Happiness and Experienced Utility

This is an assessment of the state of research on the issue in an authoritative field dictionary. The term and concept of ‘experienced utility’ has been re-introduced by Daniel Kahneman as “the meaning of utility that Jeremy Bentham introduced, and it was mostly retained by the economists of the nineteenth century” (Kahneman & Thaler, 2006). Edgeworth’s Mathematical Psychics (1871) − Kahneman & Thaler continue − provides an instance; that work “was quite explicit about this, and even defined happiness as the temporal integral of momentary experienced utility”. However, those authors further observe, “the notion of utility as an aspect of experience essentially disappeared from economic discourse at the beginning of the twentieth century, when utility came to be construed as decision utility”. It is important to understand how and why the use of the idea of experienced utility is embedded in a revolution in method and content in economic theory, deploying itself through the last forty-odd years and gaining momentum at present. The revolution involves two main areas of economics: the use of the concept of rationality and the definition and measurement of welfare or well-being. Thereby the present article will be divided in two parts: we shall first discuss utility and its link with rationality, stressing the cognitive imperative for economics to part with the idea of optimizing; in the second half, which follows as an implication and a consequence from the first, we shall highlight the motives behind the impressive recent surge of happiness studies within economics.