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No, the specific issue is not marginal income; you referred to pct of** total **income: "Also, don't middle class and richer people save a higher proportion of their incomes than poorer people?"
Because they get paid for the paid work. You seem to think that the argument is that a rich person gets zero marginal utility from money. That is not the claim. If I am a lawyer or doctor making $300,000, then obviously I by quitting I am giving up quite a bit of utility. But that says nothing about the issue at hand: It tells us noting about whether I would get as much utility from an extra $1000 as would a poor person. And, btw, people who are rich enough not have to work quit work all the time -- it's called retirement -- and often they spend some of their time volunteering. So, your assumption that rich people don't never quit work and go volunteer is empirically false.
Then let's ignore money. Suppose 100,000 people own three cars each (call them "Group X"), and 100,000 other people ("Group Y") have no cars. I give each of them a 2003 Honda Civic. Which Group members are most likely to use their new cars" It is Group Y, right? Why, if that obviously true, if it is so impossible to make a comparison between the utility each gets out of the car? It isn't.
(1) That was me being sloppy. I should have said "proportion of their marginal incomes", since the issue is the marginal utility of money.
(2) I didn't say that rich people never quit work and volunteer, I said that many rich people still work as many hours as poor people, which is odd if they have a diminishing marginal utility of money. Maybe are competing for extra-monetary status, which is associated with a lot of paid labour. My point is that the view that the marginal utility of money is greater for poor people isn't obvious, though it may be true for all I know.
(3) I agree that we might be able to infer that Group Y probably prefers using their new 2003 Honda Civic relative to other activities that Group Y can do and that Group X does prefer other activities to using their 2003 Honda Civic. What is harder to infer - arguably impossible to infer - is that the preference of Group Y for using their new car is stronger than the preference for Group X for using their new car, relative to a common scale.
As it happens, I suspect that we can roughly estimate interpersonal strengths of pleasure (as opposed to preference) across people. I think that behaviourism is a useful methodological guide in social science, but it isn't literally true, and we can make inferences about interpersonal intensities of pleasure, pain etc. based on our similar neurochemistries. So, while I haven't thought about it a lot, I can imagine that there is a true and plausible sense in which e.g. an additional $100 causes more pleasure to a homeless person than it does to Jeff Bezos. However, modern utilitarians and economists have largely abandoned the pleasure analysis of "utility", in favour of preference accounts. This is partly to handle paradoxes like the Experience Machine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine
The modern utilitarian is that what matters is preferences, which are normally about the world, rather than psychological states like pleasure, which aren't about the world as such.
Anyway, to reiterate, I'm not saying that the original view about utility is wrong. I'm saying that it's not clear that it is true in the sense that it needs to be to produce a (modern) utilitarian argument in favour of income redistribution. This is part of my broader claim that right-wing (to be precise, conservative) utilitarianism is not obviously wrong, even though I suspect that it is wrong both in virtue of being conservative and in virtue of being utilitarian.
If that is what you meant, it greatly weakens your point.
If they value status, then the status is part of the utility they derive from working. You have answered your own question.
It really seems like you are not saying anything. If X are not using the car, then it must not be providing much marginal utility to them. The fact that they are driving their other cars instead shows that they got little extra utility from the Honda, and in fact, miles driven is a perfectly useful common measure of utility, because that is why people acquire cars: to drive them, because driving them makes up most of the utility they get from them.
The problem with your approach is that it completely unable to explain why I turned down a free cookie today after lunch, whereas a homeless person almost certainty would have accepted the cookie.
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