Sherov abdujabbor

The Marginal Tooth, by Bryan Caplan on EconLog
Every patient gets the same lecture: “If you don’t floss, you’ll loose your teeth. I told you this last time, and you’re still not flossing!” Has it ever occurred to dentists that the marginal benefit of flossing may be less than its marginal cost?…
De Minimis, by Allen R. Sanderson.
Here the “plant and planet advocates” are not entirely consistent. If I wanted to minimize the explicit costs of my eggs, I want the chickens cooped-up in cages on large-scale “egg farms.” Eggs laid by free-range chickens are more costly because production is far less efficient. But those who advocate free-range and organic produce are trading off costs against other values–such as my chickens having a little elbow room and a chance to smell some roses. Why do chickens get to have fun but people don’t? We could, I suppose, have more costly free-range lettuce if we just let wind power turbines scatter the seeds instead of planting them in tidy, efficient rows.
Recycling is appealing because it seems to offer a way to simultaneously reduce the amount of waste disposed in landfills and to save natural resources….
A Little History
Carl Menger, biography in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Carl Menger has the twin distinctions of being the founder of Austrian economics and a cofounder of the marginal utility revolution. Menger worked separately from William Jevons and Leon Walras and reached similar conclusions by a different method. Unlike Jevons, Menger did not believe that goods provide “utils,” or units of utility. Rather, he wrote, goods are valuable because they serve various uses whose importance differs. For example, the first pails of water are used to satisfy the most important uses, and successive pails are used for less and less important purposes.
Leon Walras, biography in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Separately but almost simultaneously with William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger, French economist Leon Walras developed the idea of marginal utility and is thus considered one of the founders of the “marginal revolution.”
Advanced Resources
From The Distribution of Wealth: A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits, by John Bates Clark
We not only admit, but positively claim, that there is a marginal region where wages are adjusted. It furnishes a large outlet for labor; and what men are able to get in this larger marginal field sets the standard of wages. This field is to labor what, in practical thought, the European market is to wheat: it is a place in which any possible surplus of labor may be disposed of at some living rate. If we find such a market, we definitely solve the problem of the law of wages…. [par. VII.26]
Here, then, is a marginal fraction of the supply of labor; and it would seem that it is in a position to set the market rate of pay for all labor. Here, also, is a direct connection between the pay of this marginal part of the laboring force and the product that can be specifically attributed to it. Does this product of marginal labor set the standard of wages, as the price of a final increment sets the general standard of value of commodities? If so, the law of wages would stand thus: (1) By a common mercantile rule, all men of a given degree of ability must take what marginal men of that same ability get. This principle fixes the market rate of wages. (2) Marginal men get what they produce. This principle governs wages more remotely, by fixing a natural standard for them. In this formula we are, indeed, near to the law that we are seeking; but we have not yet reached it. The true law, when accurately stated, sounds much like the foregoing one; but between the two there is a vital difference. [par. VII.29]
In that static condition in which competition would produce its full effects and bring wages to a natural standard, the pay of labor, as has just been shown, would equal the product that could be separately traced to it. We have discovered a limited field in which whatever is produced is due to labor only; but we need to find one that is larger and more elastic. We have to look for an economic field to which many men may go, and in which they will be virtually rent-free and interest-free. They must be able to work unaided and also untaxed and to create a distinguishable product, all of which they will then get. A few men may, of course, till worthless land, and so make themselves free from landlords’ and capitalists’ claims. Many more may utilize instruments of other kinds that are too poor to afford a rent to their owners. A larger number still may get employment as additional workers in establishments that have good working appliances, and that pay no more for the use of them in consequence of the presence of the marginal men…. [par. VIII.1]
It does not follow that, because a man desires that the product of his industry shall not pay tribute to employers, he needs to take himself away from them. Working near to the man who tills a waste piece of land in an independent way, there may be another man who works on similar land for the owner of it, and gets as wages the value of what he raises. This man is as free from a master’s exactions as is the squatter. A man may have, as Adam Smith has said, “neither landlord nor master to share with him,” though he work for a master. If he gives his employer no more in value than his employer gives to him, his product is intact, and it all comes to him as wages. It is in positions like these that most marginal laborers are found. They are not working in solitude, yet their products are distinguishable from all other products…. [par. VIII.2]