Chapter 21. Chapter 21

Step 1

Work It Out

Chapter 21

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You must read each slide, and complete any questions on the slide, in sequence.

Question

Let’s see how a utilitarian dictator would arrange things for Charles, Elizabeth, and Mary. One heroic assumption that utilitarians make is that you can actually compare happiness and misery across different people. In reality, brain scans are making this easier to do, but it’s still a lot of guesswork. Let’s suppose that this utilitarian dictator has eight oranges to distribute. The table shows the utility that each person receives from their first orange (a lot), but extra oranges give less extra happiness (oranges give “diminishing marginal utility,” in economic jargon).

Utility per orange	Charles	Elizabeth	Mary
1st	2,000	1,200	2,400
2nd	280	1,000	400
3rd	40	800	200
4th	2	600	100

So, if the dictator wants to maximize the sum of Charles’s, Elizabeth’s, and Mary’s utilities, then Charles will get z/MtvYfrU4W4Xy9Z oranges, Elizabeth will get QFPDDKg3tWAy2l9s oranges and Mary will get q0/Dn3B4o2HvakSE oranges.

Correct! Mary will get the first orange, Charles the second and Elizabeth will get the next four since her marginal utility is higher than the others in each case. Mary would then get the seventh and Charles the eighth. In total, Charles gets 2, Elizabeth gets 4, and Mary 2.

Sorry! Think about how the marginal utilities will determine who gets a particular unit. For example, who will benefit the most when the dictator decides to give away the first orange? To review utilitarianism, please see the section “Poverty, Inequality, and the Distribution of Income?

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Step 2

Question

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Correct! Mary’s marginal utility from the first orange was already the highest in the group, so increasing it more will not change the initial allocation.