tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 34

History of Economic Analysis part 34. 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 292 competition which according to him is productive of disorganized markets in which every participant is proletarized. But better things were to follow in the eighteenth century. We shall confine ourselves to the peak achievements of Beccaria Turgot and Isnard and then consider the manner in which the Wealth of Nations codified the whole of the value and price theory of the epoch. Beccaria dealt with value and price in Part IV Chapter 1 Del commercio of his Elementi publ. posthumously 1804 the subject stands there pretty much where it was to stand in s Principles. He explains the phenomenon of value as mentioned already by utility and scarcity and then proceeds to investigate the modus operandi of a hypothetical market in which wine is bartered for wheat cf. Marshall s apples and nuts .13 He recognized clearly that the exchange ratio is indeterminate in the case of isolated exchange between two individuals and that determinateness is brought about by competition through the higgling of the market fluctuations must eventually lead to the price at which quantity demanded equals quantity supplied. His careful treatment of the exchange of three commodities against one another in which he insists on the phenomenon and necessity of indirect exchange is particularly satisfactory. This is about as much as the average economist had to say a century later. Beccaria s performance has been chosen for comment because of its comparative fullness but it had been strikingly anticipated by Turgot s Reflexions XXXIII-XXXV written in 1766 published in 1769-70 . After having deduced trading commerce from besoins réciproques Turgot too touches upon the case of isolated exchange and then introduces the determining force competition. His description of the market mechanism is very similar to that of Bohm-Bawerk see below Part IV ch. 5 sec. 4 . The resulting market price prix courant is then made to vary under the impact of forces acting through .