Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on October 25, 2017
… is from page 299 of the late Paul Heyne‘s 1995 article “Economics Is a Way of Thinking,” as it is reprinted in the superb 2008 collection of Heyne’s writings, “Are Economists Basically Immoral?” and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion (Geoffrey Brennan and A.M.C. Waterman, eds.) (original emphases):
That is the “miracle of the market.” One of the economist’s most important tasks is to demythologize this miracle by enabling people to see how and why it occurs. We do that by teaching the process of supply and demand, and by teaching it as a process of continuous, ongoing interaction among suppliers and demanders. This is not an economizing process. Each supplier economizes and each demander economizes, but their interactions cannot appropriately be viewed as an economizing process in which there is something to be maximized, such as wealth or utility. It is an exchange process, and as such it has no maximand.
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