[EM] Finding the probable best candidate?

[Forest Simmons]

On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, Blake Cretney wrote:

> Forest Simmons wrote:
> 
>  >Personal benefits add up to societal benefit if the voters are civic
>  >minded enough to consider community benefits of personal worth. If their
>  >attitude is "every man for himself" then community values will be short
>  >changed (notwithstanding the Chicago School of Economics myth to the
>  >contrary).
>  
> But isn't social utility supposed to be the sum of individual utilities?

Yes. Although that only works where the individual benefits get spread
around through sharing or "trickledown."

>   So if you're hoping that the method will measure social utility, don't
> you want to measure actual individual utilities?  

Yes.

> If some people vote
> the social utility as if it were their personal utility, then the end
> result may no longer maximize social utility.

I'm not talking about social utility as if it were personal utility as in
your example.  I think you misunderstood what I meant by "altruism".  I
didn't necessarily mean sacrificing my utility for social utility or for
somebody else's utility.  I meant including intangibles that are valuable
to me in my utility calculation.  Sacrifice is only one form of altruism,
and altruism is only one kind of intangible. 

For example, I could vote against clear cutting for aesthetical reasons if
those aesthetics gave me more personal utility then the economic advantage
of retaining my job in a saw mill. 

Example 2. I vote for a progressive income tax measure even though I'm in
the top tax bracket, because I think that too much wealth is being spent
on luxuries while the homeless suffer, etc. I get intangible satisfaction
(seeing the billionaires pay a larger part of the infrastructure cost
so that the working homeless can begin to afford housing) that outweighs
the economic disadvantages to me. 

Economic theories have "externalities" that are disallowed from inclusion
in the utilities.  I'm saying that our voters have the right and duty to
include those considerations in their utility calculations, even if the
calculations are intuitive estimates from the hip, so to speak.

In other words, utility doesn't have to convert into dollars.  In fact
that was the original purpose of utility ... getting away from conversion
of every benefit into economic benefit.  Unfortunately, the word
"utilitarian" still has that connotation of tangibles. 

That's why (in my original posting) I put "utilitarian" in quotes when I
said that the utilities didn't have to be "utilitarian" even though that
sounds paradoxical.

Forest