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Natural price and the long run: Alfred Marshall’s misreading of Adam Smith

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  • David Andrews

Abstract

This article challenges Alfred Marshall’s widely accepted claim that it was Adam Smith’s ‘doctrine’ that ‘the “natural” value of a commodity is that which economic forces tend to bring about in the long run’. Smith did not define natural price in this way either explicitly or implicitly. The classical natural price of a commodity functioned instead as a reproduction price, the price that is just sufficient to maintain an ongoing supply of the commodity to the market, a concept fundamentally different from a long-run outcome.

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  • David Andrews, 2015. "Natural price and the long run: Alfred Marshall’s misreading of Adam Smith," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 39(1), pages 265-279.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:39:y:2015:i:1:p:265-279.
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    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/beu028
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    Cited by:

    1. Harry Bloch, 2022. "The language of pluralism from the history of the theory of price determination: Natural price, equilibrium price and administered price," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 73(4), pages 1094-1111, November.
    2. Antonio D’Agata, 2018. "Freeing long‐period prices from the uniform profit rate hypothesis: A general model of long‐period positions," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 69(4), pages 847-861, November.

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