I don't really know who wrote the page I quoted the url for - it explained the theory quite well, which was all I was looking for. Hello, Mr Google. It is a simplification of extreme utilitarianism, but not that much of one.

The idea of exactly measuring happiness/utility is, of course, absolute twaddle. You are usually unable to precisely gauge whether you would have one nuclear missile or 2.5 million ice creams. But it does provide economics with an historical basis for measurement using value series which was ahead of its time. Until that point, all economics had been philosophical - Smith's "invisible hand" being a good example. There were ideas, but no empirical evidence to back them up. It also provided the philosophical basis for the modern theories of utilitarianism - "the greatest good for the greatest number".

Believe it or not, the work of Bentham, JS Mill and David Hume is actually the theoretical underpinning of modern market research surveys which use Leikart scales. Stop and think about it for a minute. When a market researcher asks you to rank, say, ten products and then indicate how good you think each of them is on a scale of 1 to 5, what are you doing? And what do they expect to get out of it? They want to know how much utility you are receiving from the products, i.e. how "happy" they make you. Is it so stupid then?

In a way, the market researchers are trying to achieve much the same objective that the old boys were aiming for.




The idiot also known as Capfka ...