When people use examples like “wealthy patrons contribute large sums of money to art museum to experience individual utility from enjoying additional art”, it makes me think they understand money as little as they do art.
QF makes assumptions like this, but it's not because the authors assume these assumptions reflect reality. They are just simplifying assumptions that allow formal proof of properties like optimality.
Also this article is explicitly challenging these assumptions.
I’m reading a winking, ironic acknowledgement from the authors that the mathematical definition of individual utility may not map perfectly onto the psychology of a patron of the arts.
> They are just simplifying assumptions that allow formal proof of properties like optimality.
And when they're done, the proofs are recognized as being fully out of touch with with the reality we actually live in based on the fact that their assumptions are also out of touch, and nobody actually tries to use them to make decisions about how to do things in our very real and non-simplified society?
Yes, as you (sarcastically) imply people do indeed try to use QF to make actual decisions, not recognizing the proofs are based on assumptions that don't match reality.
There's nothing wrong with making proofs based on simplifying assumptions. A lot of incremental progress is made that way. The problem is not the QF theory, it is that people are using QF in the real world because they think it has all these great theoretical properties in the real world -- not recognizing that the underlying assumptions are unrealistic.
They don't have to. When you only have $100, every cent matters. Once you have 10k, dollars still matter, but cents not so much. They stop having value. And that just keeps going: once you have several hundred million, a million bucks has no value. It's not just "a small amount of money", it simply has no value anymore. You're not "spending it" so much as "whatever"ing it.
(Which is why no one should ever even be allowed to have that much money)
