Utility Measures

Over the years, people have discussed if it's possible to measure utility or even to compare utility of different individuals on either a ordinal (ranked) or cardinal (absolute) basis. A common criticism of utilitarianism is that utility is incommensurable, i.e. that it can't be compared across different individuals, making it impossible to determine what actions maximize utility.

Personally, this view seems inconsistent with the underlying physiology of utility or with basic personal experience. To me, the question is not if we can measure utility but how accurately we can do so. Indeed, not only is it possible to measure utility, but we do it all the time. Here is an overview of the existing measures of utility I'm currently aware of. Please add others in the comments or email them to me for me to add.

I'll say up front that the one glaring absence is the complete lack of even crude measures of utility of non-humans, despite the general consensus that members of other species do have non-zero utility (i.e. they experience pleasure, pain, etc.).

Measures of individual utility:

Self-reported happiness as used in happiness economics. Here, the measure of an individual's utility is that individual's response to a question along the lines of "On a scale from one to ten, how happy are you?". While a five for you might be different from a five for me, it's probably at least similar, and in large studies, these differences get averaged out. For more, see the post Happiness Economics: Recommended Reading.

Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) as used in public health. One DALY is one human life year in full health. A year in less than full health will will have a lower DALY value. It strictly focuses on health and not on quality of life more generally and thus is an imperfect but nonetheless useful statistic, such as for measuring the impact of a disease outbreak. For more, see Wikipedia

Quality-adjusted life years as used in medicine. Ultimately the QALY should replace the DALY as the more general unit of utility, but for now its use appears restricted to the medical community. For more, see Wikipedia

At the time of this post, measures of utility using brain imaging appear to be a nonexistent pipe dream.

Measures of collective utility:

Happy Planet Index (HPI), by the new economics foundation (London). It "shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the world." (link) This one's a personal favorite. For more see the post Links, Links, Links, the HPI website, or Wikipedia.

Human Development Index (HDI), by the UN Development Program. It strives to measure well being from a bundle of external (i.e. non-neurophysiological) phenomena, including literacy and life expectancy. I consider it a middle ground between strictly financial measures such as GDP and pure quality of life measures such as HPI. See Wikipedia.

Gross National Happiness (GNH), a counterpart to GNP/GDP devised by the King of Bhutan to be focused more on happiness and on consumption. "the four pillars of GNH: economic self-reliance, a pristine environment, the preservation and promotion of Bhutan’s culture, and good governance in the form of a democracy." (link) For more see Wikipedia.

Genuine Progress Indicator, as in welfare and green economics. "The Genuine Progress Index is based on the fundamental understanding that social, economic and environmental realities are inextricably linked." (link) For more see Wikipedia.

Various financial measures including Gross National Product (GNP), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and others, which measure "the total value of final goods and services produced in a year" (link) and are perhaps the most common measures of collective well being, especially among economists. While I generally agree with these measures' critics, the measures do provide at least some insight.

For criticism of the financial measures, I quote Warren Buffett: "If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though."
The quote is supposed to be from Warren Buffett Speaks by Janet Lowe, 1997, p. 165-166, ISBN 047116996X