Access to Land and Development
Access to land, and the conditions under which it happens, play a fundamental role in economic development. This is because the way the modes of access to land and the rules and conditions of access are set, as policy instruments, has the potential of inc
- PDF / 185,175,476 Bytes
- 917 Pages / 535.748 x 697.323 pts Page_size
- 23 Downloads / 180 Views
L
(CONTINUED)
Lardner, Dionysius (1793-1859)
Scientific popularizer and railway economist, Lardner was born in Dublin on 3 April 1793 and died on 29 April 1859. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, between 1817 and 1827 and is probably best known for his Cabinet Cyclopaedia of 133 volumes, published between 1829 and 1849. Although Lardner's series was graced by a number of distinguished contributors, he was satirized in the scientific community as 'Dionysius Diddler'. An astronomer as well as an essayist on numerous scientific topics, Lardner often took side trips into other fields. He studied railway engineering in Paris, and was probably well acquainted with the econoengineering work at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees at a time when Jules Dupuit was actively pursuing economic topics. His sole work relating to economics, Railway Economy (1850), was filled with the kind of factual work and analysis being undertaken by the French engineers and by an American pupil of the Ecole, Charles Ellet. Lardner's work caught the eye of W.S. Jevons, who claimed that a reading of Railway Economy in 1857 led him to investigate economics in mathematical terms. There is little doubt that Lardner's book contains important and creative insights into economic theory. An authority on Belgian railroads of the time, Lardner drew up a vast array of facts to develop a theory of the railway
firm's costs and revenues. His theory of profit maximization derived from 'empirical' firm's costs and revenues may be set out graphically (see Figure 1). The railway tariff, which Lardner identified as the independent variable, is displayed on the horizontal axis of the figure while total cost and receipts are measured on the horizontal. The total cost curve shows costs increasing as the tariff is lowered. At a prohibitive tariff Ox, that is, where no traffic would be transported, costs are some positive amount. Fixed costs, which exist whether traffic is carried or not, are an amount xL. As the tariff is lowered, increases in traffic carried cause total costs to increase until they reach maximum at a zero tariff. Both fixed and variable components of cost, then, are considered by Lardner. Lardner formalized his conception of total receipts in the following terms. If, with Lardner, we let r =the tariff imposed per mile on each ton of goods carried; D =the average distance in miles to which each ton of goods is carried; N =the number of tons booked, and; R =the gross receipts from goods transport, then total receipts may be expressed as
R=NDr. As the tariff is lowered from Ox, the average distance of each ton carried, D, and the number of tons booked, N, increase. With reference to Figure 1, lowering the tariff from Ox causes receipts, R in Lardner's equation, to increase to some maximum mp. Tariff reductions below Om, however, cause total receipts to fall, so that at a tariff
y
\ \ \ \ \
'
s'
0
m'
n
m
Tariff
Figure 1
S. N. Durlauf et al. (eds.), The New Palgrave: Dictionary of Economics © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmill
