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The Power of Beliefs: The Organisational Principles of Economics’ Paradigmatic Core

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Abstract

Synopsis : To claim that the co-ordinating powers of the market constitute a natural order, there is a need to show not only that such an order exists (i.e. synchronic order in the sense that it achieves a co-ordinated outcome to economic interactions) but also that it does not offend people’s moral sensibilities (i.e. that it is also a diachronic order). One way of achieving this is by making the system universal and ethically neutral. The way modern economics proposes to do this is by adhering to strict methodological individualism and by removing the ‘other’ (except as someone whose actions may affect us) from all economic considerations. As individuals exist in all societies, and as it is the attitudes towards the ‘other’ which may distinguish one society from another, economics claims to have produced an idea of an order which is universal and independent of ethical or social dispositions. In this chapter, we examine how economics proposes to achieve this outcome and whether it has been successful in its endeavour.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    At the undergraduate level, it is enough to take a look at the multitudes of editions of books like Samuelson’s, Lipsey’s and Dornbusch and Fischer’s, as well as intermediate books from Stigler’s Price Theory to contemporary ones. At the graduate level, one can compare books like Varian’s Microeconomic Analysis from 1977, Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green from 1995 and Kreps from 2013 to see that not much has really changed in what economists teach as the core of their subject.

  2. 2.

    Developments emanating from behavioural economics like, for instance, prospect theory have not yet reached the core chapters in textbooks as the debates about them are still raging.

  3. 3.

    The question of whether solving the individual problem is sufficient to solve the collective one or, alternatively, that individuals cannot solve the problem by themselves is a very important question pertaining to the relationship between the individual and the collective (society) and the methodological issue regarding the way in which we choose to analyse society. The assumption regarding this in modern economics is spelt out in point (d). But it is important to bear in mind that this is only one way of conceiving the methodology of social analysis.

  4. 4.

    To be ‘good at’ something should not be confused with wanting to do that thing. A tall person may have some advantages in some employments over a short person, but it does not mean that the tall person likes to be engaged in that employment.

  5. 5.

    It has to be observed that the term ‘competition’ here is used in a very well-defined, yet limited, fashion. Intuitively, and perhaps colloquially, competition may, and will, prevail among individuals who are not necessarily equal. Indeed, even in a monopolistic set-up there is still a degree of competition taking place among consumers and even the monopolist who is trying to keep others out of its turf. But we use the term here in its purest form where the most important assumption is that competition is where all agents have the same power (fair, if you will). A case where no one has any power is, perhaps, the fairest of all set-ups.

  6. 6.

    After the Italian economist-turned-sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, who inherited the Chair of Leon Walras in the University of Lausanne.

  7. 7.

    Notice that we discuss here an ideal world, a benchmark or a reference point. It is clear that economics realised that the reality of competition is more complex. This gave rise to the idea of incomplete markets which was somewhat resolved by the introduction of property rights into the discussion. While this is an important issue, it is not really part of the core as it is part of the application. I shall discuss these issues further down the line. Here, I am simply trying to delineate the core, the logical limit of the idea of decentralised decision-making.

  8. 8.

    There is a proviso here as this is only true in the presence of lump-sum transfers. These however, are not really possible in reality which led to the development of what is known as the ‘second-best’ approach. But these are details which, although of great importance, will not alter the main thrust of the argument.

  9. 9.

    In spite of appearances, we will see that this is not as obvious as it may seem.

  10. 10.

    In principle, profits are made up of the return to capital which is comprised of what we call normal profits and profits above the normal. The normal profit is what the firm pays to those who forwarded capital to it, which is equivalent to what they would have received elsewhere (the market rate of return). Any profits above it can be used by the firm either to be distributed to its shareholders, who then receive a return on their capital which is higher than the market rate, or to be invested in the firm itself. Competition usually erodes the latter part which means that firms will have no funds to invest in R&D.

  11. 11.

    The evidence seems to support the argument that larger firms tend to invest more in R&D than smaller firm, but this in itself does not mean that monopolist will invest more. Monopolistic power does not necessarily mean larger firms.

  12. 12.

    For instance, by protecting patents, the innovator has limited monopolistic power which allows him or her to recoup the return on their investment by preventing competition from eroding their gains.

  13. 13.

    Also meaning that they compete on equal footing and with full information. What exactly is meant by freely will be further discussed in Chap. 4.

