their co-
game players.
     The other is the approach of the happiness studies, which have been around for
several decades, with such economists as Richard Easterlin leading the way on these (see
the recent volume he has edited for Edward Elgar on _Happiness in Economics_ for a
collection of key papers). These depend on answers to these survey questions along the
lines of "are you happy?" or "are you satisfied?"  Presumably this deals more with the
long term sort of satisfaction that Kahneman was referring to, and is probably more like
what we think "rational agents" ought to be striving for rather than short term pleasure
that can lead to long term unhappiness.  Of course relative to MRI, these surveys are very
blunt instruments and certainly open to many problems, especially when cross-cultural
comparisons are made, as is increasingly being done in a lot of literature.
    However, some stylized facts at least appear to hold from the accumulating pile of
data from these surveys, which have been done for several decades in some countries. Thus,
as Easterlin first argued some time ago from the first such time series available (Japan),
in a cross section within a given society, richer people tend to be happier/more satisfied
than poorer people, but over time rising incomes within a society do not generally lead to
rising happiness/satisfaction.  Whether or not this happiness/satisfaction is really what
we mean, or wish to mean, by "utility" obviously remains an open question.
 
Barkley Rosser   
 
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