The Challenge of Mountaineering ... for Utility Theory
I suspect that there will be fewer than five people who will appreciate this remarkable confluence of interests. Yeah, that probably includes me.
A choice quote:
To illustrate the importance of motives that are unconnected to consumption, I will focus on personal accounts of a specinc activity: mountaineering. Why mountaineering? Admittedly, I examine mountaineering in part because it so obviously is not about pleasure from consumption. Serious mountaineering which I define broadly to include polar exploration - tends to be one unrelenting misery from beginning to end. The reason why mountaineers are so often asked why they climb mountains, and the reason why their explicit answers are so often unilluminating (e.g., Mallory's 'because it is there') is precisely that their reasons don't fit neatly into materialistic notions of human motivation. Dentists, investment bankers, and real estate brokers are rarely asked why they are engaged in these activities (though I suspect that the extent to which they are motivated by material considerations is exaggerated).
Although mountaineering is ideal for illustrating these non-consumption-related motives, it could be argued that, as a pathological activity engaged in by a small number of unusual people, it has little relevance to economics. The descriptions of mountaineering included in this essay will do nothing to dispel such opinions. But, as I argue in the conclusion, the motives that drive mountaineers are also pervasive in the general population in diverse domains of behavior.
If mountaineers aren't very good at answering the 'why' question when it is posed directly, a close reading of the mountaineering literature reveals myriad clues about their motives. In this essay I draw on works by and about mountaineers to illustrate the importance for human behavior of motives that don't directly involve pleasure from consumption.
Grab the full text here. You can also find the last strange intersection of interests here.