  14. 14.

    Bearing in mind epistemological differences across culture (and in particular between rationalist Continental European thinkers and Anglo-Saxon empiricists), the argument can be slightly modified to say that the abstract—non-descriptive—part of the theory produces testable claims about the world which, if confirmed, would increase the belief about the empirical truth behind the model. While this is a view, which empiricists would subscribe to, it has serious difficulties as even the empirical confirmation of testable claims derived from the model can in no possible way lend empirical truth to other components of the model. Namely, even if we can empirically confirm that, say, demand schedules in the world are downward sloping, we will not be able to conclude that a competitive equilibrium is empirically efficient because it does not lend empirical truth to the utility function which is the analytical tool needed to interpret the area below the demand schedule.

  15. 15.

    Some would correctly point out that markets may help in alleviating uncertainty and even allow individuals, through insurance, to live, potentially, in a world which seems certain (what is called full insurance), but this is still the result of a recommendation emanating from a model, or an abstraction, which was based on recognising the presence of uncertainty.

  16. 16.

    For instance, while in a world of certainty, that which defines an economic good is fairly straightforward, in a world of uncertainty we deem the same commodity in different states of nature as completely different economic goods. This, by no stretch of imagination, is a simple abstraction.

  17. 17.

    Debreu has formalised this idea in his Theory of Value which was an attempt to modernise, mathematically, Walras’s Elements of Pure Economics. All of this led to the application of Walrasian General Equilibrium to the world of what is known as ‘state-contingent-claims’ in the form of the Arrow-Debreu Securities model.

  18. 18.

    This should be seen as somewhat more akin to the idea behind Popper’s principle of falsifiability.

  19. 19.

    We are leaving out at this stage personal distributional matters as they are present everywhere in our story. Even at the perfectly competitive case, there is always the question who receives these benefits. In general, as individuals are both consumers and owners of firms, we cannot learn from this anything about the personal distribution of benefits. The second welfare theorem is a means to ensure that we can change the distribution of these benefits without affecting the total sums produced. Nevertheless, we do have a distributional element here too as we focus on the distribution of benefits in terms of returns for economic activities.

  20. 20.

    But even this is not straightforward. Suppose that we know that dumping refuse will affect the fishing industry, how do we evaluate the damage? The government would want to tax the cruise owners according to the damage they create. This will lead their supply curve (the marginal cost of a cruise) upward in line with the social cost (it is also known as Pigouvian Tax). But the government does not know what the damage is and will have to rely on reports from fishermen—who are likely to exaggerate the damage—and the cruise operators—who are likely to undervalue it.

  21. 21.

    I do not for a moment suppose that cultural differences can only be manifested in the choice of the distributional outcomes but within the terminology of modern economics—which is a consequentialist theory—this is the only way in which such differences can be well captured.

  22. 22.

    We assume that the fishermen are interested in maximising their own value and will therefore accept money for the right to dump the refuse in the river. The price that they will determine will be such that the quantity dumped will be consistent with the social optimum of bruising and producing fish for the market.

  23. 23.

    Some economists take an extremely narrow view of what economics does and for them economics is the art of reaching an agreement between rational agents. Therefore, the problem of missing market is just a problem of constraint. If we do not have enough assets, individuals will still be able to trade and reach an equilibrium which is Pareto-efficient in the sense that one cannot make anyone better off without making someone else worse off. However, it is clear that this is not what people would have wanted had they been able to trade in state-contingent claims. The outcome of such a trade would have constituted the solution to the economic problem. The solution that will materialise failing this may be such where we cannot make one person better off without harming the other, but it still is not a solution to the economic problem. Namely, it will not correspond to the benchmark of efficiency. To show the absurdity of this claim, imagine a world in which there are monopolists. This is clearly a world where the value of what has been produced is not maximised and there are clear deadweight losses in terms of efficiency. Yet, according to this narrow view of economics, agents may trade in secondary markets that which has been allocated to them and, in so doing, reach an allocation where no one can be made better off without harming another. This may, in principle, allow some gains in utility for both agents but not enough to offset the loss of utility emanating from the presence of monopolists. Surely no one would argue that such an equilibrium, in spite of its apparent efficiency, constitutes a solution to the economic problem in the way in which we defined it.

  24. 24.

    In other words, productive efficiency is about allocating resources in such a way as to fully utilise the existing resources while allocative efficiency is about the distribution of that which has been produced.

