> Economists claim to make precise what is vague, and are convinced that economics is superior to all other disciplines, because the objectivity of money enables it to measure historical forces exactly, rather than approximately. Economist here. Maybe some economists make this very bold, presumptive claim. But I'll be honest, money very rarely enters into the paradigm; rather resource allocation and maximizing utilit…
>resource allocation and maximizing utility are the common approach. Utility maximisation has always struck me as a horrible way to do modelling. In most cases your results must depend heavily on the form of utility function you choose. And you always have to make a choice since utility functions are unobservable.
If the utility function isn't provided to you directly, then you should infer the functional form from the data with a reasonable prior, and use sampling techniques to show the uncertainty in your answer due to uncertainty in the utility function.
There's nothing wrong with utility functions as a model sense they are exactly dual to any 'reasonable' choice function, meaning the space they model is the same. If you find them mathematically inconvenient, then you can use choice functions directly, but raw choice functions are usually not very helpful for modeling or predicting anything at all.
