Valid Predictions from Invalid Comparisons: Response to Heckathorn

Professor Heckathorn has advanced, as the main justification for his essay, the removal of what he takes to be deficiencies from Emerson's powerdependence theory, first published in 1962 and elaborated in 1972. While all theories are published for the purpose of allowing others to improve on them, the deficiencies put forward by Heckathorn are spurious, and for that reason a reply1 is in order. The decision by Social Forces to publish the Heckathorn essay must be applauded, for it helps to draw attention to theoretical problems which are important to anyone interested in such topics as power and exploitation, equity and justice, or more generally the distribution of benefit in society. The central theoretical problem turns on the comparison of subjective value. (Does a plantation slave derive more or less personal benefit from the system than does the master? Does the husband or the wife in a given household obtain more personal benefit from the relationship?) Economists refer to this kind of problem as interpersonal utility comparison. As Heckathorn correctly observes, most economists or utility theorists seem to have given this problem up as inherently unsolvable. Taking such economists as authority figures, Heckathorn chastises Cook and Emerson for making invalid comparisons. If economists can't make such comparisons, how can sociologists presume to do so? We will return to this issue below. Closely related to the comparison of subject value, but theoretically subordinate and less important, is the distribution of benefit in two-party transactions. This problem is well-known in economics as bilateral monopoly; a problem which many economists consider to be indeterminate