From: Ian Wright (iwright@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Mon Apr 11 2005 - 15:46:46 EDT
> So the unit labour-content of corn is determined at the margin of cultivation. > and is equal to dN/dX, the marginal rate at which labour is required to produce > extra corn. It was the expression X' dN/dX that I didn't understand (which defined labour-content of X' at the margin). dN/dX is a gradient, and represents the instantaneous change in N wrt X. But X' is a substantive amount of corn. How can it make economic sense to multiply X' by a gradient? If we want the labour-content of X' then don't we need to take the line integral of the production function from X=a to X=a+X', where a is the current number of labour-hours devoted to corn production and X' is the extra corn required? -Ian.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 12 2005 - 00:00:01 EDT