Economic essays

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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

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Document type:: Monograph

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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 ‘MARGINAL UTILITY” 189 of family budgets beyond the lower incomes, those of working- men. And just as, through Case 2 in Evenland taken as a yardstick, we are enabled to compare Cases 1 and 3, both in Oddland, so Case 3 could be used as a yardstick to enable us to compare 2 and 4—Dboth in Evenland—and then go on to 6, 8, etc. In this way we could construct a series of points on a corresponding curve for Evenland. Comparison Between Two Countries Possible Moreover, not only can we thus compare wantabilities between different families in one and the same country under the same set of prices and general conditions and subject only to differences in income, but we can also make comparison between the two coun- tries, involving different prices as well as different incomes. All the foregoing calculations are supposedly worked out by using the two sub-groups specified, food and rent. But the same method applies with any other two sub-groups—food and cloth- ing, for instance, or clothing and rent, as long as the three speci- fied assumptions apply. Moreover, the same method may be applied to two different times instead of two different places, using, say, 1927 instead of Oddland and 1900 instead of Evenland. Wantability Curve for Any Commodity Group Thus far the only curves of want constructed relate to total income, giving quantitatively the “law of diminishing utility” by which the subjective value of a dollar diminishes as the number of dollars in one’s income increases. But by similar methods we may construct wantability curves for the sub-groups, food, rent, clothing, ete. Let us take the food group, for instance. The money expendi- tures for food in Cases 1 and 3 were S; ¢1 and S3 ¢3; while the physical quantities—what we first called “pounds,” but what, more exactly, may be described as an index of food consumption— are Bh and bh . The corresponding marginal wants,—i.e., for food per “pound,”—we found to be W, F; and Ws Fs. These last four expressions relating to food, the first pair being “physical” quantities (or indexes thereof) and the second pair being their AN

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