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Kingston Masters Political Economy Lecture 02: Fallacies in the theory of demand

Summary:
This second lecture covers the standard exposition of supply and demand theory, and then explains how the individual demand curve is derived, which obeys the so-called “Law of Demand”, that demand necessarily falls for a product when its relative price rises. I then cover the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, which shows that this “Law” does not survive ...

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This second lecture covers the standard exposition of supply and demand theory, and then explains how the individual demand curve is derived, which obeys the so-called “Law of Demand”, that demand necessarily falls for a product when its relative price rises. I then cover the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, which shows that this “Law” does not survive aggregation: when you consider more than one consumer in isolation, the “income” and “substitition” effects of a relative price change can’t be disentangled, and consequently a market demand curve derived by aggregating the demand curves of individuals who all have downward-sloping “Hicksian compensated” demand curves can have any (polynomial) shape at all: the smoothly downward-sloping market demand curves of textbooks and mainstream macroeconomic models are fantasies.



This doesn’t mean that demand doesn’t fall for most products when their relative prices rise; it just means that Neoclassical theory has no explanation for why this occurs. Since the core theory omits the distribution of income, this implies that the real-world reason why demand for a product falls as its relative price rises is that less well-off consumers can’t afford to buy it.



Steve Keen
Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian-born, British-based economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Augusto Graziani, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and François Quesnay.

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