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History of Economic Analysis part 62

History of Economic Analysis part 62. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | History of economic analysis 572 how very interesting this is and how revelatory of the ways of the human mind. It implies of course that Ricardo was completely blind to the nature and the logical place in economic theory of the supply-and-demand apparatus and that he took it to represent a theory of value distinct from and opposed to his own. This reflects little credit on him as a theorist.26 For it should be clear that his own theorem on equilibrium values is only tenable so far as it is tenable at all by virtue of the interplay of supply and demand. Ricardo could not have failed to discover this had he tried to deduce that theorem rationally instead of merely positing it intuitively. That is to say had he but stopped to ask why exchange values of commodities should be proportional to the quantities of standard labor embodied in them he would in answering this question have found himself using the supply-and-demand apparatus by which alone under appropriate assumptions that law of value can be established. Then he could never have denied the validity of the law of demand and supply for the long-run normal prices of the goods the quantities of which can be indefinitely increased by human industry while admitting its validity for short-run market prices and for the prices of monopolized or scarce goods. For as Malthus pointed out painstakingly Principles 1st ed. ch. 2 J2 and 3 supply and demand come in quite generally27 to determine prices in both the long-run and the short-run cases and the difference between them consists only in the level at which supply and demand fix them which has certain properties in the one case that are absent in the other. In other words the concepts of supply and demand apply to a mechanism that is compatible with any theory of value and indeed is required by all. But so great was Ricardo s personal authority with some later writers that traces of this mistake of his may be found not only in J.S.Mill s but even in A. Marshall s .