William Barnett Ii, Walter E. Block
The Antimathematicality of Demand Curves
Summary:
Mathematics has proven so helpful in the physical sciences such as physics that it has been improperly applied to economics. The dismal science studies purposeful human action, while purpose in the hard sciences is properly dismissed as anthropomorphic. The present paper takes the demand curve as a case in point. It demonstrates that this tool of analysis is fundamentally flawed in that it violates its own economic assumption of ceteris paribus, and also the mathematical requirement that only the proper number of variables may vary along a given graph in two-dimensional space.
