Reply to Ted and Brad

[Brad DeLong]

>G'day Brad,
>
>>>Are you saying in your last paragraph that utiility can be measured very
>>>roughly  by pleasure and pain? If you can know that watching my children
>>>starve is more painful to me than the Hoffman Farm etc., is pleasurable to
>>>you then you must be able to make interpersonal comparisons of utility. I
>>>thought most economists deny this.
>
>>I would say, rather, that most economists would say that if you are
>>making interpersonal comparisons of utility you are not speaking as
>>an economist--but rather as something else.
>
>Kinda diminishes the utility of an economist, though.  Still, I could live
>with that if most of your (pre)occupation didn't then turn around and tell
>us the 'free' market is better for us than the alternatives ...

Ah. You see, there are two rhetorical modes:

In the first, economists are high priests of efficiency--they are 
concerned only with getting to the Pareto-optimal frontier, and leave 
questions of distribution to the political system. Economists advise 
people to rid themselves of all frictions and imperfections, and then 
let the political system redistribute income and wealth in order to 
maximize social welfare.

In the second, economists are advocates of maximized GDP--hence there 
is to be no redistribution from the current situation, because such 
redistribution reduces incentives and so reduces effort.

I have seen people switch from rhetorical mode (1) to rhetorical mode 
(2) in less than five seconds, and never recognize that their switch 
to (2) has left them vulnerable to critiques over distribution that 
they attempted to immunize themselves from with (1)...


>
>>Can I momentarily escape from utilitarian into deontological ethics,
>
>As you're not at work yet, I suppose that'd be alright.
>
>>and say that because taking pleasure in the (relative) pain of others
>>is cruel and immoral, we won't count that source of pleasure as a
>>plus in our utilitarian calculations?
>
>You'd require an interfering state to prevent sadists purchasing the pain
>of others.

Making everyone who wants to act like a sadist purchase the pain of 
others I wouldn't mind so much. Just think: people could earn a 
pretty could living by volunteering to be the audience for displays 
of conspicuous consumption. If everyone driving a BMW convertible, 
say, had to purchase from everyone else a license for the privilege 
of making their car seem drab and slow, we might have a pretty good 
world....


>That's okay for a deontologist, who could argue, for instance,
>that, regardless of possible outcomes, a democratic polity must always be
>able to discipline/distort the price mechanism from without.  Which is why
>you'll have to abandon your argument on your way to work, where you're
>professionally bound to defend the price mechanism's production of sadistic
>utility and its concomitant agonies.
>
>Or not?

Not any more. As of last Monday, I am chair of Berkeley's Political 
Economy of Industrial Societies major...

Brad DeLong