Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The state or fact of being useless or counterproductive.
- noun Something that is inefficient or counterproductive.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The state or quality of producing harm, hindrance, injury, or other undesirable conditions: the opposite or negative of utility.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun
uselessness , a lack ofutility
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.
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In the authors 'view, those decisions are shaped by students' finances, their beliefs about their future earnings, and by the amount of misery - "disutility," in econospeak-that they suffer when they do academic work.
Wired Campus 2010
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A common way of assessing potential dangers if to multiply the probability of something happening, if known, by some measure of the scale of the impact (be it general 'disutility' or a more specific measure such as potential fatalities).
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A common way of assessing potential dangers if to multiply the probability of something happening, if known, by some measure of the scale of the impact (be it general 'disutility' or a more specific measure such as potential fatalities).
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"disutility," a nasty and distasteful thing, engaged in only for the consumption it makes possible.
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From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. "
axisoflogic.com 2009
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One one side of the comparison, it's bogus to treat the pay earned by the holder of a newly created job as a pure benefit -- that is, unless someone's discovered that there's no such thing as disutility of labor after all, and I'm late getting the word.
Comment of the Week, 2003-04-30, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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It also seems many people get disutility from living in a society with large and permanent differences in living standards.
A Childish Question About Immigration, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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If I derive disutility from supporting a political platform that contains some planks I disagree with, then is it irrational to change my mind so as to experience less cognitive dissonance?
Against MRV, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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One one side of the comparison, it's bogus to treat the pay earned by the holder of a newly created job as a pure benefit -- that is, unless someone's discovered that there's no such thing as disutility of labor after all, and I'm late getting the word.
Job-Creation Arithmetic, II, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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