1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
At the heart of the endless quarrel over whether utility or cost is the ultimate source of value lies, on Böhm-Bawerk's diagnosis, a single equivocal word: "cost." This 1894 article, translated for an American audience by C. W. Macfarlane, patiently separates its meanings — synchronous money outlay from historical sacrifice, labor measured by duration from labor measured by pain — and asks which of them prices actually obey. He grants the law of cost real force, but only as a leveling principle that shifts productive powers among competing uses; what looks like cost is usually the marginal utility of the alternative products those powers might have made. Against Marshall, Macvane, and the disutility theorists, and exposing the circle of explaining product value by labor value and labor value by product value, he concludes that the ultimate standard of value is human well-being, expressed chiefly through utility.
It is, therefore, utility and not disutility which, as well on the side of supply as of demand, determines the height of the price.