8. Money, Costs, Prices, and Alfred Marshall
In the E.R.E., therefore, every good sold to consumers will sell at a certain final
equilibrium price, and at certain total sales. These receipts will accrue, in part, to capitalists
in the form of interest income, and the remainder to owners of land and labor. The payments
Costs of income to the producers have also been popularly termed costs.
These are clearly money costs, or money expenses, and obviously are not the same thing as costs
in the psychic sense of subjective opportunity foregone.
Money costs may be ex post as well as ex ante.
In the ERE, of course, ex ante and ex post calculations are always the same.
However, the two concepts become linked when psychic costs are appraised as much as possible
in monetary terms.
Thus, payment to factors may be 95 ounces and recorded as a cost, while the capitalist
who earns an interest of 5 ounces considers 100 as an opportunity cost.
If for the moment we include as money costs factor payments and interest, then in the
ERE money costs equal total money sales for every firm in every line of production.
Strictly this assumption is incorrect, and we make it in this section only for purposes
Profits of Simplicity For interest may be an opportunity cost for
an individual investor, but it is not a money cost, nor is it an opportunity cost for the
aggregate of capitalists.
A firm earns entrepreneurial profits when its return is more than interest, suffers
entrepreneurial losses when its return is less.
In our production process, consumers will pay 100 ounces, money sales, and money costs
are 100 ounces, factor plus interest income, and there will be similar equality for all
other goods and processes.
What this means in essence is that there are no entrepreneurial profits or losses in the
CERE, because there is no change of data or uncertainty about possible change.
If total money sales equal total money costs, then it evidently follows that total money
sales per unit sold will equal total money costs per unit sold.
This follows from elementary rules of arithmetic, but the money sales per unit are equal to
to the money price of the good, by definition, while we shall call the total money costs
per unit the average money cost of the good.
It likewise follows, therefore, that price will equal average money cost for every good
in the ERE.
Strange as it may seem, a great many writers on economics have deduced from this a curious
conclusion indeed.
They have deduced that in the long run, that is, in the ERE, the fact that costs equals
sales or that cost equals price implies that costs determine price.
The price of the good discussed previously is 100 ounces per unit, allegedly because
the cost, average money cost, is 100 ounces per unit.
This is supposed to be the law of price determination in the long run.
It would seem to be crystal clear, however, that the truth is precisely the reverse.
The price of the final product is determined by the valuations and demands of the consumers,
and this price determines what the cost will be.
If the consumers value the product mentioned so that its price is 50 ounces instead of
In the long run, when the effects of uncertainty are removed, that costs of production, here,
factor payment plus interest payment, will equal the final price.
We have seen above how factor incomes are at the mercy of consumer demand, and fluctuate
according to that demand.
Higher payments are the result of sales to consumers, and do not determine the latter
in advance.
Costs of production, then, are at the mercy of final price, and not the other way around.
It is ironic that it is precisely in the ERE that this causative phenomenon should be the
clearest.
For in the ERE, we see quite evidently that consumers pay and determine the final price
Price of the Product, that it is through these payments and these payments alone that factors
and interest are paid, that therefore the amount of the payments and the total costs
of production are determined by price and not vice versa.
Money costs are the opposite of a basic determining factor.
They are dependent on the price of the product, and on consumer demands.
In the real world of uncertainty, it is more difficult to see this, because factors are
paid in advance of the sale of the product, since the capitalist entrepreneurs speculatively
advance money to the factors in the expectation of being able to recoup their money with a
The Surplus for Interest and Profit After Sale to the Consumers
Whether they do so or not depends on their foresight regarding the state of consumer demand
and the future prices of consumers' goods.
In the real world of immediate market prices, of course, the existence of entrepreneurial
profit and loss will always prevent costs and receipts, cost and price, from being identical,
And it is obvious to all that price is solely determined by valuations of stock, by utilities,
and not at all by money cost.
But although most economists recognize that in the real world, the so-called short run,
costs cannot determine price, they are seduced by the habit of the individual entrepreneur
of Dealing in Terms of Cost as the Determining Factor and they apply this procedure to the
case of the ERE and therefore to the inherent long-run tendencies of the economy.
Their grave error, as will be discussed further below, comes from viewing the economy from
the standpoint of an individual entrepreneur rather than from that of an economist.