  25. 25.

    In Chap. 7, we discuss a case where two agents in society with different abilities choose to divide the work between them according to a principle of equity rather than expediency (in this case, the issue was the distribution of burden). In such a case, it is clear that the productive inefficient allocation is allocatively efficient, which contradicts what we have just said. However, it is important to bear in mind that from the perspective of the organisational principles of the paradigm there are no clear organisational rules that will lead to such an allocation. Competitive decentralisation is highly unlikely to lead us to such an allocation. Therefore, such a case is a case where moral values precede economic considerations which cannot be the case of a universal and ethically neutral system. This point too will be further discussed in Chap. 8.

  26. 26.

    Residual claims are the basis upon which an owner can argue for a smaller share of the produce to be available. If, for instance, the agreement between the owner of the plot and the worker is to share the produce of the employee effort 50:50, then if the produce is a 100, the employee will get 50. However, the owner can say that he must keep 10 aside because he has extra cost emanating from his ownership of the land, which means that instead of receiving 50, the employee will get only 45.

  27. 27.

    It is interesting to note that the modern conception of the connection between ownership and productivity has already been fully articulated by Nassau Senior and J. S. Mill.

  28. 28.

    Notice that entailed in this story is also an explanation to the existence of corporations (which has also been the concern of institutional economics). In principle, in a purely competitive environment, all activities should be conducted through markets. The presence of corporations suggests that this is not the case and some transactions take place, as it were, in-house. Clearly, the reasons for this are both the presence of missing markets (which make some market transaction inefficient) and the salvaging power of specific ownership structures (like corporations) which make these transactions efficient (for a more complete discussion, see, for instance, Hart (1995)). This means that corporations are here not to impede competition but rather to support markets in the face of the disturbance generated by missing markets. Notice that corporations are in essence the union of capital. The implications of all of this are that in modern economics unions of capital are beneficial for society while union of labour is not (as it gives power to a group of agents which distorts efficiency).

  29. 29.

    Previously, we used the area under the demand to approximate the money value of the utility generated by the consumption of commodity x. In this particular case, we managed to argue that the inefficiency of the monopolist will be the same as the inefficiency generated by missing markets. However, this was a very simple case of one market and where we had no information about the distribution of the benefits among all participants. We assumed the demand to be derived from the utility of a representative agent and, consequently, lost all the information about the distribution of these benefits across all those who participate in the market. To do this, we run into the difficulty of comparing utilities between individuals.

  30. 30.

    If there are also missing markets—in the case of certainty—then the allocation of property rights regardless of their distribution will solve the problem (this is the case of certainty). Also, we may add to this the assumption that natural monopolies are state owned and produce efficiently at marginal cost pricing with a designated lump-sum tax to cover their losses. However, it is not inconceivable to consider the possibility of institutional convergence even in the presence of missing markets. Recall that part of the effects of missing markets was to form corporations and, therefore, require certain ownership structures to ensure productive efficiency. In a digitised world, it may be the case that when individuals are less concerned about job security—being able to derive income from other sources—they may work more on a freelance base which may be a way to solve some of the missing market problems (in the sense that operators own the assets with which they work).

  31. 31.

    Elul (1995), for instance, demonstrates how financial innovations—the equivalent to an increase in the number of competitive markets—does not necessarily lead to an improvement in welfare. This, of course, is the case of situation IV.

  32. 32.

    See Appendix.

  33. 33.

    On the fascinating history of how the concept emerged from von Neumann through Morgenstern and, subsequently, Nash, see Giocoli (2003).

  34. 34.

    Of course, there are mountains of attempts to analyse conditions under which the agents will stick to their collusion rather than deviate but in many of these studies the distinction between what is an abstraction and what is a reality has been somewhat blurred. One can always create sufficiently complex and specific imaginary structures where outcomes will be different, but in the dialogue between reality and the model we are more concerned with simplified and fairly general rules. Indeed, the story I tell is the one that managed to enter the textbooks even though some allowances are made to the other forms of analysis (like infinite horizon and the likes), but if they take us further from the paradigmatic core, they make the latter irrelevant and leave us without any clear idea about what would be the best form of social organisation that will resolve the economic problem.

  35. 35.

    Recall that the attraction of spontaneous order was predicated on the diachronic nature of that order. By this, to remind the reader, we are referring to the moral acceptability—and, thus, sustainability—of the system.

