Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on January 16, 2021
… is from page 109 of UCLA economists Armen Alchian’s and William Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:
The first question really should be, “Why so much attention to price adjustments?” A major reason is that price adjustments make the aggregate quantity demanded of a good equal the aggregate available supply. Unhappily, our tastes, preferences, or total worths don’t change to make us desire to have only as much of a good as our income allows. Prices change so as to reconcile personal conflicts for available goods, they direct production from the less-highly to the more-highly demanded goods, and they affect your earnings and the kind of work you will be doing.
DBx: Huge amounts of mischief are caused by the widespread failure to understand the source and role of prices expressed in money and determined on markets. There is no single volume that teaches price theory as well as does Alchian’s and Allen’s legendary text.
Bill Allen (pictured above) died yesterday, a few months shy of his 97th birthday. He will be missed.
Back in 2010, my GMU Econ colleague Larry White – who earned his PhD at UCLA – interviewed Bill Allen.
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