Jim wrote, > I don't remember, what's the difference between "tastes" and "preferences"?
Same thing except that preferences likely became common language after the presentation of the notion of "revealed preferences" in modern welfare economics. Tastes is just older language for the same thing. > isn't being "more demanding" the same thing as having more needs? aren't a > lot of these a result of objective circumstances rather than being totally > subjective? It might be expressed this way. Sen, for instance, would argue--I think--that the need for a telephone is not just subjective (based upon people coming to like phones once they saw how useful they were) but is objective in that to participate fully in a modern society a person needs a phone. But, more likely, it is both at the same time--both objectively and subjectively needed. Eric
