Talk:Marginal utility/Archive 3

message: A standard practice in academic discourse by economists is to achieve gender-neutrality by toggling back-and-forth between genders as hypothetical people are introduced.  This has two advantages over “he or she” disjunctive constructions.  First, the awkwardness that they sometimes entail is avoided.  Second, when just two people exist, they can be simply distinguished by being given distinct genders.
For some reason (leaning against the wind?) it has also become standard to make the first hypothetical person female.
Anyway, at one stage, I had a hypothetical “her” which someone changed to a “her or his”.  No big deal.  But now there are two more hypothetical people in that section.  Hence, I have restored the feminine gender of that first hypothetical, made the second male, and the third female.  I hope that people will accept this convention for this article. —SlamDiego 03:06, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's just people with political agendas that hijacked the language for their own POV pushing into the culture, the language used to have a whole lot more forms in archaic form and the usage of "he" in a text has no sexual-meaning what so ever. It derives from the words themselves being classified as male or female. Much like the usage of "one" in text to describe oneself, the word "one" doesn't have anything to do with the number '1' it is an archaic heritage in our language. Don't let the politicans hijack the language. No one ever writes: *read out loud*, "He or she must ask himself or herself whether his or her sensetive style could allow himself or herself to write like this?", that would be insane and that is what those people would want. As Orwell paraphrases, people who controls the meaning of the words controls the minds of people. 81.227.10.205 20:13, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gender 

message: The hedonic notion of utility is that of pleasure per se.  But note that “Grenz·nutzen” literally translates as “border use” or “use at the border”, without any presumption that the use is pleasure itself.  Granted that one feels happiness of a sort as one moves towards a goal, but that doesn't make the happiness itself (nor the contentment at arrival) the goal. (I am reminded of the many Playboy Playmates who listed as one of their goals “To be successful!”) Now, given the ordinary sense of “pleasure” (sensory and so forth), pleasure can be a goal, but the article should not presume that it must be, let alone that it is ultimately the only goal. —SlamDiego 23:22, 18 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Utility as ''pleasure'' 

message: Ackh! This nomination comes while one of the sub-sections is still a stub! —SlamDiego 15:29, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry about my hasty nomination... I suppose we just have to speedily finish the section in question. Lord Metroid 16:03, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it's not a particularly easy section to complete.  On the one hand, it shouldn't be overly long.  On the other hand, it should simply participate in the common confusions about where differences did or didn't lie. —SlamDiego 16:42, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nomination 

message: Very nice article. Consider a peer review, and sending to WP:FAC after that. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 17:40, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Passed v0.7 nomination 

message: I don't know much about marginal utility (I came to learn), but I have read a lot of Marx. There are some fundamental errors here.
"to Marx labor was the ultimate source of value." This may be contributable to Marxists but not Marx. The person who wrote this has conflated the two. Marx:
:Labor is <EM>not the source</EM> of all wealth. <EM>Nature</EM> is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
Critique of the Gotha Programme is very good for identifying the differences between Marx and Marxists (he wrote it as a criticism of the United Workers' Party of Germany.)
There is a problem of conflating use-value with value here also. According to the political economists that Marx was critiquing, they are not the same thing. There is also no mention of exchange-value here either which is fundamental to an understanding of use-value.
"[...] utility was considered as all or nothing; it was unnecessary to describe variable use-value". I don't understand this. Isn't "It is, moreover, determined not only qualitatively but also quantitatively" sufficient to completely explode this idea? I mean, it's even quoted in the text! Perhaps I don't understand what the wikipedian is getting at. We need to explain what is meant by "utility was considered as all or nothing". Marx would consider commodity x to have more use-value for one person (or a group for that matter) than commodity y. Commodity x would also have different use-value over time. A steam-powered machine, for example, has a high use-value for a capitalist in the 19th century, but might be completely useless in the 20th century. The use-value would therefore be variable right? I can provide references (from Capital) where Marx talks about the necessity to keep machines running because running or not running their use-value dissipates (through becoming obsolete or simply rusting.)
"The doctrines of marginalism and the Marginal Revolution are often interpreted as somehow a response to Marxist economics." This is again a paradigmatic shift. Only a Marxist would say there are Marxist economics. Marx was not positing the LTV as his economics, he was criticising it. You need to make this cristal clear.
As for: "his inability to formulate a viable critique may account for his failure to complete any further volumes of Kapital before his death," it is useless speculation, I don't care if it is referenced. Maybe if Marx had said somewhere "Look I cannot get me head around this marginal utility thing maybe I should hold off on publishing" then it might be interesting.
My recommendation for this section on Marx is that it be scrapped in its entirety. The first paragraph seems to be entirely incorrect. The second is speculation and the third is only useful given that the first two exist.
Ledpup 03:29, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  More on Marx 

message: An assertion that the marginal use was merely “closest” to the margin would suggest that there might yet be some distance between that use and the margin; but that wouldn't be coherent. The margin is located by that use. —SlamDiego←T 08:31, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  “closest” 

message: In his edits, Rinconsoleao has repeatedly associated the dispute with the distinction between “cardinal” utility and “ordinal” utility; he has further linked to the articles thereon.  Unfortunately, this is not the relevant distinction.  The problem is that the names of these two conceptions (“cardinal” and “ordinal”) are not good descriptions — both in fact represent a sort of quantification.  They were named under a presumption corresponding to de Finetti's Conjecture or something very much like it, so that the only remaining question was of whether some measure were in some way uniquely meaningful (hence absolute).  It would have been better had they been named something such as “strong cardinal” and “weak cardinal”, but that's not going to be changed here. —SlamDiego←T 02:22, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  “cardinal” utility v. “ordinal” utility 

message: Could someone show me where in A Reconsideration of the Theory of Value the assumption of convexity of the indifference curve is other than a bald assumption? (I'll try later to dig up a page number on Hicks' admission in VC to that effect, but this is obviously low priority, as the present version of the paragraph is okay.) —SlamDiego←T 19:00, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV?