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SoullessAutomaton comments on Post Your Utility Function - Less Wrong
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Are you assuming your utility function for Xs and Ys is linear?
If X is "houses" and Y is "cars", and someone starts with one of each, how many people would gain utility from trading their only house for more cars or their only car for more houses?
I'd trade my car for another house: virtually any house would be worth more than my old car; I could sell the house and buy a better car, with something left over!
But why would you sell the house and buy a car? Because you place higher utility on having one of each, which is precisely my point.
The fact that two houses can be converted into more fungible resources than two cars is true, but is, as thomblake said, missing the point.
In this housing market? You'd be without a car for months waiting for the house to sell - would that be worth the vehicle upgrade and the leftover money, even assuming the house did eventually sell?
Only if he tried to sell at the current market price (or what passes for one at the moment). I suspect if he tried to sell his house for something just above the price of a car, it would sell easily.
On the other hand, SoullessAutomaron's response is sound.
By "this housing market" did you mean the current one in the real world, or in the thought experiment where everyone already has exactly one house and car?
Either way it seems like an apt point, though it seems to miss the point of Philo's response (which in turn seemed to miss the point of SoullessAutomaton's question)
I meant the real one, although the hypothetical universe where everybody has one house and one car would be hard on real estate sales too.
Another obvious trick of thinking about lotteries was even worse - I cannot get myself to do any kind of high-value one-off lottery thinking because of risk aversion, and low-value many-attempts lotteries are just like having EN Xs with some noise.