Dealing With Time In Economic Analysis: Some Marshallian Insights

According to Alfred Marshall, the element of time is the most important and difficult aspect to deal with in the economic analysis. Accordingly, he has placed the concept of time at the core of his economic reasoning, and he has developed a number of analytical tools that allow including time in his analytical framework: most notably, the cœteris paribus pound, the representative firm, and the distinction between short and long periods. However, he encountered an insurmountable impasse when dealing with the real elapsing of time in his static framework: the solution proposed in his Principles of Economics remained, for him, highly unsatisfactory, problematic, and incomplete. The real elapsing of time—unavoidable in his reflections—copes very badly indeed with his analytical construction based on equilibrium. The continuity of time is the element of the Marshallian analysis most quickly criticized and rejected. After him, in the economic analysis, time gradation was rigorously divided into “short” and “long” periods, whereas Marshall’s concerns for the continuity of real time were banished from what was considered a “rigorous” analysis. The main aims of this paper are to frame Marshall’s distinction between short and long periods and to underline those aspects of his contribution that were lost or were substantially simplified in later literature.