Talk:Marginal utility/Archive 1

message: The criticism of Marginal utility and its explanation of the diamond water paradox is clearly ignorant and misses the nuance in marginal utility completely. Marginal utility is certainly not a perfect theory, but to say that it cannot explain prices, supply, or demand is just wrong. The logic in that passage does not make sense. 
This article needs a more sophisticated critique of marginal utility. For example, in the diamond water paradox criticism section, it says that classical economists would explain the cost of diamonds by the production process. While this is the classical argument, it does not account for the fact that if water was scarce, it could very likely be expensive, at least more expensive. See Menger's distinction between economic goods and non-economic goods, also Jevon's theory of pleasure and pain, chaper 4. 
the criticism section's "therefore it is the cost of production which determines price, not marginal utility" is too simplistic. The quality of the argument does not justify its confident, repeated use of "therefore blah blah blah" in both criticism sections. Someone please write a better critique of marginal utility. Both the neutrality and nuance of this article has been compromised. 
Xiaoxitu 23:04, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Bill j, you plainly haven't read the works of the marginalists except to the extent that you've found them heavily edited — crippled — by hostile secondary, tertiary, or quaternary sources.  And your misrepresentation will not transcend to truth by way of your verbosity. —SlamDiego 20:46, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

message: Is this grammatically correct?
"...in a period when psychologists were much interested in the Weber-Fechner law of sensation."
I was just going to change it, but I didn't want to be ignorant of a possible strange use of grammar.
Thoughts?
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.71.132.121 (talk • contribs) 
:Seems to be correct to me. I just restored this article, but the "law of senation" is actually pretty irrelevant for the discussion of marginal utility (at least within economics). Intangible 11:06, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And distorted things horribly (as well as consistently misspelling “Wieser” as “Weiser”).  You tried to erase Menger, as if the Austrian school began with Wieser, to make the time-line fit Marxian myth. (And you ought to actually read Ricardo some day.  He offered the labor theory of value as a useful approximation; it was vulgar Ricardians who made it dogma.) —SlamDiego 16:18, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grammar 

message: This article is terrible.  Every paragraph at which I looked needed or needs to be rewritten. (I have already rewritten a couple, but I so despair of this mess that it may be a while before I can bring myself to wrestle with more.) —SlamDiego 19:44, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad 

message: There is still much more work that can or should be done, but this article is no longer truly awful.
One thing about which I will probably write is the eclipsing of the theory of marginal utility resulting (in the context of presumptions of quantification) from the works of Hicks and Allen, followed by its revival (quantified) with the work of v. Neumann & Morgenstern and with that of Savage. (Some mention of Ramsey should be made.) —SlamDiego 16:10, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  No longer utterly awful