Talk:Marginalism

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Possible addition?[edit]

Hi there, fellow collaborators. I posted this suggestion earlier, but it was archived the same day so it never got a chance to be discussed (the archivist said the discussion was 'stale'; an oversight I presume). Anyway, I'm wondering how the concept of Marginalism of workers might be worked into the article. I'm not quite WP:BOLD enough to just rudely shoehorn it in there, which is why I brought it to talk in the first place... (should I just be bold, or...?) I figured I'd do the collaborative thing and suggest it here on the talk page so others can weigh in (that's what talk is for, after all, to discuss article changes, right?):

  • When a business falls on hard times, workers are the first to feel the pinch. Wages are lowered; jobs are cut. Profits are sacrificed last.
  • When costs go up, consumers (i.e., workers) pay the difference. Profits are sacrificed last.
  • Profits are like the last bag of grain; the capitalist values his profits above the workers.

I suppose this may be too controversial (hey, I'm certainly no Austrian School economist!), but there it is, FWIW. (I hope this is noticed before the next archive!) Cheers, all. --70.105.228.24 (talk) 13:18, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

None of this theory would be within the scope of this article, even if it weren't “original research”. —SlamDiego←T 15:39, 2 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It's very peculiar. The IP above has a talk page headed IP's are people too. But that edit actually came from a different IP 209.217.195.144. I guess their IP keeps changing but then they have to put in the original IP. Using a username is so much less bother. I'll ask why they do it. Dmcq (talk) 09:14, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

History section[edit]

At this stage, the history section covers notions of marginal utility (and antecedent utility notions) fairly well. It still lacks and probably needs some discussion of notions of marginal physical product (since the mainstream tradition has leaned so heavily upon it); I have some notes and ideas on a subsection covering this area.

Beyond that, the section might explore the development of various other concepts employed by marginalism. I'm not sure how thorough this article should seek to be, how much history should be delegated to articles specific to each concept, how much of the history of marginalism Wikipedia in toto should try to cover. —SlamDiego←T 06:06, 3 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

More, please[edit]

There's no limit to how much notable history of anything Wikipedia can cover - "Wikipedia is not paper". Surely, everything notable about the history of an economic concept, such as marginalism, would benefit those Wikipedia readers who are interested in it? Please, do go ahead and add whatever relevant sourced material you have!

You've suggested that marginalism has used other concepts, including that of marginal physical product and others. Any reliable information you have on the history of those concepts within the tradition or context of marginalism would be valuable. You have at least one interested reader right here. ;-) yoyo (talk) 11:26, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Marginalism as a Reaction to Marxism[edit]

For reasons best known to himself or not - maybe he doesn't understand himself - SlamDiego keeps on, in the archives, deleting the following indirect quotations from reliable sources: "I might as well point out this: http://robertvienneau.blogspot.com/2008/02/marginalism-as-reaction-to-marxism.html. There are some cited quotations." -- RLV 209.217.195.126 (talk) 04:22, 3 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have at least twice before asked you not to spam Wikipedia with links to your 'blog, so your claim that my reason is “best known to himself or not - maybe he doesn't understand himself” is rather absurd. Not quite as absurd as your claim that I keep deleting that link from the archive, since I have removed it exactly once (and then only as part of a restoration of the archive after it was edited).
As I have told you, any relevant content from your 'blog could be placed on the talk pages where you instead place links. Obviously, you'd like to drive traffic to your 'blog, but that's a misuse of Wikipedia. —SlamDiego←T 04:55, 3 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with WP is that people are allowed to make completely baseless presumptions about their fellow editors, and voice them publicly, as long as they have some longevity and are seemingly useful to the project. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of such editors, some of them administrators. If a relative newbie were to engage in same behavior, s/he would be swiftly blocked. The lesson is to create an account, bide your time quietly while making useful edits, and then one day you'll be free to set loose your acidic true self with total impunity. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.105.228.24 (talk) 12:51, 5 January 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.217.195.172 (talk) [reply]

“not unreasonable” v. “reasonable”.[edit]

In general, double negatives are often weakened positives. And “not unreasonable” carries a different sense than “reasonable”. The former is a failure to reject; the later is an endorsement. —SlamDiego←T 03:34, 7 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Follow the WP:MoS, please.[edit]

