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Concepts / 05
The economics
of pleasure.
The things that give us joy can give us pain when we keep going past enough.
What do I get from one more?
Diminishing marginal utilityEnjoyment from each additional experience
Pleasure
The experience feels good. I want to have it again.
This shows one possible pattern. Repetition can also deepen enjoyment, as with familiar music. The downward curve is a way to explore excess.
I think about taste, touch, sex and other sensory experiences. Something feels good, and I want the same experience again. I want to notice what happens when I keep repeating it.
Food makes the idea easy to picture. The first taste can be wonderful. As I keep eating, the next mouthful can give me less pleasure. If I keep going past being full, the experience can become uncomfortable.
The economics term is diminishing marginal utility: each additional unit can add less satisfaction. When an extra unit makes the experience worse, its marginal utility is negative.
Hedonic adaptation is a related idea about becoming accustomed to changes over time. With food, sensory-specific satiety describes a decline in the pleasantness of the food being eaten relative to other foods.
My question is about regulation. Am I still enjoying this? How do I notice when I have had enough?
Pleasure & wealth
An apple tastes
like an apple.
Growing up, I was taught that God made everyone equal. I used to think, “That's bullshit. Everyone isn't equal.” I could see how different people's lives were.
Later, I started thinking about equality at the level of experience. An apple can taste wonderful whether you are a billionaire or just starting out.
Take an orgasm. Is a rich man's orgasm somehow better just because he is rich? I find that assumption funny.
I think there is something equalising about our capacity for simple pleasure. A person's income tells me very little about how much they are enjoying a particular moment.
From my Journal: What wealth means to meA question I keep exploring
Are we seeking
a desireless state?
Can I enjoy an experience and let it end? Can I notice the urge to repeat it and choose what I do next?
From my Journal: Desire without the painNotes & reading
The graph is an illustration of an economic idea and a personal question. Its shape and crossing point are chosen to explain the idea. They represent no measured biochemical response or universal limit. Motivation, pleasure and learning interact; wanting an experience and enjoying it can differ.
- OpenStax: consumption choices and diminishing marginal utility
- Rolls and colleagues (1981): sensory-specific satiety in people
- Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2012): hedonic adaptation
- Madison and Schiölde (2017): repeated listening can increase liking for music
- Berridge, Robinson and Aldridge (2009): liking, wanting and learning
- Plassmann and colleagues (2008): price expectations and experienced pleasure
Pleasure varies across people and contexts. Expectations can shape it: in a wine-tasting experiment, changing the stated price changed reported enjoyment of the same wine. The reflection above concerns our shared capacity for pleasure.