Empirical Examples of the Primal

At times, nomenclature — what we call things — adds confusion instead of understanding. For most of my career, I have attached the label microeconomics to the study of individual decisions and the implications of those decisions. Intuitively, the economics of small units within the economy (i.e., the micro) contrasts with the analysis of the overall or larger economy — macroeconomics. In this juxtaposition, I have included production economics in microeconomics. Specifically, I have been interested in what production has to say about individual firm or household decisions. However, in retrospective, this taxonomy may not serve the student of economics or agricultural economics well. The production function in general and the Cobb—Douglas function in particular have found its way into several macroeconomic analyses. In fact, the original article which introduced the Cobb—Douglas form to the general economics profession deals with wages in a very macroeconomic way:The progressive refinement during the recent years in the measurement of the volume of production in manufacturing suggests the possibility of attempting (1) to measure the changes in the amount of labor and capital that have been used to turn out this volume of goods, and (2) to determine what relationships existed between the three factors of labor, capital, and product (Cobb and Douglas, 1928, p. 139)…