The consequences of marginal thinking for the production boundary are dramatic. As we have seen, classical thinkers differed in their definition of who was and was not productive. For Quesnay only farmers were productive; Smith put services in the ‘unproductive’ bracket; and even Marx defined productive workers as those who were working in capitalist production. In marginal thinking, however, such classification was swept aside. What replaced it was the notion that it is only whatever fetches a price in the market (legally) that can be termed productive activity. Moreover, productivity will
...more
