Jevons Versus Marshal On Ricardo

I have been pointing out that much teaching in most universities and high schools in economics is propaganda. Mistakes that were exposed more than half a century ago continue to be taught. Alternatives have been available, at varying levels, in textbooks for decades.

Does an alternative, building on classical political economy and Marx, exist? Assertions on this topic go back more than a century.

A (bad) way of reading classical political economy is that its proponents were struggling towards developing the one true system, that of marginalist economists. With this incorrect view of continuity, you might say incorrectly that they overemphasized supply. Their theories were corrected by developing theories of utility and demand.

A better reading recognizes that they had their own approach. Jevons held this view, although he was wrong about which approach was better:

"When at length a true system of Economics comes to be established, it will be seen that that able but wrong-headed man, David Ricardo, shunted the car of Economic science on to a wrong line - a line, however, on which it was further urged towards confusion by his equally able and, wrong-headed admirer, John Stuart Mill." -- William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, Preface to the Second Edition, p. li.

Marshall, on the other hand, was an early progenitor of a supposedly generous reading that blurs the distinctiveness of the classical theory of value and distribution:

"1... [Ricardo's] book makes no pretence to be systematic. He was with difficulty induced to publish it; and if in writing it he had in view any readers at all, they were chiefly those statesmen and business men with whom he associated. So he purposely omitted many things which were necessary for the logical completeness of his argument, but which they would regard as obvious. And further, as he told Malthus in the following October, he was 'but a poor master of language.' His exposition is as confused as his thought is profound; he uses words in artificial senses which he does not explain, and to which he does not adhere; and he changes from one hypothesis to another without giving notice.

If then we seek to understand him rightly, we must interpret him generously, more generously than he himself interpreted Adam Smith. When his words are ambiguous, we must give them that interpretation which other passages in his writings indicate that he would have wished us to give them. If we do this with the desire to ascertain what he really meant, his doctrines, though very far from complete, are free from many of the errors that are commonly attributed to them...

...Again, in a profound, though very incomplete, discussion of the difference between 'Value and Riches' he seems to be feeling his way towards the distinction between marginal and total utility. For by Riches he means total utility, and he seems to be always on the point of stating that value corresponds to the increment of riches which results from that part of the commodity which it is only just worth the while of purchasers to buy; and that when the supply runs short, whether temporarily in consequence of a passing accident, or permanently in consequence of an increase in cost of production, there is a rise in that marginal increment of riches which is measured by value, at the same time that there is a diminution in the aggregate riches, the total utility, derived from the commodity. Throughout the whole discussion he is trying to say, though (being ignorant of the terse language of the differential calculus) he did not get hold of the right words in which to say it neatly, that marginal utility is raised and total utility is lessened by any check to supply.

2. But while not thinking that he had much to say that was of great importance on the subject of utility, he believed that the connection between cost of production and value was imperfectly understood; and that erroneous views on this subject were likely to lead the country astray in practical problems of taxation and finance; and so he addressed himself specially to this subject. But here also he made short cuts." -- Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, Appendix I

Marshall is wrong here. For example, Ricardo describes riches as a collection of commodities. They were not measured along a single scale, whatever measurement level you might think that scale obtains. Even less could his labor values be said to have been marginal utilities.

Samuel Hollander is the greatest exponent in my lifetime of the view of continuity in the development of theories of value and distribution. Even he, though, recognizes that Marx had reasons for his reading of Ricardo, but I forget where.