Work · Sociology & Social Theory
Manual of Political Economy
Develops general-equilibrium economics on the basis of choices and indifference curves and defines the state in which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off.
Introduction
The “Manual of Political Economy” appeared in Milan in 1906 and in a revised French edition with a mathematical appendix in 1909. Pareto here puts the equilibrium theory of his predecessor Walras on a new footing: the theory needs no measurable utility – economic satisfaction he calls “ophelimity” – but only the order in which people prefer alternatives, represented by indifference curves taken from Edgeworth. The book treats tastes and obstacles, production, exchange and capital, and contains the definition of a maximum of ophelimity for a community: a state from which no one can gain without someone else losing. Through John Hicks, Paul Samuelson and others this became, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Pareto criterion of welfare economics; Rawls and Sen later discussed its moral limits.
More works by Vilfredo Pareto
Sources: Wikidata
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