Even regarding spelling. The guidelines for the preferred variant are clear. Further, not only does the use of this variant not improve the article in anyway, but it actually hurts the quality and plainly violates the guidelines on clarity as the presence of obscure spellings, with characters not in the alphabet, serves only to obfuscate the meaning. Further, it undermines functionality of tools like spell check and search functions and makes maintaining consistency more difficult as it requires a character that is not present on a standard English Keyboard. Let's keep the encyclopedia in the vernacular, okay? M t/c 07:12, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As has been discussed before, this is not an obscure spelling; it is in fact listed in almost every authoritative dictionary, and in some modern dictionaries it remains the preferred spelling. (By happenstance, it is also the spelling used in the book on decision-theory, copyrighted 2000, that I'm reading these days.) The MoS says nothing that actually supports its removal. The article shouldn't be expected to have the word further introduced a great many times, and maintaining consistency has only been a problem for people attempting to impose a new spelling. —SlamDiego←T 19:01, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I do not question that it is a legitimate variant, but I am outlining why it is not the preferred variant. Works that use spellings with diacritics are rare exceptions nowadays, and generally only do so out of stubborn refusal to get off their high horse and accept the evolution of the English language over the last century. M t/c 20:31, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You have employed a series of falsified claims: The spelling is not obsolete, and remains the preferred spelling in some modern, authoritative dictionaries; it does not violate the MoS; there is no reson to expect that maintaining consistency will be a problem. You are simply changing what was the original spelling in this article to suit your sense of æsthetics, which is why your edit is a disruptive leg-lift edit. (And restoring that spelling is not a leg-lift edit of any sort.) —SlamDiego←T 21:07, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Judging by the edit and talk, this discussion is likely going nowhere. So I'll make it blunt. You seem to be engaged in edit warring and judging by the article history and talk archives this is not a new issue. You also seem to be violating the spirit of WP:OWN. Further reverting will result in a report for edit warring. Thank You. M t/c 06:47, 19 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If the party to whom you make such a complaint does not attend to the point that each of your arguments for changing from the original spelling has been falsified, then you'll be told that we are both edit warring. If the party does attend to that point, then you'll be told that you're trolling or somesuch. —SlamDiego←T 19:19, 19 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
In the absence of any clear context for the preceding bickering, I'm going to rashly assume that we're talking about the decidedly precious spelling "markèd" for a word that the vernacular only knows as "marked", the simple past participle of the verb "to mark". Even the reference to Wiktionary notes that the use of the grave accent is appropriate when the disyllabicity of the word is important - and that would only be in poetry and its stable-mate, song. It is a fact, I aver (so it's probably OR at this point!), that school teaching of English in Australia, for example, only recognised the existence of diacritics in older English texts to explain them, asserting their present inessentiality. Students were actively discouraged from using diareses to spell, e.g., coöperate; even the use of copulaic hyphens was deprecated, so they learnt to spell, not "co-operate", but "cooperate". Now you may take my stated facts, or leave them, but if anybody should insist on retaining the spelling "markèd", please answer this: Where in the world is it part of the English vernacular to pronounce the word /ˈmɑːkɪd/ rather than simply /ˈmɑːkt/? I contend that persisting in this precious distinction can only mar the clarity of the article, contrary to Wikipedia policy. I don't doubt it has a fine ring to it, and is probably appreciated in the lecture room by those students who prefer entertainment to elucidation, but let's reserve such fine rings for our priests and others whom we allow to sway us with rhetoric rather than reason, with cant rather than ken. (Sorry, couldn't help myself; I so love rhetoric and oratory! ;-) ) yoyo (talk) 10:28, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"mercantist" versus "mercantilist"[edit]

I don't understand the word "mercantist", although its form suggests "mercantilist" or some other noun for one professing an "-ism" relating to "merchants" or "markets". I checked Wiktionary, which doesn't recognise it. Wikipedia's only references to it are this page and the related Marginal utility, which have identical text.

The context in this article suggests that the term applies to all the Italian economists listed just two paragraphs earlier:

Eighteenth-century Italian mercantilists, such as Antonio Genovesi, Giammaria Ortes, Pietro Verri, Marchese Cesare di Beccaria, and Count Giovanni Rinaldo Carli, ...

Google, however, gave "About 674 results", of which many were red herrings: addresses containing "mercanti" + white space + "st". The first few relevant hits were these:

Critical Thinking Questions [1] Question 8. Describe "comparative advantage" and what role it plays in the both liberal and mercantist theories of trade. ...

kalypso media :: forum - Political Science 101 [2] The game's economic system might be compared to an 17th century Mercantist Colony - that is, a closed monetary circuit. ...

