Welfare As An Economic Quantity

ubstance. It is doubtful if we can at all divide and classify satisfaction as such. But we can deal with sources of satisfaction with reference to psychical effects as well as with reference to physical qualities, and therefore we can divide or classify utility. Though satisfaction is one, relations to it, or the sides from which it can be approached, are many. The same substance may be cut into many different sizes and shapes. There may be several classifications of the same group of things, all quite " natural " or organic in character. Thus utility is susceptible of more than one significant division. Some familiar ones are as follows: ? Utility is positive or negative. Negative utility is the tendency to cause detriment or to detract from enjoyment and is usually distinguished as "disutility. Utility is marginal, super-marginal, or free ? ideas to which the reader has already been introduced. The first is the utility corresponding to the least important reasonable use or set of uses for a unit good under given conditions of supply. Wants remaining constant, any unit of a given supply has the same degree of marginal utility as any other unit. Some units, though their physical identity cannot be fixed, have more than this degree of utility. The excess is super-marginal utility.) If we wish to distinguish other than marginal units of the supply as intra-marginal, then intra-marginal utility would be the utility individually and collectively poss...