Value and distribution: by Davenport Herbert Joseph 1861-

Author:Davenport, Herbert Joseph, 1861- [from old catalog]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Value, Economics
Publisher: Chicago, The University of Chicago press
Published: 1908-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

It by no means follows, however, that each of the items is marginal because any one of them may be so. Not all of the items of a stock can be marginal at once. The utility loss that will be suffered in the loss of the entire stock is not the marginal utility times the number of items, but the utility of the entire stock conceived as a marginal stock. No one item can be regarded as marginal excepting on such terms of regrouping as shall impose the non-marginal quality upon all the others.**

It needs also to be clearly held in mind that in utility schedules we never get beyond the individual, and that marginal utility is purely a matter of the individual psychology. For different individuals there can be no

"Wicser appears to be of the other opinion: "The majority of theorists .... are agreed that these prices are fixed by a marginal law. We, however, have gone still farther, and say that value generally and in every form, even that of use, and even where there is no exchange .... must obey a marginal law. Jevons, Gossen, and Walras have not gone so far as to assert this. To these writers the utility of the separate portions or items of one supply is different

according to the amount of use which each actually gives I

can scarcely hope to have converted him [the reader] all at once to such an unfamiliar aspect of the question" {Natural Value, p. 26, note.) But in another note upon page forty-four Wieser states the position again in a way to raise the query whether he is not talking about value rather than utility. In fact, in the second case he employs the word value for seemingly precisely the same meaning as was in the former case expressed by utility, the two statements together being perhaps mostly serviceable as illustrating the confusion of utility with value characteristic of Austrian discussion.

comparison of utilities either qualitatively or quantitatively. As including more than one individual schedule, there is, therefore, no possibility of a marginal service in the sense of the smallest service of a descending series; there is no series. That A will pay 30 and B 29 in no sense implies that the utility to B is to the utility to A as 29 : 30. One may be willing to give today for bread double what he would have given a year ago, though only equally as hungry today. The strength of his desire for other things is a necessary factor. Cases are, as we have seen, marginal, not in terms of absolute utility, but only of relative utility. A wealth of illustrations edifying to the point of weariness about the cigar and the loaf. Dives and Lazarus, the starving man and the man at feast, ought long since to have placed this truth beyond either the right or the danger of serious discussion, but have not done so. We still hear that stocks of goods in

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