Note 1111 — Chapter I · : THE HEDONISTS

Condillac had already drawn attention to this fact (see p. 48), and Buffon had noted it even before that. “The poor man’s coin which goes to pay for the necessaries of life and the last coin that goes to fill the financier’s purse are in the opinion of the mathematician two units of the same order, but to the moralist the one is worth a louis, the other not a cent.” (Essai d’Arithmétique morale.)

The connection between quantity and demand is best expressed by means of a curve either of utility or of demand (see p. 532). Along the horizontal line let the figures 1, 2, 3, 4 denote the quantities consumed, and from each of these points draw a vertical line to denote the intensity of demand for each of these quantities. The height of the ordinate decreases more or less rapidly as the quantity increases, until at last it falls to zero.