Utility: Use and Abuse

Philosophical roots of utility or utilitarianism dates to Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1781 and John Stewart Mill's Utilitarianism, 1863. This reigned supreme, and in a sense still does, but for John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, 1971.

Lest I deviate further, my current concerns are more as a student, rather my sticky wicket as a teacher, of Economics, as I fail to understand utility.

While in school, when my teacher explained the diminishing marginal utility it looked fine. More and more of the same item (say, mangoes) will give me less and less utility. It looked fine and still does if your thoughts don't go astray. One can eat one mango every day then it would increase utility for having more and more of the same. It does not hold for money or maybe even for items like diamond.

My major concern today is that I woke up in my dream trying to understand utility. A middle-aged young person, could be me, left from home for work after having a lavish breakfast without mangoes, but at the work place saw mangoes that were smelling nice and immediately took and ate one, a sense of desire-fulfillment, it increased utility.

At work, the person had to sell fruits, including mangoes, and besides getting a fixed wage the person also had a share in the amount of fruit sold. To maximize income, the person tried to sell more fruits by convincing the buyers about the merits of the fruit. For mangoes, the king of fruits, the person tried telling about its taste and value, knowing fully well, and having tasted it a while ago, that unseasonal mangoes during monsoon are not that tasty. Nevertheless the person continued with the story as it was convincing for many buyers and this would increase money income, and hence, utility.

At the end of the day, before closing shop, the person came across some poor children begging for food and to whom, out of concern and also to atone for the lies told during the day, the person gave some mangoes. It gave mental satisfaction on helping the needy, and hence, increased utility.

Utility got enhanced through desire-fulfillment, increasing money income and mental satisfaction. Do all these increase utility. Yes, of course, but in different ways. Are they one and the same? Can we reduce them to a single measure? No, definitely not. Again, this takes me to my school maths teacher who drove into our heads that mangoes and marbles cannot be added together. It will be disutility (if one can use the term) to the concept of utility.

Detecting Cervical Cancer

In the paper HPV Screening for Cervical Cancer in Rural India, The New England Journal of Medicine 360 (14): 1885-1394, April 2, 2009 Rengaswamy Sankaranarayanan et al. discuss about a cheaper screening alternative for cervical cancer in resource-poor settings. This has positive implications for health care of women in developing countries.

This uses cluster-randomization. From 52 cluster villages 131,746 women in the 30-59 age-group participated. Four group were assigned 13 cluster villages each randomly. Further, the groups were randomly assigned to undergo different screening mechanisms.

One group (34,126 women) was tested through Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) for human papillomavirus (HPV) ; note that Harald zur Hause was one of the recipients of the 2008 Noble prize in Medicine for his discovery of HPV - he received half of the cash award and the other half was shared by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus. A second group (32,058 women) was subjected to cytologic testing through a pap smear test where collected tissues are analysed at the cellular structure for early detection of cancer, as is being done for women in developed countries. The third group (34,074 women) was subjected to a visual inspection of the cervix with acetic acid (VIA), another low-cost option. Finally, the fourth (control) group (31,488 women) received standard care.

The design, particularly exclusion of care to the control group, was approved by the ethics committee of the institutes involved - International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Nargis Dutt Memorial Cancer Hospital and Tata Memorial Centre. This process of ethical review should be an integral part of randomization experiments by social scientists/economists.

This is a follow-up study based on the period January 2000-December 2007. The results indicate that for the HPV testing group when compared with the control group one observes significant reduction in incidences of advanced cervical cancer as also deaths. This shows promise for women in low-resource settings or developing countries like India.

Another fact about the publication is that there are 18 authors and some of them are graduates (with a Bacelor;s degree) from different backgrounds (Arts, Commerce and Science). This is an ethical lesson that users of large scale survey data in economics/social sciences need to follow.

Economics needs a scientific revolution: a comment

The essay Economics needs a scientific revolution by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud has been published in 30 October 2008 issue of Nature 455, 1181, is stimulating and an interesting read. It points out the inability of mainstream economics or financial engineering to either predict or avert a crisis.

This outcome is a result of the huge divide between normative (theory) and positive (empirical) economics. In the process, as Bouchaud indicates, assumption have taken the form of axioms: rational economic agents maximize profits, each agent's pursuit of profit is also best for society and markets are efficient that through prices reflect all known information. At best, these results are about some ideal situations, which do not exist in real life. Striving for a particular ideal situation is one thing, but considering that the features of this ideal system are a part of the real life situation is another. It takes us to a belief system.

Adhering to a belief system can make updating of knowledge difficult. For instance, Tycho Brahe, who despite being credited for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations, could not entirely got out of the Geocentric model that the Earth is at the centre of the universe. It was his assistant, Johannes Kepler, who used the observations and came out with his three laws of planetary motion that conclusively showed that the Copernican system, Sun is at the centre, is correct.

There are no two opinions that a scientific inquiry requires a questioning mind. If required, questioning the very premises by cross checking with empirical observations. The reign of empiricism is in a Bayesian world. A minimum requirement for this is that your prior cannot be certain - you cannot begin with a belief system. The reason is that if your prior is either zero or unity, then whatever be your observation, your posterior will be equal to your prior (see my working paper Understanding Fundamentalist Belief Through Bayesian Updating. All empirical observations become irrelevant.

True, the models used by contemporary mainstream economics fail to explain how small perturbations can have 'wild' impacts. It is not true that fringe attempts by econo-physicists (including Bouchaud himself) and behavioural economists are not being taken seriously. Paul Ormerod's Butterfly Economics that followed the East Asian Crisis is a best seller (aside - most Economists may not know of this). Daniel Kanheman, a behavioural economist, received the Nobel in 2002. There have been some hiccups, but then many prominent economists have done work on asymmetric information, uncertainty and missing market that cannot be brushed aside.

Having largely agreed with Bouchaud, I point out some differences. First, inability to predict and avert a crisis cannot be a basis to gauge a discipline's success or failure. Just as the space shuttle Columbia's disaster on 1 February 2003 cannot be construed to be a measure of judging Aeronautics and Space research, the current financial crisis cannot be a measure of judging Economics. Crisis or disaster by nature is rare and not predictable. Like the violation of some safety regulations in the Columbia disaster the current global financial crisis, to put it simply, is an outcome of greed by some players who manipulated the markets for their advantages. Modelling apart, an economic system should have effective regulation to safeguard us against possible disasters.

Second, understanding the market with more appropriate tools and techniques of modelling is necessary, but it is more important to acknowledge that market is a tool, albeit, an important one. It is a means, but not an end in itself. This is the approach of the larger human development paradigm, which is people-centric.

Third, which in a way is related to the previous point, is that the dominance of utilitarianism, and hence, of markets in economics, was first successfully challenged by a prominent moral philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls. He argued against the monoconcentration of utilitarianism and its associated formulaic reductionism in favour of plural concerns. On his concerns of justice his focus was on the least advantaged while assigning priorities to equal liberties and equal opportunities (that is, against arbitrary privileges). This is made possible by invoking the original position, that is, by putting decision makers under a veil of ignorance - they do not know which group they belong to. This in essence does away with vested interests. Thus, the silent scientific revolution, which goes beyond Economics, is already under way.