An early rebuttal of the ‘representative consumer’ – and what it teaches us

The notion of the representative consumer:

Around 1900 John Bates Clark introduced the mythical ‘representative consumer’, the idea that you can model the sector households as if it is one person, as well as the idea that the ‘social utility’ (his phrase) experienced by this entity is the ultimate standard of social welfare (emphasis added):

>”If each man could measure the usefulness of an article by the effort that it costs him to get it, and if he could attain a fixed unit of effort, he could state the utility of a number of different articles in a sum total. Similarly, if all society acts in reality as one man, it makes such measurements of all commodities, and the trouble arising from the fact that there are many measurers disappear. A market secures this result, for society acts as a unit—like an individual buyer (chapter XXIV.14).

Interestingly, the economist Charles E. Persons, citing the last sentence…

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Author: Damian Merciar

Damian Merciar is Managing Director of Merciar Business Consulting, http://www.merciar.com, a niche business economics consultancy founded in 1998. He has over twenty years experience in the areas of commercial Business Strategy. He is experienced in the transition environments of nationalized to private sector state utilities and the senior practice of commercial management, advisorial consultancy, and implementation. He has carried out policy advisory work for government ministries and been an adviser to institutional bodies proposing changes to government. He holds an MSc Economics from the University of Surrey’s leading Economics department and an MBA from the University of Kent. Also attending the leading University in the Middle East, studying International Relations and Language, for which he won a competitive international scholarship, and has a BA (Hons) in Economic History and Political Economy from the University of Portsmouth. He is currently based in London. View all posts by Damian Merciar