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Dear Tony, 
 
Thanks for your comments.  I think that I have to clarify some points. 
 
Anthony Brewer wrote: 
>First, his title and his first line or two seem to claim that he is 
>making some general statement about the marginal revolution, but the 
>bulk of his editorial compares Malthus and Ricardo on limits to growth 
>with Jevon's concern about coal. But Jevon's worry about coal is surely 
>specific to him rather than being typical of the other participants in 
>the 'revolution', and has little or nothing to do with his marginalism. 
 
You are completely right : my story is about Malthus, Ricardo and Jevons. 
No claims are made regarding the 'marginal revolution' - that is why my 
EJHET-paper mentions the 'Jevonian revolution' in the title.  But you may 
also have noticed that I put the 'marginal revolution' between inverted 
comma's in the title, indicating that I do not really believe that there 
was something like a 'marginal revolution'.  In the British case, the 
transition from classical to neoclassical economics was a very gradual 
process, accompanied by a growing skepticism towards laissez-faire.  There 
is no reason to believe that the same process occurred in France, Austria, 
Germany, the United States or elsewhere.  Several different theoretical 
contributions were unified later, which implies that the 'marginal 
revolution' results from a look to the past from today's point of view.  We 
can also question whether the concept of 'marginality' was at the center of 
this so-called revolution - I doubt it.  But I do not want to speculate too 
much about this.  Further research is necessary. 
 
>Second, the notion of scarcity in modern economics is not about limits 
>to growth. It says that things have an opportunity cost - we can only 
>have more of one thing if we have less of something else. By dating 
>goods, we can add that we can have more at one date only by having less 
>(than we otherwise would) at some other date. That is true whether 
>there are ultimate limits to growth or not. It was recognized, at least 
>implicitly, by the classics - see Smith treating parsimony as an 
>alternative to present enjoyment, or his assumption that productive and 
>unproductive labour are alternatives. 
 
I agree once again : I am not making claims about the concept of scarcity 
in contemporary economics.  I claim that Jevons's switch from internal to 
external scarcity is a major change in the history of economic thought, 
because it makes the modern notion of scarcity, as you describe it, 
possible.  The conception of 'opportunity costs' operates within a context 
of fixed, given resources, which have to be allocated in an optimal way. 
Scarcity is given externally : if you take something from one side, you can 
take less of something else.  Internal scarcity, on the other hand, is 
different : you can alter the behaviour of agents to overcome the 
prevailing scarcity.  This tendency is still visible in Jevons, but only to 
a minor extent.  We could say the following : Jevons's conception of 
scarcity is concerned with limits to growth, which made a statical 
analytical framework possible.  This statical framework makes an 
'opportunity cost' conception of scarcity possible, which is disentagled 
from limits to growth. 
 
Bert Mosselmans 
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