To the individual entrepreneur, the cost of factors is largely determined by forces outside
himself and his own sales.
The economist, however, must see how money costs are determined, and, taking account
of all the interrelations in the economy, must recognize that they are determined by
by Final Prices Reflecting Consumer Demands and Valuations
The source of the error will become clearer when we consider a world of non-specific as
well as specific factors.
However, the essentials of our analysis and its conclusion remain the same in that more
complex and realistic case.
The classical economists were under the delusion that the price of the final product is determined
by costs of production, or rather, they fluctuated between this doctrine and the labor theory
of value, which isolated the money costs of labor and picked that segment of the cost
of production as the determinant of price.
They slurred over the determination of the prices of such goods as old paintings that
already existed and needed no further production.
The correct relation between prices and costs, as outlined earlier, was developed along with
other outstanding contributions to economics by the Austrian economists, including the
Austrians Carl Menger, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser, and the Englishman
W. Stanley Jevons.
It was with the writings of the Austrian School in the 1870s and 1880s that economics was
truly established as a science.
The very interesting researches by Emil Kauder indicate that the essentials of the Austrian
marginal utility theory, the basis of the view that price determines cost and not vice
and vice versa or mutually had already been formulated by French and Italian economists
of the 17th and 18th centuries, and that the English classical school shunted economics
onto a very wrong road, a road from which economics was extricated only by the Austrians.
Unfortunately, in the science of economics, retrogression in knowledge has taken place
is almost as often as progression.
The enormous advance provided by the Austrian School, on this point as on others, was blocked
and reversed by the influence of Alfred Marshall, who attempted to rehabilitate the classicists
and integrate them with the Austrians, while disparaging the contributions of the latter.
It was unfortunately the Marshallian and not the Austrian approach that exerted the most
influence over later writers.
This influence is partly responsible for the current myth among economists that the Austrian
School is effectively dead and has no more to contribute and that everything of lasting
worth that it had to offer was effectively stated and integrated in Alfred Marshall's
principles.
Marshall tried to rehabilitate the cost of production theory of the classicists by conceding
According to Marshall, both utility and money costs determine price, like blades of a scissors,
but one blade is more important in the short run and another in the long run.
He concludes that, as a general rule, the shorter the period we are considering, the
greater must be the share of our attention which is given to the influence of demand
on value, and the longer the period, the more important will be the influence of cost of
production on value.
The actual value at any time, the market value as it is often called, is often more influenced
by passing events and by causes whose action is fitful and short-lived than by those which
work persistently.
But in long periods these fitful and irregular causes in large measure efface one another's
influence so that in the long run persistent causes dominate value completely.
The implication is quite clear.
If one deals with short-run market values, one is being quite superficial and dwelling
only on fitful and transient causes, so much for the Austrians.
But if one wants to deal with the really basic matters, the really lasting and permanent
causes of prices, he must concentrate on costs of production, pace the classicists.
This impression of the Austrians, their alleged neglect of the long period and one-sided neglect
of costs, has been stamped on economics ever since.
Marshall's analysis suffers from a grave methodological defect, indeed from an almost
hopeless methodological confusion as regards the short run and the long run.
He considers the long run as actually existing, as being the permanent, persistent, observable
element beneath the fitful, basically unimportant flux of market value.
He admits on page 350 that even the most persistent causes are, however, liable to change.
But he clearly indicates that they are far less likely to change than the fitful market
values.
When indeed lies their long-run nature.
He regards the long-run data then as underlying the transient market values in a way similar
to that in which the basic sea level underlies the changing waves and tides.
This analogy, though not used in this context, was often used by classical economists as
has applied to prices and the price level, an application equally erroneous.
For Marshall, then, the long-run data are something that can be spotted and marked by
an observer.
Indeed, since they change far more slowly than the market values, they can be observed
more accurately.
Marshall's conception of the long run is completely fallacious, and this eliminates
It's the whole groundwork of his theoretical structure.
The long-run, by its very nature, never does and never can exist.
This does not mean that long-run, or ERE, analysis is not important.
On the contrary, only through the concept of the ERE can we subject to catallactic analysis,
The ERE is the goal, albeit shifting in the concrete sense, toward which the market moves, but the point at issue is that it is not observable or real, as are actual market prices.
