When someone says, “OK, the rich are getting richer and the poor are staying the same. This is not PE,” the problem is not solved by responding, “Well, just assume the numbers are utility values, and the problem disappears!” You cannot measure the utility (or especially the counterfactual utility) with any precision. So “They’re utilities!” as I’ve heard (and used) it, tends to be a hand-wavy manner of dismissing a potentially serious problem by assumption.
I think a lot of people stubbornly refuse to accept that such values represent utilities because that assumption requires a rather violent departure from reality and realistic measures. Nothing is ever measured or calculated in utilities, so if your model of PE denominates values in them, that model may be shiny and interesting and have lots of cool mathematical properties, but it ain’t very useful when we’re applying it to, say, income disparity.
When someone says, “OK, the rich are getting richer and the poor are staying the same. This is not PE,” the problem is not solved by responding, “Well, just assume the numbers are utility values, and the problem disappears!” You cannot measure the utility (or especially the counterfactual utility) with any precision. So “They’re utilities!” as I’ve heard (and used) it, tends to be a hand-wavy manner of dismissing a potentially serious problem by assumption.
I think a lot of people stubbornly refuse to accept that such values represent utilities because that assumption requires a rather violent departure from reality and realistic measures. Nothing is ever measured or calculated in utilities, so if your model of PE denominates values in them, that model may be shiny and interesting and have lots of cool mathematical properties, but it ain’t very useful when we’re applying it to, say, income disparity.