  36. 36.

    Growth has been part of the interest of economists all the time since the days of classical economics and Adam Smith. So, I am not suggesting that interest in growth as such is new but rather that growth has become the main part of the academic and, subsequently, public, discourse.

  37. 37.

    It is true that on many occasions theorist examines the ‘efficiency’ of growth by comparing it to a benchmark of a social planner who is maximising some form of a social welfare function. Whether or not this is a measure of ethical goodness is highly contentious and I will not spend time discussing this here. It would be sufficient to say that even in such a framework, real distributional matters are never near the surface.

  38. 38.

    To some extent, the focus on growth seems to be an extension on Robbins’s attempt to make economics an ethically neutral discipline. Following Wicksteed, Robbins’s basic claim is that the domain of economics is the creation of plenty which is a necessary condition for whatever values society may wish to implement. In the same way that the presumption of competitiveness in the sense that individuals will always choose the cheapest option (broadly conceived) whatever it is they are trying to achieve, the pursue of growth is merely a collective attempt at creating the plenty upon which all social and moral values can be implemented.

  39. 39.

    By compensation we mean the general increase in living standards which people may experience as a result of the greater affluence. This, however, does not mean that society managed to reach an allocative efficient allocation commensurate with the socially desirable distribution of income.

  40. 40.

    Which is in itself the result of our belief that competitive decentralisation is both the right way of solving the original economic problem and ethically neutral. Some may argue that in the context of the globalised world (i.e. the whole world is one economic system) the rule will work but this may raise questions about whether individuals, in their lifetime, enjoy the compensation of not being able to solve their individual economic problem.

  41. 41.

    What we are referring to here is the presence, or absence, of Pareto-efficiency. But in growth models, the presence of efficiency criteria is usually through a comparison between the rate of growth which society—as a collective (a social planner)—desires and the one which would be otherwise generated by the model.

  42. 42.

    Lump-sum taxes, which were mentioned earlier, are a form of tax where payments are due irrespective of what a person does. This means that the relative value of different choices remains the same. For instance, with a lump-sum tax, the opportunity cost of leisure remains the same so rational agents will not change their choice of how to split their time between leisure and work. Moreover, as their overall income falls, they may wish to have less leisure and consequently work more. At the same time, as the money is given to someone else, in the same form, that person would also not change the relative choice of time allocation but may work less as his, or her, income increases. This form of transfer is the condition under which the second welfare theorem would hold. Non-lump-sum taxes create not only the income effect but will have an additional substitution effect as, say, leisure becomes less expensive.

  43. 43.

    By this I again refer to lump-sum transfer where the loss of labour—due to what economists call, income effect—is compensated by a gain of labour from those who receive the tax as benefit.

  44. 44.

    I hasten to say that the removal of the other is not an inherent trait of methodological individualism but simply a specific characteristic of the way in which economics employs the concept. I shall come back to this question in Chaps. 7 and 8, where I will discuss the conception of the individual in modern and classical economics.

  45. 45.

    See, for instance, Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press or Maynard Smith, J. (1982). Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  46. 46.

    I know that many equate the natural rates with long-run equilibrium prices in Marshall, while market prices are the short-run equilibrium. I believe that this is a misguided reading of Smith which ignores the social—and moral—context of his theorising. This point is more directly explored in Witztum (2008), but it will also be explored further in Chap. 8.

  47. 47.

    Scarf, Herbert. (1960). “Some Examples of Global Instability of Competitive Equilibrium,” International Economic Review 1:157–172.

  48. 48.

    Rubinstein, Ariel and Asher Wolinsky. (1985). “Equilibrium in a Market with Sequential Bargaining,” Econometrica 53:1133–1150.

    Rubinstein and Wolinsky. (1990). “Decentralized Trading, Strategic Behavior and the Walrasian Outcome,” Review of Economic Studies 57:63–78.

  49. 49.

    Recall what we said earlier about the ‘in principle’ idea which is very similar to the Popperian notion of falsifiability.

