Hans Mayer: Zur Frage der Rechenbarkeit des subjektiven Wertes (1953)

Hans Mayer’s essay, published as a Festschrift contribution on pages 57–78, proposes a way to make subjective value calculable without making it measurable. Its two sections move from a critique of contemporary value theory to a constructive reformulation of marginal utility through time, recurring needs, and production relationships. The central distinction is between measuring qualitatively different satisfactions and calculating with repeated instances of an equally valued satisfaction. Mayer claims that the latter becomes possible once economic planning is understood as provision for a period rather than allocation at an isolated instant.

Section I defends foundational research against both theoretical complacency and the predominance of immediately pressing economic questions. Mayer distinguishes three responses to the subjective-value problem: confidence that the foundations are already settled; rejection of subjective value because it cannot be measured; and the attempted circumvention of utility through indifference analysis. Against these positions, he adopts Carl Menger’s definition of value as the significance attached to goods because particular need satisfactions depend upon possessing them. This significance establishes an order of importance, not a measurable quantity. Of the numbers in Menger’s scales, Mayer writes:

Sie ermöglichen nur einen Vergleich nach höher – niedriger – gleichwertig.

English translation: They permit only a comparison in terms of higher – lower – equal in value.

The distinction also implicates earlier Austrian theory, especially Böhm-Bawerk: acknowledging that utility is only comparable does not license subsequent addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division of heterogeneous psychological magnitudes. Mayer’s target is therefore not mathematical notation alone, but the substantive interpretation of what it purports to calculate.

His extended examination of Pareto challenges the claim that indifference curves reconstruct economic relationships directly from experience while eliminating subjective utility. First, individuals cannot report mathematically exact preferences over infinitely many combinations they have never encountered. The allegedly experimental foundation is consequently circular:

Es ist kein wirkliches Experiment, sondern die Fiktion eines Experiments, wodurch Sinn und Zweck eines Experiments in sein Gegenteil verkehrt werden.

English translation: It is not a real experiment, but the fiction of an experiment, whereby the meaning and purpose of an experiment are turned into their opposite.

Second, infinitely divisible goods and continuous curves disregard the finite quantities required to produce actual satisfaction. For Mayer, correcting this assumption would alter the form of economic relationships, not merely their numerical precision. Third, he argues that the construction generalizes substitution beyond its real limits. More wine cannot indefinitely compensate for less bread; more cigarettes cannot replace clothing. Qualitatively distinct needs and complementary goods resist such exchanges. These are Mayer’s objections to the indifference systems he examines, rather than a demonstrated rejection of every possible representation of preferences.

The critique culminates in the accusation that Pareto reintroduces measurable utility through operations upon ophelimity and its indices. Hicks’s substitution of the marginal rate of substitution for marginal utility likewise fails, in Mayer’s view, to remove the underlying valuation relationship. The notes extend this dispute to numerical utility in game theory: Mayer maintains that invoking probabilities does not first establish measurability under certainty. Throughout, he insists that subjective valuation is a real explanatory relation even when it lacks a cardinal measure.

Section II locates the constructive problem before the formation of demand, supply, and money prices. Economic agents must calculate even in a self-provisioning natural economy, yet their decisions ultimately depend on unmeasurable valuations. Mayer’s solution introduces a neglected time coordinate. Needs recur, and production takes time; available stocks must therefore serve an economic period containing repeated episodes of need satisfaction. A quantity that would rapidly lose utility if consumed within one episode can retain considerable marginal importance when distributed across many.

Using a stationary self-provisioning economy as his starting point, Mayer describes allocation by successive layers. The highest-intensity needs throughout the planning period are supplied first, followed by the next-highest layer, until each good reaches its marginal layer of use. Within that layer, every unit secures a satisfaction of equal importance. After explaining that one hundred such marginal units consequently carry one hundred times the subjective value of one, he states:

Damit wird der Grenznutzen bzw. der subjektive Wert, ohne daß die Notwendigkeit besteht, für ihn Meßbarkeit anzunehmen, rechenbar.

English translation: Marginal utility, or subjective value, thereby becomes calculable without any need to assume that it is measurable.

The initial claim is expressly confined to the marginal layer within one kind of good. Higher layers can remain outside routine calculation because their provision is secured under stationary or gradually changing conditions. Marginal utility emerges from the completed allocation plan and then functions as a starting point, regulator, and check on future uses. This temporal account also reframes the Austrian dispute over the total value of a stock: repeated equal marginal satisfactions differ from the declining satisfactions of successive consumption within a single episode.

Production greatly extends the proposed calculation. Multipurpose inputs derive their value from their least-important product, while products made with equivalent quantities of the same inputs are aligned through their cost values. Technical substitution among inputs connects further valuations without requiring unlimited substitution among consumption goods.

Produktionsverwandtschaft und technische Substituierbarkeit sind die elementaren Bindeglieder, welche die Bewertungen der Güter in jeder Organisationsform der Wirtschaft (auch der naturalen Eigenbedarfsdeckungswirtschaft) miteinander verknüpfen. So weit sie reichen, reicht auch die Rechenbarkeit der subjektiven Werte.

English translation: Relatedness through production and technical substitutability are the elementary links connecting the valuations of goods in every organizational form of the economy (including natural self-provisioning). The calculability of subjective values extends as far as they do.

Mayer excludes a universal calculation through labour alone and acknowledges exceptions involving specific, monopolistic inputs. He closes with a sketch, reserving fuller development and deductions for later work. The essay’s distinctive contribution is thus a proposed bridge from ordinal valuation to practical calculation: temporal repetition supplies equal-valued units, and production relationships connect otherwise distinct goods.