> > Ray, I don't think it's quite right to say that economists saw utility
as
> > being equal to pleasure. It would be more correct to say that they saw
it
> as
> > the source of human satisfaction.
>
> Actually Bentham and Mill used the term pleasure and tried to decide how
you
> could measure it.
You may be right. I'm a long way away from having read the history of
economic thought. Even then I mostly concentrated on Marx. What I remember
most vividly about Bentham was that he thought up something called an
"panopticon", a circular prison in which everybody could be watched all of
the time. The French philosopher Foucault used it as a metaphor for
society. Isn't it Bentham who is stuffed and mounted in one of England's
university, or is that just a nasty story of a deserved fate?
>
> >The more utility, or "utils", accruing to
> > someone, the more satisfied he would be, though each util would give him
a
> > decreasing amount of satisfaction. Utilitarian economists pretended not
to
> > make moral judgments, but most would probably have restricted what they
> > meant by "satisfaction" as relating to the fulfillment of basic needs.
>
> Until the time of Jevons, the opposite was true. The issue of a decline
in
> pleasure in a piece of music as compared to ownership of a material thing
> was a source of grief to JS Mill, especially since Wordsworth had brought
> him back from a nervous breakdown through the artistic process.
Again, you seem to have read more than I have.
> As for basic needs, these folks were much more cultivated then you are
> giving them credit for being. Otherwise why would they have been so
> knowledgeable when as the "wretched refuse of their teeming shore" these
> walking wounded came to America and the first thing they did was build a
> church and a theater. Their knowledge of the classics was far superior
to
> our audiences today as was their reason for knowing such. You got it
> wrong Ed, it was we natives that Milanowski said that our lives were
brutish
> and short, not the Europeans. He was wrong about us as well. But what
> do you expect when everything is remembered in books that go out of print
> and disappear. I'm just delighted that people are starting to ask the
> basic questions again. The very basic ones, like what forms our lives
and
> what gives us pleasure. How to discover and create from an inner life.
I don't think it was Malinowski (Sp?). I believe it was an English
philosopher, Hobbes or Locke or someone like that that referred to
aboriginal lives as being "Nasty, brutish and short". I would have to look
it up, but a judge who presided at the hearing of a famous Canadian native
claims case used the quote in describing pre-contact Canadian Indians. It
may have been an early round of the Calder case, which, back in the early
1970s, established the existence of aboriginal title in Canada. But, I'd
have to look it up in my notes.
However, when I think of poor and downtrodden Europeans, my usual model is
the central and eastern European peasantry from which, alas, I'm descended.
>From the stories that have been passed down to me, their lives were truly
nasty, brutish and short, and probably quite totally artless. All they
could do from one short-lived generation to the next was satisfy their basic
needs for food and probably alcohol.
> > "Pleasure" would not likely be viewed as a basic need, at least not for
> the
> > poor, but of course once basic needs were satisfied, the individual was
> free
> > to pursue pleasure in any way he saw fit.
>
> So all of those musicians and artists were from the rich? Get serious.
> Most were lower middle class and servant classes. They were so good at
> music that a servant had to be able to play and sing before they would
hire
> them to wait tables. Once more I point out that the most expensive
seats
> in the live theater today were the place where the folks who brought their
> lunch and threw it if they didn't like the action on stage, sat. They
> also tore up the seats and threw them at the stage as well. They were
the
> poor and in New Orleans the respected slaves who sat under the dripping
> candles in the Orchestra Pit, now just called the Orchestra and where
seats
> run $200 in New York while the royalty boxes are cheaper.
I'm sure you're right, but rich is a relative term. From what I know of my
ancestors and millions of people like them, they would have considered lower
middle class people and servants as being considerably more fortunate than
they were. When she was a young woman in Poland, my mother considered
herself as very fortunate to be hired as a servant girl to a wealthy
industrial family in Lodz. She brought some of those attitudes with her
when she came to Canada, and I remember her instructing my brother and I, as
young children, on the importance of bowing at the right time and always
appearing to be subdued and subordinate (excellent training for my
subsequent career as a civil servant!). On the other hand, she did claim
that we were related to Joseph Conrad, which is a very nice thought dear to
all people of Polish descent.
> > In 18th,19th and even early 20th Century Europe, most people were so
busy
> > simply satisfying their basic needs that they had no time for pleasure.
>
> Are you from the wealthy? I'm from the Indian reservation that is still
> the number one toxic waste superfund site in America. When we were
hungry
> we practiced. We placed musicians in the Chicago Symphony, developed one
> of America's greatest composers (and Mickey Mantle) and many other
> successful souls. Pleasure is one of the ways you subvert pain and
> injustice. This is the economist's myth that has gotten us into this
> bizarre situation.
No, I'm not from the wealthy. Take a look at my mini-autobiography on my
website sometime and you'll see: http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/ed.htm
SNIP - getting late - bedtime!
> The best thing economists could do is get to know a few Gypsies. They
> always make a living at art but will walk away from you if you try to buy
> it.
I tried being a Gypsy once - even attended an art school and led a very
Bohemian life. Trouble is, I sold my art. Guess I was meant to be an
economist.
Bedtime!
Ed Weick
