The original question was, "Who was the first to use the term
"indifference" in economics, where?"
For me, this thread is deja vu all over again because after reading the
suggested answers, I see the issue is much more complicated than it first
appears.
I first read the question as "indifference curve" which makes me agree with
the conventional answer that would credit Edgeworth. I took a quick look
at Mathematical Psychics and, sure enough, he means indifference as "equal
satisfaction" and lays out the equimarginal condition for the contract
curve. But he refers to Jevons quite a bit.
In his 1871 Theory of Political Economy, Jevons has an entire section
titled, "The Law of Indifference." "Then," you might conclude, "Jevons,
1871, beats Edgeworth, 1881." Not so fast. Here's what Jevons says in
that section:
"When a commodity is perfectly uniform or homogeneous in quality, any
portion may be indifferently used in place of an equal portion: hence, in
the same market, and at the same moment, all portions must be exchanged at
the same ratio. There can be no reason why a person should treat exactly
similar things differently, and the slightest excess in what is demanded
for one over the other will cause him to take the latter instead of the
former."
Now, to a modern microeconomist, Jevons is talking about perfect
substitutes, not indifference curves. Indifference to Jevons sounds to me
like another application of Buridan's ass (thanks to Thomas Moser for that
tidbit of knowledge) and has little to do with the modern concept of
"trade-off that maintains equal satisfaction."
It seems clear that Edgeworth took a word that had a known meaning and
adapted it to a more narrow definition. This happens all the time. It
also makes determining the first use pretty difficult. Given Edgeworth's
penchant for inventing words, it's too bad he didn't invent one for his
mathematical concept of variation in X and Y that maintains the same
utility. "Isoutility" seems an obvious name.
My answer to the original question would be, "It depends. Do you mean
indifference in a general sense or do you mean indifference in the sense of
a contour line or level curve?"
Humberto Barreto
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