There's a branch of economics, usually lumped in with "heterodox economics" that says that interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible. This is called the Austrian school of economics, whose figures are von Mises and Rothbard.
Their basic unit of the market is the transaction. You know you value the coffee more than $2 and the coffee seller less than $2, and the other person values it more than $1, but until you and the other person actually make a trade you can't figure out the relationship between your preferences. That is, you are exactly right that you cannot say you prefer coffee twice as much.
Among the first things you learn in microeconomic theory are the expected utility axioms (developed by Von Neumann and Morganstern), and Afriat's theorem. These results give conditions under which an agent's behavior is indistiguishable from utility/expected utility maximization. This is the standard justification for the use of utility maxmization in economics: that it is a good mathematical model of decision making, not that it captures what actually goes on in people's heads. This is not a heterodox idea, it has been mainstream since at least as early as the 1950s. Of course, modern economists like to empirically verify whether these models of decision-making are accurate or whether other behavioral models are more consistent with the data, because economics is a science. Praxeology, on the other hand, is the opposite of science.
This is an example of a weird phenomenon where the heterodox schools of economics argue against a position that hasn't been mainstream in years. In this case, years and years and years. Economics stopped requiring interpersonal comparisons of utility a hundred years ago.
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There's a branch of economics, usually lumped in with "heterodox economics" that says that interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible. This is called the Austrian school of economics, whose figures are von Mises and Rothbard.
Their basic unit of the market is the transaction. You know you value the coffee more than $2 and the coffee seller less than $2, and the other person values it more than $1, but until you and the other person actually make a trade you can't figure out the relationship between your preferences. That is, you are exactly right that you cannot say you prefer coffee twice as much.
Here's a video that explains this idea, called "praxeology" in these circles. He explains it in the first five minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5fjTz1Rbw
Among the first things you learn in microeconomic theory are the expected utility axioms (developed by Von Neumann and Morganstern), and Afriat's theorem. These results give conditions under which an agent's behavior is indistiguishable from utility/expected utility maximization. This is the standard justification for the use of utility maxmization in economics: that it is a good mathematical model of decision making, not that it captures what actually goes on in people's heads. This is not a heterodox idea, it has been mainstream since at least as early as the 1950s. Of course, modern economists like to empirically verify whether these models of decision-making are accurate or whether other behavioral models are more consistent with the data, because economics is a science. Praxeology, on the other hand, is the opposite of science.
This is an example of a weird phenomenon where the heterodox schools of economics argue against a position that hasn't been mainstream in years. In this case, years and years and years. Economics stopped requiring interpersonal comparisons of utility a hundred years ago.