Comment by _v7gu
5 years ago
The underlying question is: what is the firm's utility from the lawyers? If the firm is not doing anything themselves but outsourcing the team, person-hours is the correct answer.
If the team is doing work for the firm, but you don't want to complicate the model, you can stick a labor-enhancing constant (to allow for heterogeneity between workers) and use "work" as a unit. Sure this model is wrong, but all models are wrong. We're just trying to create some useful ones.
See my response above, but this suffers the same problem. Economics people talk about "utility" as a single number, when in reality its a multi-dimensional (perhaps infinitely dimensional) number. Because it depends on a multitude of independent variables (age, health, experience, intelligence, expertise, efficiency, relationships, persausion / charisma, etc.), it can never be simplified. This also makes it impossible to compare two utility values, because there's no way to strictly order variables in many dimensions (without arbitrary reduction in complexity that loses information like calling "cost" or "hours worked" the primary axis and sorting on that).
You're right that the map is not the territory, but it doesn't change the fact that you need a map to navigate. No science is comprehensive enough to fully model the territory (even physics)