We have seen the characteristics of the evenly rotating economy.
The ERE is the condition that comes into being and continues to obtain when the present existing
market data – valuations, technology, resources – remain constant.
It is a theoretical construct of the economist that enables him to point out in what directions
As the economy tends to be moving at any given time, it also enables the economist to isolate
various elements in his analysis of the economy of the real world.
To analyze the determining forces in a world of change, he must construct hypothetically
a world of non-change.
This is far different from, indeed, it is the reverse of, saying that the long run exists
or that it is somehow more permanently or more persistently existent than the actual
market data.
The actual market prices, on the contrary, are the only ones that ever exist, and they
are the resultants of actual market data, consumer demands, resources, etc., that themselves
change continually.
The long run is not more stable.
This data necessarily change along with the data on the market.
The fact that costs equal prices in the long run does not mean that costs will actually
equal prices, but that the tendency exists, a tendency that is continually being disrupted
in reality by the very fitful changes in market data that Marshall points out.
Paul is here committing the famous fallacy of conceptual realism in which theoretical
constructs are mistaken for actually existing entities.
In sum, rather than being in some sense more persistent and more real than the actual market,
the long run of the ERE is not real at all, but a very useful theoretical construct that
That enables the economist to point out the direction in which the market is moving at
any given time, specifically toward the elimination of profits and losses if existing market data
remain the same.
Thus, the ERE concept is especially helpful in the analysis of profits and losses as compared
to interest, but the market data are the only actual reality.
This is not to deny, and the Austrians never did deny, that subjective costs, in the sense
of opportunity costs and utilities foregone, are important in the analysis of production.
In particular, the disutilities of labor and of waiting, as expressed in the time preference
ratios, determine how much of people's energies and how much of their savings will go into
the production process.
This in the broadest sense will determine or help to determine the total supply of all
goods that will be produced.
But these costs are themselves subjective utilities, so that both blades of the scissors
are governed by the subjective utility of individuals.
This is a monistic and not a dualistic causal explanation.
The costs, furthermore, have no direct influence on the relative amount of the stock of each
good to be produced.
Consumers will evaluate the various stocks of goods available.
How much productive energy and savings will go into producing stock of one particular
good and how much into producing another?
In other words, the relative stocks of each product will depend in turn on entrepreneurial
Marshall's Treatment of the Greatest Monetary Profit
Development of subjective costs was also highly fallacious.
Instead of the idea of opportunity costs, he had the notion that they were real costs
that could be added in terms of measurable units.
Money costs of production then became the necessary supply prices that entrepreneurs
had to pay in order to call forth an adequate supply of the efforts and weightings to produce
a Supply of the Product.
These real costs were then supposed to be the fundamental persisting element that backstops
money costs of production and allowed Marshall to talk of the more persisting, long-run,
normal situation.
Marshall's great error here, and it has permeated the works of his followers and of present-day
is to regard costs and production exclusively from the point of view of an isolated individual entrepreneur or an isolated individual industry rather than viewing the whole economy in all its interrelations.
We must hasten to point out that this is by no means the same criticism as the Neo-Keynesian
charge that economists must deal in broad aggregates and not with individual cases.
The latter approach is even worse, since it begins with holes that have no basis in reality
whatever.
What we are advocating is a theory that deals with all the individuals as they interact
in the Economy, Furthermore, this is the Austrian and not the Walrassian approach, which has
recently come into favor.
The latter deals with interrelations of individuals, the general equilibrium approach, but only
in the ERE, and with mathematical abstractions in the ERE.
Paul is dealing of necessity with particular prices of different goods, and he is attempting
to show that alleged costs of production determine these prices in the long run.
But it is completely erroneous to tie up particular goods with labor versus leisure and with consuming
versus waiting costs, for the latter are only general phenomena, applying and diffusing
Banking Throughout the Entire Economic System.
The price necessary to call forth a non-specific factor is the highest price this factor can
earn elsewhere, an opportunity cost.
What it can attain elsewhere is basically determined by the state of consumer demand
elsewhere.
The foregone leisure and consumption costs in general only help to determine the size,
The general stock of labor and savings that will be applied to production.
All this will be treated further.