Handbook of public finance - Google Books Result [3] Jürgen G. Backhaus, Richard E. Wagner - 2004 - Business & Economics - 554 pages A cameralist land faced different circumstances than the contemporaneous mercantist regimes. There was no concern within the cameralist lands about ...

In the shadow of Perón: Juan Atilio Bramuglia and the second line ... - Google Books Result [4] Raanan Rein - 2008 - Biography & Autobiography - 302 pages A number of writers mention the specific “Mercantist” project he tried to implement in the province, which Perón torpedoed. The new national constitution ...

Since the term seems to mean exactly the same as the better-known "mercantilist", I propose to replace it accordingly. yoyo (talk) 11:15, 2 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Marx Attacks[edit]

I think the following passage is problematic:

Following this, Annotation 2 in the German printed edition of Vol. III of "Das Kapital[53] argues:
Marginal utility theory -- an apologetic bourgeois economic theory ... [consolidated] in the 1870s as an antipode to Marx' Labour Theory of Value. According to ... [utility] theory, the value of a commodity is determined by its "Marginal Utility", i.e. by the subjective judgement of the usefulness of a commodity unit, which satisfies the least pressing need of the buyer, when the volume of commodity supply [i.e. the existing pool] is given. Hence, the magnitude of value depends on the relative scarcity of commodities. Yet ... [Marx held the opposite, namely that] the relative scarcity of commodities depends on their higher or lower [labour] value, which is determined by the socially necessary labour time. Thus, the [labour] value of commodities determines, via market prices, the magnitude of demand that buyers are actually able to pay; commodity supply adapts itself to this demand.
  • The citation isn't very specific. I'm not sure what "Annotation 2" means. The second footnote? It would be good to get the chapter number rather than just a page number to a specific edition. And why the German edition? Clearly this is an English translation. Who wrote the note anyway?
  • I don't think it's a very good argument, basically consisting of asserting the LTV position against the Marginalist one, without backing it up.
  • I don't think the square bracketed insertions help clarify the issue.--Jack Upland (talk) 19:32, 14 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Marginal Revolution[edit]

This article and Marginal Utility share a largely-identical section on The Marginal Revolution. Maintaining the same text in two different articles is inefficient, so I encourage editors of Marginal Utility and this article to come up with the best way of removing the redundancy. Perhaps The Marginal Revolution should have its own article? Or maybe its home should be one of these two articles, with a short summary and a link in the other? Also, the same argument applies to other content that is largely the same in these two articles.

In the interest of keeping the discussion in one place, please discuss this in Talk:Marginal_utility#The_Marginal_Revolution, and not here.

Silver hr (talk) 17:53, 27 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Cyrillic names[edit]

It seems odd to use Cyrillic spellings for so many economists' names with Roman spellings in brackets. Would it not be more readable with the Roman spelling in the text and the Cyrillic in brackets? 87.112.127.175 (talk) 14:12, 20 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed--even the actual pages for those people don't list the Cyrillic spellings of their names. I'm going to go change that now. WeakTrain (talk) 22:02, 20 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Roberto Mangabeira Unger - excessive promotion spam removal[edit]

Archivingcontext (talk · contribs) shows a disturbing history of excessive promotion of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and his ideas. His entries have previously been removed from the pages of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Slavoj Žižek and others. Unger's contributions and critiques to Marginalism are either non-existent, incomprehensibly vague or utterly on the fringe and do not belong on this page. Considering Unger's only references seem to be his own books and blog, I doubt he even belongs on Wikipedia at all. Should anyone have a problem with this, I invite you to come to terms with Archivingcontext's opinion on Roberto Unger first and then get back to me on the supposed neutrality of this contributor:

"I do think Unger is the most important thinker of the Hobbes legacy (I might even make the argument that he is the most important thinker of the 20th and 21st centuries)" - Archivingcontext [5]

There are plenty of quotes of a similar vein to be found in Archivingcontext's history, which seems to be centered entirely around placing Unger on a pedestal next to well-known authors.

