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return instead of the high returns one would expect with high fares. What will adjust is simply the number of
cabs and the fraction of the time they actually carry passengers. Cabs will get more for each rider, but each cab
will have fewer riders.
Other situations of rent-seeking occur when artificially high urban wages attract migrants from rural areas.
If the wage does not adjust downward to equate supply and demand, the rate of urban unemployment will rise
until further migration is deterred. Still other examples are in banking and drugs. When the "margin" in banking
is set too high, new banks enter and/or branches of old ones proliferate until further entry is deterred. Artifi-
cially maintained drug prices lead, in some countries, to a pharmacy on almost every block.
Rent-seeking also occurs in circumstances where something of value (like import licenses or radio/TV
franchises) is being given away or sold below its true value. In such cases potential buyers often spend large
amounts in "lobbying" to improve their chances of getting the prize. Indeed, a broad view of rent-seeking easily
covers most cases of lobbying (using real resources in efforts to gain legislative or executive "favors").
The great unifying principles of microeconomics are, ever and always, supply and demand. The normative
overtone of microeconomics comes from the fact that competitive supply price represents value as seen by sup-
pliers, and competitive demand price represents value as seen by demanders. The motivating force is that of
human beings, always gravitating toward choices and arrangements that reflect their tastes. The miracle of it all
is that on the basis of such simple and straightforward underpinnings, a rich tapestry of analysis, insights, and
understanding can be woven. This brief article can only give its readers a glimpse-hopefully a tempting one-of
the richness, beauty, and promise of that tapestry.
NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS
By E. Roy Weintraub
Economists publicly disagree with each other so often that they are easy targets for standup comedians. Yet
non-economists may not realize that the disagreements are mostly over the details – the way in which the big
picture is to be focused on the small screen. When it comes to broad economic theory, most economists agree.
President Richard Nixon, defending deficit spending against the conservative charge that it was "Keynesian", is
reported to have replied, "We're all Keynesians now". In fact, what he should have said is "We're all neoclassi-
cals now, even the Keynesians", because what is taught to students, what is mainstream economics today, is
neoclassical economics.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, English-speaking economists generally shared a perspective on
value theory and distribution theory. The value of a bushel of corn, for example, was thought to depend on the
costs involved in producing that bushel. The output or product of an economy was thought to be divided or dis-
tributed among the different social groups in accord with the costs borne by those groups in producing the out-
put. This, roughly, was the "Classical Theory" developed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Mal-
thus, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx.
But there were difficulties in this approach. Chief among them was that prices in the market did not neces-
sarily reflect the "value" so defined, for people were often willing to pay more than an object was "worth". The
classical "substance" theories of value, which took value to be a property inherent in an object, gradually gave
way to a perspective in which value was associated with the relationship between the object and the person ob-
taining the object. Several economists in different places at about the same time (the 1870s and 1880s) began to
base value on the relationship between costs of production and "subjective elements", later called "supply" and
"demand". This came to be known as the Marginal Revolution in economics, and the overarching theory that
developed from these ideas came to be called neoclassical economics. The first to use the term "neoclassical
economics" seems to have been the American economist Thorstein Veblen.
The framework of neoclassical economics is easily summarized. Buyers attempt to maximize their gains
from getting goods, and they do this by increasing their purchases of a good until what they gain from an extra
unit is just balanced by what they have to give up to obtain it. In this way they maximize "utility" – the satisfac-
tion associated with the consumption of goods and services. Likewise, individuals provide labor to firms that
wish to employ them, by balancing the gains from offering the marginal unit of their services (the wage they
would receive) with the disutility of labor itself – the loss of leisure. Individuals make choices at the margin.
This results in a theory of demand for goods, and supply of productive factors.
Similarly, producers attempt to produce units of a good so that the cost of producing the incremental or
marginal unit is just balanced by the revenue it generates. In this way they maximize profits. Firms also hire
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