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Appendix

Appendix

Walras , the rationalist, discovered in his Elements of Pure Economics that as the essence of goods is utility, there exists a vector of prices for which all rational plans coincide and all markets, without exception, are in equilibrium. This vector of prices, the Walrasian prices in their modern transformation, has all the properties of efficiency required by the solution to the economic problem. However, for Walras, the rationalists, these prices were actually the essence of values but not necessarily the actual market price. In this respect, Walras was following the traditions of economic thinking, according to which there is always a difference between ‘value’ and ‘price’. They did not all mean the same thing, but one can trace such a distinction all the way back to Aristotle. In his theory, he distinguishes between what he calls a ‘just price’ and the actual market price that will emerge. By ‘just price’ Aristotle was referring to something akin to labour theory of value by expecting this price to reflect the relative difficulties of attainment. As the objective of Aristotle’s theorising was to find the conditions which would support what he called the just, or good, society (alternatively, the society which would support the good life understood as eudemonia). In such a society, material wellbeing is not the objective and, therefore, the production and exchange of it should be based on needs. Trade for the purpose of wants is immoral. Therefore, to some extent, the just price was the measure of how well the system operates. Without the middlemen, who will appear when trade becomes wants-based, prices of good will correspond to the just price. Therefore, just price is a form of value against which one can measure prices and decree whether the system is working well.

St Thomas of Aquinas followed suit and even in Adam Smith one can find a similar concept in what he calls the ‘natural rate’. Natural prices, for Smith, were a benchmark for whether or not the system of natural liberty is consistent with morality and justice.Footnote 46 When market price deviates from their natural rate, there is something not right about the system. Ricardo too was looking for an absolute value but the purpose of this was somewhat different. In Marx, however, the use of the distinction between values and prices becomes more acute. Marx, being a rationalist like Walras, finds that the labour is the value embodied in all commodities. This led to his famous labour theory of value, which was, like that which Walras did later, a search for the essence of things. Marx was very much aware of the fact that market prices deviate from labour values and it is through this deviation that the exploitative nature of the system is revealed. Many interpreted the labour theory of value as the explanation for prices and were therefore concerned with the most intricate of problems: the problem of transformation. How do labour values explain market prices? Not much good came out of this exercise and for a good reason. The labour values were a benchmark, a reference point, rather than an explanation of prices.

So, Walras too was concerned with the question of how actual market prices relate to the values of goods which are the general equilibrium prices. In some sense, this is similar to the problem we have posed in the text. Here, the Walrasian prices are the paradigmatic core and actual market prices represent reality. Therefore, the question of whether there is convergence is really a question of whether there exists a process, in principle, which will lead actual market prices to their Walrasian values.

Walras himself was baffled by this and proposed a somewhat peculiar process known as the Tatonnement (or groping). But there have been many questions raised both about the realism (i.e. whether it is really a possible process) of the process and about its convergence. Scarf (1960)Footnote 47 demonstrates the problem in a very simple context. The fact that we have no convergence in such a simple case raises serious doubts on the generality of any other account. There were also attempts to devise simple sequential bargaining processes, but these too did not seem to lead to Walrasian prices.Footnote 48 Mandel and Gintis (2014) propose that a solution can be found if we adopt an evolutionary game approach, but this raises a serious question about what we mean by the idea of competition. Moreover, the conditions of the structures which may generate convergence are far too specific to make this a sufficiently generalised proposition.

In any case, to demonstrate the problems of convergence and reference, let us look at a very simple example: the Cobweb model. Suppose that we have a simple competitive market for good x with standard demand and supply schedules:

figure d

This, of course, is only one market but assuming all other markets in equilibrium (their prices would affect the position of both demand and supply), the price where this market too is in equilibrium—and thus the entire system—is, of course, the price corresponding to point A. So, we know that there exists a price for which there will be a Walrasian general equilibrium and where the allocation of resources and distribution of outcomes are efficient.

Now, the question is, how do such prices form? Clearly, the demand and supply schedules do not really exist; they tell us what we think would happen, had people been rational, when prices change. But in the real world, there is a price and that is it. But the model does not tell us how the price is being determined. Let us, therefore, devise a very simple and intuitively appealing story to describe this dynamic.

Suppose that the good x is sold in a weekly market. The suppliers who bring the goods to the market in the morning must decide how much to bring that would be consistent with their rationality as producers, that is, profit maximising principle. The principle which guides them is to bring a quantity to the market where the marginal cost (the cost of the last unit) equals the price. However, they do not know what the price tomorrow will be. They do know, however, what the price was at the end of today’s trade. A simple form of expectation would be for them to think that the price of tomorrow will be the same as the closing price of today. This is what should happen when we have convergence:

figure e

If the price at the end of today (t = 1) is where it is, producers who maximise profits will bring to the market the quantity dictated by the marginal cost curve (supply). But during the day they will discover that at this price the quantity demanded is less than that. This means that they will find that there is excess supply in the market. As they cannot keep their goods from one day to another, sellers will declare a sale and prices will fall to the level at t = 2, where the sellers will be able to sell all their goods.

