Economic essays

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: A statistical method for measuring "marginal utility" and testing the justice of a progressive income tax / Irving Fisher

Collection:: Economics Books

A STATISTICAL METHOD FOR MEASURING “MAR- GINAL UTILITY” AND TESTING THE JUSTICE OF A PROGRESSIVE INCOME TAX Irving Fisher Introduction Amona Professor J. B. Clark’s many contributions to economic science is his discovery, independently of Jevons, Menger, and Walras or their anticipators, of the concept of “Marginal Utility,” or as he first called it “effective specific utility,” or as I shall call it in this article, “want-for-one-more” * unit of any economic good. He is the only American who has that honor. The basic importance of this concept has been partially lost sight of because of the growth of statistical economics and the lack hitherto of any method of showing that such a purely psychical magnitude is at least capable of being measured, granted the necessary data. For a generation, economic text books have displayed curves purporting to show “the law of diminishing utility.” But how '1 have discussed the unsatisfactory terminology on this subject in “Is ‘Utility’ the Most Suitable Term for the Concept Which It is Used to Denote?”, American Economic Review, Vol. VIII, No. 2, June 1918, pp. 335-337. Among the terms in use or proposed—utility, desiredness, desir- ability, ophelimity, advantage, rarete, wantedness, wantability, want—I prefer the short and simple term “want” followed by “for.” To relieve monotony, occasional use may be made of “wantability of,” or, more strictly, “wantedness of.” When, as is usually the case, we refer to what is commonly called the “margin,” I suggest we say not marginal want but simply “want-for-one-more,” or, to relieve the monotony, ‘“wantability- of-one-more” or “advantage-of-one-more” rather than “final degree of utility” or even “marginal desirability.” Although “margin” and ‘“mar- ginal” are already in current use, their technical meaning is not self-evident. I find intelligent business men assuming that “margin” refers not to an edge or limit but to an interval as the “margin” of a page or the “margin” in a broker’s acccount. I hope the term “utility” in particular may be abandoned, because it has to-day other economic connotations, such as in “A Public Utility” referring, say, to a telephone company, and because it seems to imply a committal to the old utilitarian “calculus of pleasure and pain” of Bentham and his school. The true meaning needed is based primarily not on pleasure but desire. For a fuller statement see my “Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices,” Trans- actions of the Connecticut Academy, Vol. IX, July 1892, pp. 1-124, repub- lished 1925, Yale University Press. 157

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: Economic essays

Monograph

Chapter

Table of contents

Download

Monograph

Chapter

This page

Image fragment

Citation links

Citation recommendation