Talk:Aggregation of individual demand to total, or market, demand

I added to this article. The article has good points but many factual innacuracies and POV comments. One is:

"The method of this aggregation is typically not discussed at the undergraduate level, but its impossibility entirely invalidates the rest of microeconomic market theory. It tells us that a separate means must be used to choose policy for the distribution of wealth; the market "equilibrium" does not optimise anything if the distribution of wealth is allowed to vary."


 * 1) It does not invalidate the rest of microeconomic market theory.  Given certain assumptions, the "rest of microeconomic market theory" is just fine for certain conclusions.  It may be accurate to say microeconomic theory cannot be correctly applied to ... because ...


 * 1) The market equlibrium does still create Pareto optimality for each participant, so the last statement above is incorrect. It may not globally optimize (which is not certain anyway) utility, but the sentence as it stands is false.

This is just one of many egregious statements in the article, so I am soliciting help to fix it. The article could have great merit in discussing the failures in market economics at providing a global optimization of social utility. If those failures are true, it still does not invalidate micro theory, it just means it is not applicable to that problem. - Taxman 23:52, Jun 21, 2004 (UTC)

If nothing else, this article has a very unusual title. How about we move it somewhere else? How about aggregation of individual demand? - Nat Krause 08:36, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I think it should just be merged into the relevant article and/or deleted. It's an essay so I'm not sure how much of it could be salvaged since it is unreferenced. Maybe we should solicit a wider opinion? - Taxman Talk 12:07, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)
 * How about just changing it to "Aggregation" - the disamb page already takes you to it under that title.radek 20:01, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
 * That doesn't tell you aggregation of what? - Taxman Talk 05:01, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, I don't think Sonneschein and Shafer refers to aggregation problem (i.e. under what conditions the individual demands can be summed up into a social demand that makes sense), rather it's about EXCESS aggregate demand which has to do with things like existance and uniqueness of equilibria (and hence has nothing to say about the welfare of society). I think the reference should be removed.


 * Good point. Doubtful a mathematical econ text would have much to say about welfare anyway. - Taxman Talk 05:01, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I think the best way to procede is to delete this article and make the relevant modifications over at Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theorem and Gorman polar form, since these are two distinct topics and the present article, in addition to being NPOV and inaccurate confused the two. Hence I will add a deletion tag.radek 05:33, 29 October 2006 (UTC)