Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

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Title:: A statistical method for measuring "marginal utility" and testing the justice of a progressive income tax / Irving Fisher

Collection:: Economics Books

158 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK uch real meaning do such curves have? If so-called “marginal tility” of anything, (or, as I prefer to say, if the want-for-one- more unit of anything) is a true mathematical quantity, should ot that marginal want be measurable? In my first economic publication * I endeavored to show that his magnitude is measurable,—in theory at least. My object ere is to go one step further and to show that even the problem f statistically measuring it should not be considered insoluble. f this contention is justified, the appearance of unreality which as surrounded the subject ought to disappear, and, if or when we actually reach even a rough numerical measurement so that the subject enters Statistical Economics, the interest in it will be evived and increased. It is noteworthy that even Jevons, one of the originators of he concept of the “want-for-one-more,” (or, as he called it, ‘final degree of utility”), and an enthusiastic believer in mathematical analysis, seemed to doubt the possibility of giving o that concept the full fledged status of a measurable quantity. e said, “We can seldom or never affirm that one pleasure is an pe multiple of another,” * and again, “I hesitate to say that men will ever have the means for measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. A unit of pleasure or of pain is difficult even to conceive; but it is the amount of these feelings which is continually prompting us to buying and selling, borrowing and ending laboring and resting, producing and consuming; and ut is rom the quantitative effects of the feelings that we t estimate heir comparative amounts.” * fr scepticism as to possibly measuring human wants is especially remarkable in view of Jevons’ statement: “ ‘But where,’ he reader will perhaps ask, ‘are your numerical data for estimat- ng pleasures and pains in Political Economy?’ I answer, that y numerical data are more abundant and precise than those ossessed by any other science, but that we have not yet known how to employ them. The very abundance of our data is per- plexing. There is not a clerk nor bookkeeper in the country who is not engaged in recording numerical facts for the economist. Op. Cit. pp. 11-24, 86-89. So far as I know this is the only attempt (other than Edgeworth’s therein cited) of treating “utility” or “want” as a definite mathematical quantity. * Theory of Political Economy, p. 13. 8 Op. cit., p. 11.

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