78.22.231.123 (talk) 17:30, 23 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This is not promotion but rather the contribution of key ideas about a topic made by a leading intellectual and published in major university presses. Archivingcontext (talk) 00:45, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Unger is not a leading intellectual in economics (if even in another field), and his critiques are not notable--the book referenced only has 225 citations, none of which are from economics scholarship. The addition also adds virtually no real substantive content except to promote Unger's critiques. Moreover, the second paragraph in "critiques" is essentially irrelevant to marginalism and is instead a broadside attack on economics. WeakTrain (talk) 03:20, 7 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I will just add my two cents and then let it rest. I think the article lacks a broader contextualization of the ideas and some key critiques from contemporary social theory. I am most familiar with the work of Unger and thus drew on his writings to add that context and situate a contemporary critique. I can accept if there is consensus that it doesn't fit here for reasons stated above or other, but I do encourage additions to the article that articulate the context and more contemporary criticism. Archivingcontext (talk) 19:25, 10 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Dr. Drakopoulos's comment on this article[edit]

Dr. Drakopoulos has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:


1) The neoclassical tradition that emerged from British marginalism abandoned the concept of utility and gave marginal rates of substitution a more fundamental role in analysis.[citation needed]

Hicks, J., and Allen, R.G.D. (1934), ‘A reconsideration of the theory of value’, Economica, 1: 52–76. 2) Marginalism as a formal theory can be attributed to the work of three economists, Jevons in England, Menger in Austria, and Walras in Switzerland.[citation needed] Screpanti, E. and Zamagni, S. (1993) An Outline of the History of Economic Thought, Clarendon Press: Oxford. 3)Menger explained why individuals use marginal utility to decide amongst trade-offs, but while his illustrative examples present utility as quantified, his essential assumptions do not.[vague] Please change to: Menger linked demand to marginal utility, and through his theory of imputation also attempted to link costs to utility. However, it has been argued that Menger's emphasis on the concepts of uncertainty and human error, his mistrust to the use of mathematics, and also his hierarchical approach to human needs, makes him the "least marginalist" of the three (Alter, 1982; Drakopoulos, 1997a). Alter, M. (1982) "Carl Menger and Homo Oeconomicus: Some Thoughts on Austrian Theory and Methodology, Journal of Economic Issues, 16, pp.149-60. Drakopoulos, S. A. (1997a) "Modelling Menger's Consumer Theory", Ekonomia vol.1, No.1, pp.82-96. 4) But it came to be seen that indifference curves could be considered as somehow given, without bothering with notions of utility. Please add: Pareto’s analysis of indifference curves, without assuming the controversial and rather psychological notion of cardinal utility, can be seen in this perspective too (Pareto, 1906; see also Drakopoulos, 1997b.) Pareto V. (1906) [1971] Manual of Political Economy, translated by Schrier, A., London: Macmillan.

Drakopoulos, S. A. (1997b) ‘Origins and development of the trend towards value-free economics’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 19: 286–300.


We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

Dr. Drakopoulos has published scholarly research which seems to be relevant to this Wikipedia article:


  • Reference : Drakopoulos, Stavros A., 2007. "Normative Issues In Marginalism: The Case Of P. Wicksteed," MPRA Paper 6684, University Library of Munich, Germany.

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 15:31, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Relevance of the "Marxist criticism of marginalism" unclear[edit]

It has been touched upon in archived pages, but not sufficiently discussed what the relevance of the Marxian critique section is.

In the quotation about Marx's criticism of supply and demand analysis it is in fact very difficult to determine what Marx means. I think whoever copied the quote here did a poor job in selecting the relevant section. It is not at all clear what Marx's argument is. I suggest that either a different quotation is necessary, or a summary from a secondary source, or an abandonment of the quotation.

Bukharin's quotation contains nothing related to economics, but a remark on Böhm-Bawerk's supposed intentions.

Mandel's quotation is not a critique of marginalism, but of the static equilibrium view about the economy. In this he agrees with Austrian Economics so this might aswell be Austrian critism (just kidding).

Dobb's remark also has no economic content. It is aimed at the intention of people who were working on this theory, and not at the theory itself.

From these four I think only Mandel's remarks are connected to marginalism, and even those tangentially. As I said, a clarification of the Marx passage would be welcome. At the present stage I don't think this section is relevant to marginalism, or at least doesn't include real arguments that Marxists might have against marginalism. The next section about Lange and co. sums up the attitude of Marxian economists to marginalism. OberleutnantMarton (talk) 13:13, 19 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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