@cshentrup over regions, sure it is. not over the whole range of conceivable utilities. real people's preferences are not described by simple functions whose characteristics are broadly unchanging over the entire budget space. log(c) is useful for models, not for predicting an individual's choices.

@cshentrup in orthodox contemporary economics there is no such thing as a number of utils. utility functions are ordinal, not cardinal. they are indistinguishable across affine transformations. the utility log(c) and 100 log(c) are precisely the same utility function.

@cshentrup you are one guy, can just be a mistake. the illicit drug industry relies on generations of kids systematically making the same "mistake" even watching their acquaintances and siblings pay and pay for it. it might be a systematic mistake or information problem, sure. or it might be that your model of their preferences is mistaken.

@cshentrup you've pointed me to that piece about a million times. we're going to, as we have before, disagree about who has very little idea about what they're talking about.

i admire your nonprofit's support of approval voting, which i think is probably the best-available practical procedure we have for single-winner elections!

@cshentrup my friend this is not a game. it explains why people with little to lose become drug dealers, even though the modal outcome is pretty terrible, as much as little lotteries. or, as a financial analogy, holding options renders portfolios "risk-loving" (volatility is good for you), and people in their life portfolios often hold real options that also render them geared to enjoy, rather than dislike, volatility.

@cshentrup my friend, i'd really ask you to talk to other people who are actual economists, particularly from the relevant domain of welfare economics. my treatment of the subject is not unusual.

@cshentrup i'm using the word "prescribe" in the general sense as advise or recommend. if we thought a cancer treatment was optimal, we'd probably prescribe it in that sense, although maybe under some broader metric (it would cost $1B) it would be less optimal and then we wouldn't.

@cshentrup people debated policy long before Bentham coined the notion of "utility". the distinction between utility and welfare i described—utility is positive, a construct deployed to predict and describe—while welfare normative—about prescribing, which inherently depends upon values—is what you would learn in any welfare economics class. my salad is very popular, and its dressing is very orthodox.

(tbf, Bentham used utility normatively, and most of us slip up on the distinction often.)

@cshentrup no, it's absolutely not. poorer people reasonably demonstrate increasing marginal utility in a wide variety of activities, because when one is very difficult straits small losses only take you from shit to shit, but the possibility of a large gain would change everything.

@cshentrup you don't have a utility function. utility is a construct made up as a tool to explain, summarize, and predict behavior. welfare is a normative construct, distinct from but in practice usually informed by peoples' hypotheses about utility. i am criticizing your worldview about social affairs, that your views are informed by an objective science rather than subject to the human vagaries of diverging preferences and values.

@cshentrup (not sure how risk preferences fit into our conversation, but have you noticed the revealed preference of many people towards participating in lotteries? would you rather have a 50% chance of $99 or a guarantee of $50, it's unpredictable the answer you will get. especially if you let it be a 1% change of 99 or a guarantee of 1. humans aren't reliably risk-averse. under some circumstances revealed preferences are described by marginally increasing, rather than diminishing, utility!)

@cshentrup yeah. that's the kind of move we're going to disagree about, on a variety of different levels.

@cshentrup even more deeply than about markets, we disagree about social welfare functions and there inherent dependence on inherently neither objective nor scientific values, and about the use and authority of what purports to be objective science in social affairs.

we've debated that _ad nauseum_ before (a bit here, more on the QSite). i have little interest in picking it up again.

@cshentrup well, we'll disagree but let's be nice about it.

i am not a neoliberal, who thinks markets should be left alone but for narrowly circumscribed failures.

i am more Polanyian these days, i think markets are polymorphic beasts that states must shape and manage to yield prosocial outcomes, and encouraging price transparency (as much with carrots as sticks) in one useful way they can do that.

@schleh_tox warning: ingestion causes frequent urination.

@cshentrup sure. price transparency is great everywhere, and we should have more government support of it here too.

@phillmv @Alon @adamserwer (i think lots of editors like the idea of supporting a vigorous debate within the contours of their tent, however broadly or narrowly defined. i don't have any idea what the editors of compactmag actually think or don't think, and don't lend much credence in these avowedly post-liberal, sometimes openly theocratic, editors' commitment to liberal free debate norms however much they might (or might not) claim them.)

@cshentrup Walmart famously cultivated a (deserved) reputation for everyday low prices, made its profits by strategically raising prices on subsets of goods, relying on the everyday low profits reputation to draw customers in who would presume these goods would be around best-price when they were not.

Fred Meyer has an opportunity with u to do the same!

Under competitive markets, relative prices certainly wld vary btw stores offering similar quality+services. (WF is a different amenities tier)