“Value can rightly be spoken of only with regard to specific acts of appraisal… . Total value can be spoken of only with reference to a particular instance of an individual … having to choose between the total available quantities of certain economic goods. Like every other act of valuation, this is complete in itself… . When a stock is valued as a whole, its marginal utility, that is to say, the utility of the last available unit of it, coincides with its total utility, since the total supply is one indivisible quantity.” – Ludwig von Mises
“There is no possible way of adding or combining marginal utilities to form some sort of “total utility”; the latter can only be a marginal utility of a large-sized unit. There are, then, two laws of utility, both following from the apodictic conditions of human action: first, that given the size of a unit of a good, the (marginal) utility of each unit decreases as the supply of units increases; second, that the (marginal) utility of a larger-sized unit is greater than the (marginal) utility of a smaller-sized unit. But there is no arithmetical relationship between the items apart from these rankings.”
Related:
- 11-3.5 There is no universal utility. Utility doesn’t exist in the abstract, it must be rooted in the context and corresponding explanations.
- 13-4d3 Values cannot be measured
- The first law of utility
- The second law of utilityrevisit