AN ANALYSIS OF THE SUPPLY CURVE: DOES IT DEPICT HOMOGENEITY AMONG ITS CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS? ANOTHER REJOINDER TO NOZICK.
Abstract
The supply curve embodies prices and quantities offered for sale of a good. But need each element of this supply be interchangeable? If so, then the person to whom the supply curve applies much necessarily be indifferent among all of these homogeneous components of the supply curve. However, Austrian economists reject the notion of indifference. Must they then jettison one of the most basic elements of economics, the supply curve? In this paper, we aver that the supply curve presupposes the notion of the same good and we approximate ‘the same good’ in steps. First, we delve into the concept of a good as such and only then do we consider what an economic good is, the latter being a proper subset of the former. Eventually, we order the set of economic goods by the relation of sameness, thus arriving at non-overlapping equivalence classes with their respective elements being the same goods. Equipped with this framework, we ultimately try to resist the Nozick’s challenge.
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