Certain kinds of surplus

Appendix K

§1. This chapter is not very interesting. Marshall merely notes that surplus from infra marginal activities (work, production and consumption) accrues to workers, capitalists and consumers, respectively, before falling to zero “at the margin.”

He warns against double-counting the surplus of a consumer from Product A against the surplus to that consumer (as worker on Service B) or to the capitalist in the process of producing A.


This post is part of a series in the Marshall 2020 Project, i.e., an excuse for me to read Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890 first edition/1920 eighth edition), which dominated economic thinking until Van Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (1944) and Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (1946) pivoted economics from institutional induction to mathematical deduction.

Author: David Zetland

I'm a political-economist from California who now lives in Amsterdam.

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