Introduction

The economics of Alfred Marshall is about the monetary measure of motivation as man goes about the ‘ordinary business in life’.1 It is about demanding and supplying, consuming and producing, marketing and sharing out. It is about the exchanging of inputs and outputs by means of voluntary contracts agreed upon within the overall framework of the market economy. It is about inertia and equilibrium but also about time, search, ignorance, uncertainty, evolution and change. It is about individual choice but also about interdependent preference patterns, want-creation, status symbols, fashion, custom and convention. It is about isolated action and the homogeneous commodity but also about collusion, product-differentiation, size, power, collective bargaining and struggle. It is about selfishness and self-interest but also about activity, generosity and empathy such as transcend the rational quid pro quo. It is in short the economics of a man who thought big and thought deep, a man of vision and imagination who, like the poet–architect–adventurer so vividly described by Shackle, saw before him ‘a landscape inexhaustibly rich in suggestions and materials’ 2— and who, while not neglecting the minutiae of economic problem solving, was also capable of ranging widely and of seeing much.