Einstein demolished the ether as a scientific category with an adroit phrase: If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Heterodox and Austrian economists might said to assert their independence from the neoclassical mainstream when they demolish ‘utility’ with this same critique.

A Professor Milan Zeleny has written-in from Fordham University to mock our use of the utility function tautology. His finding of logical triviality proceeds from direct, unassailable observations: SFEcon’s behaviors emulate the creation of physical asset levels so as to discover the maximal benefit implicit in a presumably known set of utility tradeoffs; and the same theory is also ‘run in reverse’ to establish those utility parameters. We only wish to add that the indisputably hard sciences also assess their theories’ boundaries through similar exercises of the causality operating within the boundary.

Our essay on Economic Science and the Scientific Mood of Inquiry introduced the notion that the restrictions applied by economists to their science would demolish any other science upon which they might be imposed; and refusal to run theories in reverse in order to compute parameters is another case in point. A system’s circularity is not a defect: In the beginning God ... is a circular assertion, as are many other useful theoretical dispensations. The importance of a thought process does not owe to where it begins or ends, but to the extent of the circuit it traverses.

One of mankind's most potent scientific excursions proceeds from another obvious tautology, i.e.: force equals mass times acceleration. Mass is a boundary condition of elementary Newtonian mechanics; but just what is the mass of a body? Our best current definition of mass is a count of the protons and neutrons within a body. An objective measure of mass is therefore technically available without reference Newton’s laws: one simply disassembles the body in question one atom at a time, counts the number of atomic mass units in each, while keeping a running total of all such counts until the body exists no more.

If our ability to measure mass were limited to such a process, physicists would be as much at sea with their science as are economists in their efforts to measure utility (or, for that matter, to prove that utility cannot be measured). But physics has a theory to exploit in the measurement of mass, viz., Newton's 2nd Law. For practical purposes, a body’s mass is determined by applying a standard reference force to it and then measuring its acceleration. Mass can then be computed as force divided by the acceleration observed.

Practical measures of utility begin in similar fashion. Observations are made of an economic sector’s physical inputs and outputs, and of the prices at which these exchanges occur. Provisional acceptance that the observed exchanges are optimal because they are actual allows a researcher to calculate the utility set behind those exchanges. A first cut at the historical series of utility parameters might then require considerable extra-theoretical refinement before projection into the future; but there is no denying that the refinement process begins with parameters measured so as to vindicate marginalist theory.

If it can be agreed that hyperbolic functions permit a measure of utility, at least in the sense that mass can be measured by a reverse application of Newton’s 2nd Law, then it should be possible to demonstrate that our measure fails to establish a useful boundary for macroeconomic science. One can readily observe that the technologies to be captured by utility change gradually and generally improve over time. So, if hyperbolic utility parameters are nonsense, such will be revealed insofar as their time series are erratic or indicative of technological decline.