Next day, the sellers know that the price was at the level it stood at the end of t = 2 and they would therefore want to sell the quantity suggested by the supply curve. But at this lower price, quantity demanded will be greater—the opposite of yesterday—so there will be excess demand and consumers will bid up the price to get what they wanted. As price increases, quantity demanded will fall until it matches the quantity supplied. What we can see in the above diagram is that the difference between the prices in each day is falling and after a while the prices will converge to the Walrasian level if nothing else changes.

This is what we mean by convergence. There is a process which, in principle, can lead to us to the Walrasian prices. The reason I say, in principle, as even the story I told was quite stylised and assumed that nothing else changes throughout the process. Nevertheless, as a process exists in principles,Footnote 49 we are willing to accept that the Walrasian prices are meaningful and that we are in a constant motion towards them.

But can we say that we are also monotonically becoming better off as we approach the Walrasian price? The answer will be clearly not:

figure f

The partial equilibrium representation of the efficiency of Walrasian equilibrium can be captured by the yellow and green areas which represent consumer and producer surplus respectively. The former is a proxy to the money measure of the utilities accrued to consumers at point A, and the latter is a measure of the utility generated by the market which ends up in the hands of producers. Point A is allocative efficient as we cannot increase one without reducing the other.

When we find ourselves at point B (after the first day), it is easy to see that consumer surplus will be increased but at the expense of producers. Moreover, producers will have an extra cost which is not covered by the benefits generated in the market and this would be the triangle CBB′. Therefore, point B is inefficient. A similar argument can be made about point C where we find ourselves in the following day. In other words, none of the points before we get to A can be deemed as efficient. So, while we know that we will be approaching the efficient outcome, we cannot attribute the efficiency of the limit of the process (at point A) to any point on the way. Nor can we clearly see the overall net benefits monotonically increasing.

But this is not the only possible outcome of the simple story we have been telling. It is quite possible that the process will actually not converge:

figure g

In this case, we have the same story as before except that prices always fluctuate around point A but will never get to it. This is the equivalent to the Israelites who roamed the desert and who were destined not to get into the Promised Land. While it is true that the path which the prices will take as they fluctuate will be influenced by the position of point A, there will never be efficiency in this market. There was no efficiency throughout the process when it converged and there is no efficiency when they do not. But while in the previous story we could pretend that at some point—when we get to A—we will benefit from the promised efficiency, we can no longer make this claim.

Can we consider A as a reference point? Well, we could but only for the purpose of being able to predict how prices will fluctuate. But, as before, we still cannot attribute any of the good properties of point A to any of the prices we observe in this very competitive market. So, the benefits are all concentrated at a point which we will never reach and there is clearly no monotonic progression in our wellbeing. What, then, is the point of pursuing greater competitiveness?

That which determines whether prices will converge or not is a set of conditions on the slopes of demand and supply (and, hence, their elasticities). These conditions require a very specific relationship between the two schedules. This means that for all markets without exception, such conditions should be present. It is enough for one of the market in the economy not to have converging prices for the general convergence of the system to fail. At the same time, there is no plausible reason why all the markets should have this particular relationship between the slope of demand and the slope of supply. This is, therefore, another reason to believe that Walrasian prices, like Marx’ labour values, are merely a benchmark for the system rather than an explanation of how prices are being formed. Marxian values exposed exploitation. Walrasian values condemn competition as an eternally inefficient form of economic and social organisation.

This last point is strengthened once we add to this the realisation that with missing markets, point A in the above diagrams does not constitute an efficient point either. As the social marginal costs of producing x are greater than the private one—represented by the supply schedule—an equilibrium at point A means that the price does not reflect the social cost of the good and, hence, will generate allocative inefficiency. To some extent, failing to gravitate towards an inefficient outcome may be a good thing but not when every other point is equally inefficient.

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Witztum, A. (2019). The Power of Beliefs: The Organisational Principles of Economics’ Paradigmatic Core. In: The Betrayal of Liberal Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10668-3_2

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