The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
The marginal utility theory is ordinarily merely a thinly disguised
version of supply and demand doctrine. As usually presented in the
text-books, we have an analysis of the phenomenon of diminishing utility
of a given commodity to a given individual, illustrated by a diagram, in
which the ordinates represent diminishing psychological intensities.
Often a money measure is given to these diminishing intensities, and the
curve is presented as the demand schedule of a given individual. Then,
with little further analysis, a leap is made to the market, and it is
assumed that the market demand-curve, of many individuals, differing in
wealth and character, is a utility-curve, and value in the market is
"explained" by means of marginal utility. I need not here repeat my
criticisms of this procedure.[62] It gives simply a confused statement
of the doctrine of supply and demand. The analysis of utility which
precedes the discussion of market demand is wholly irrelevant, and
merely mixes things up. That such a conception is of no use in solving
the problem of the value of money has been sufficiently indicated in the
chapter on supply and demand.
Sometimes the contention is made that money is unique among goods in
having "no power to satisfy human wants except a power _to purchase_
things which do have such power."[63] This contention, in Professor
Fisher's view, precludes the application of the marginal utility theory
to the problem of the value of money, and he makes no use of marginal
utility in his explanation. Indeed, in the passage from which this
quotation is taken, Professor Fisher says that the quantity theory of
money rests on just this peculiarity of money. Not all writers who
contend that money has no utility _per se_, however, have felt it
necessary to give up the marginal utility theory as a theory of money,
as we shall later see.
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