Economic welfare cares not about giving people experiences but about satisfying their preferences. … If we do something a dead person would have wanted, that counts as a benefit.

Close, but not quite. If while they were alive we did something a dead person wanted, that counts as a benefit. Doing something now after they are dead provides no benefit.

Finding win-win deals between the living and the dead is of no use if you don’t find them until after they are dead. At that point it’s not win-win, it’s just win. And if there were a different deal that gave more to the living and less to the dead, then that’s just a bigger win.

The dead do not have wants. The dead cannot participate in deals. The dead should play no part in our deal-finding framework, except to the extent that the living wish the same things the dead once wished.

anon, you are correct that it also an unproven assumption. Robin Hanson’s presentation at the Foresight Institute explains how the Luddites may have a point however.

Robert Bloomfield:
“say and feel they want (a “revealed preference” model)”
I think revealed preference normally suggests “actions speak much louder than words”.

“legislators argue that they know preferences better than individual agents”
I don’t think the assumption that preferences are poorly defined and time-inconsistent is sufficient to reach that conclusion.

John:
There are other utilitarian arguments for the extermination of humanity and more.

James Andrix:
The enforcement costs for activities in the privacy of ones own home are high, and the people engaging in such activities normally have a much higher willingness-to-pay relative to those opposed to it. This efficiency is why David Friedman thinks anarchy would likely (though may not be) be libertarian. Using the “least-cost avoider” approach in Robin’s follow-up, we might argue that those offended by others behavior can more easily decide not to pay it much attention.

ii) I’m not sure what you mean by “none of us are perfect maximizers.” If you mean that we maximize against constraints, of course. The point is that observed outcomes are the best we can do under those constraints. If you mean, on the other hand, that we don’t actually maximize utility, then you must abandon traditional economic welfare analysis because prices cannot be taken to be measure of willingness-to-pay.

This is clearly incorrect. For one thing, the extent to which prisoner’s dilemmas and other comparable situations are effectively addressed depends on broad, ‘institutional’ frameworks which are amenable to continuous improvement. Furthermore, none of us are perfect maximizers, so we can in fact do better even when it comes to individual actions.

This is an unproven assumption. In a world where most tasks were performed by machines, even a limited amount of creativity or other human-specific input would have enormous value.

Perhaps. But when a living person has made a deal which has helped her pursue her wants (such as leaving a bequest to a existential-risk reduction organization), why shouldn’t we enforce this deal after her death?

i.e. Some people are very concerned about what other consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. I might say to them “What do you care? It doesn’t affect you at all.” I don’t much care to help them with their preferences, (even ignoring the required control of others) and I say their preferences are silly because they are non-experiential.

The same people would be concerned about consenting adults displaying affection in public. I might now say “What do you care? It’s not hurting you.” I still don’t care about this preference, but I can’t deny it is experiential. I claim their preferences are silly because the experience doesn’t have some other arbitrary quality.

On the other hand, if someone were to complain about something I also find morally objectionable, even though it doesn’t affect me, I would want to help with that preference. I would never cite it’s non-experiential nature are a reason not to care. (In fact some would claim this is a sign of noble altruism.)

I think most would agree that that’s a silly argument. Efficiency, at its root, rests upon the assumption that we care about the desires of a particular group of entities–human beings. So there’s a moral component built into the idea of efficiency–if we don’t make a judgement about which entities we should care about (people, dead people, rats, single-cell organisms, rocks, planets, trees), efficiency is meaningless.

Economic Inefficiency: A Failure of Economists

# Economic Inefficiency: A Failure of Economists
# Author(s): Michael Staten and John Umbeck
# Source: The Journal of Economic Education, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter, 1989), pp. 57-72
# Published by: Heldref Publications
# Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1182717

rapscallion, it sounds like you are rediscovering the political economy of Demsetz. It is discussed in the first paper here.