> Mike - It's hard to wrap my mind around what a "vulgar" supply-and-demand
> theory would look like without schedules. Does this mean when Victorians
> said "demand went up" they meant "the quantity demanded went up"? And then,
> how did they conceptualize the relationship between demand/supply and price?
> How can someone understand that "the quantity demanded depends negatively on
> price" yet fail to conceptualize a demand schedule?
Yeah - as Schumpeter puts it in his History of Economic Analysis: "The concepts, so familiar to every beginner of our own days, of demand _schedules_ or curves of willingness to buy (under certain general conditions) specified quantities of a commodity at specified prices, proved unbelievably hard to discover and to distinguish from the concepts - quantity demanded and quantity supplied. Malthus made indeed some progress toward clarification. But the reader needs only to look up Senior ('Outline', pp. 14 et seq.) to satisfy himself of the blundering way in which he tried to explain these simple matters. Or were they so simple after all? Is it not a fact, which stares at us from the histories of all sciences, that it is much more difficult for the human mind to forge the most elementary conceptual schemes than it is to elaborate the most complicated superstructures when those elements are well in hand?" [p. 602]
On second thought, though, I would maybe say that what really makes vulgar supply-and-demand analysis vulgar, more than the lack of a conception of schedules, is a failure to fully consider the reactions to disequilibrium of supply and demand, in other words a failure to understand what adjusts in tendencies towards equilibrium. (Although Marx talked in terms of tendencies rather than equilibrium, he generally defined tendencies in terms of their end-point and his theory of relative prices is really a theory of general equilibrium, though he never implies an actual economy would ever reach equilibrium.)
Mike Beggs