Value

The time has come Walras has said To speak of many things. Lewis Carroll, pseudonym of Dodgson, quoted by Samuelson, mistranslated by Kudryavtsev and retranslated by Gerschenkron. Pure economics is, in essen ce, the theory of the determination of prices under a hypothetical regime of free competition. Leon Walras, translated by laffe. Why is wheat more valuable than oats? In this monograph I propose an answer to this question, namely that wheat is more valuable than oats because it is scarcer, and then examine a number of questions which must in turn be answered to justify this.