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Suppose that an isolated colonist has just reaped his grain crop. The yield is five full sacks. He destines each sack for a specific purpose: the first sackful of grain must serve him to survive, the second one to keep him in full strength, the third will serve as fodder for his poultry, enabling him to enrich his diet with meat. He plans to use the fourth for distilling corn brandy, a luxury to him. For lack of better he destines the fifth sackful of grain for feeding his parrots: their antics amuse him. So, unmistakably, the five uses are of diminishing importance to him.

Suggests a new understanding of the category of economic value. According to this understanding, economic value is the unity of economic utility and economic costs. Interprets these categories of utility and costs as relative, and imminently implying one another. There exists a specific attitude of man towards the limited goods which are involved in his teleological activity. On the basis of this new understanding of economic value, attempts to give a new explanation of the law of increasing marginal costs, as the opposite form of manifestation of the law of diminishing marginal utility. Suggests an original interpretation of global and local criteria for optimum, and of an economic mechanism for comparison of costs and utility. Proposes many ideas which proceed from the teleological understanding of man’s activity and which are in harmony with the ideas and principles of econometrics.

Allyn Young′s lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor, survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to the modern neo‐classical writers. The focus throughout is on the conditions making for economic progress, with stress on the institutional developments that extend and are extended by the size of the market. Organisational changes that promote the division of labour and specialisation within and between firms and industries, and which promote competition and mobility, are seen as the vital factors in growth. In the absence of new markets, inventions as such play only a minor role. The economic system is an inter‐related whole, or a living “organon”. It is from this perspective that micro‐economic relations are analysed, and this helps expose certain fallacies of composition associated with the marginal productivity theory of production and distribution. Factors are paid not because they are productive but because they are scarce. Likewise he shows why Marshallian supply and demand schedules, based on the “one thing at a time” approach, cannot adequately describe the dynamic growth properties of the system. Supply and demand cannot be simply integrated to arrive at a picture of the whole economy. These notes are complemented by eleven articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which were published shortly after Young′s sudden death in 1929.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

This paper aims to test and compare two innovative methodologies (utility additive and evolutionary polynomial regression) for mass appraisal of residential properties. The aim is to deepen their characteristics, by exploring the potentialities and the operating limits.

With reference to the same case studies, concerning samples of residential properties recently sold in three Italian cities, the two procedures are tested and the results are compared. The first method is the utility additive, which interprets the process of the property price formation as a multi-criteria selection of multi-objective typology, where the selection criteria are the property characteristics that are decisive in the real estate market; the second method is a hybrid data-driven technique, called evolutionary polynomial regression, that uses multi-objective genetic algorithms to search those models expressions that simultaneously maximize accuracy of data and parsimony of mathematical functions.

The outputs obtained from the experimentation highlight the potentialities and the limits of the two methodologies, as well as the possibility of jointly applying them to interpret and predict the real estate phenomena in a more realistic representation.

In all countries, mass appraisal techniques have become strategic for the definition of management and enhancement policies of public and private property assets, in the case of investments of technical and economic refunctionalization (energy, environment, etc.), and for the alienation of buildings no longer suitable for public needs (military barracks, hospitals, areas in disuse, etc.). In this context, the use of mass appraisal techniques for residential properties assumes a leading role for sector operators (buyers, sellers, institutions, insurance companies, banks, real estate funds, etc.). Therefore, the results of the applications outline the potentialities of the two methodologies implemented and the opportunity of further insights of the topics that have been dealt with in this research.

Seligman's evaluation of Longfield's work concentrated exclusively on his views on value and distribution as set out in the Lectures on Political Economy. He noted that Longfield adopted many of the doctrines of the classical school but dissented from it in his treatment of distribution above all in his theory of profits (Seligman, 1903, p. 526). Seligman began with an examination of Longfield's ‘noteworthy’ theory of value which takes into account ‘the influence of cost of production upon the supply side of the equation’ as well as calling attention to the demand side (Seligman, 1903, p. 526). In discussing the demand side, Longfield pointed out that although the intensity of demand varies with different persons, all will affect their purchases at the market price. If an attempt was made to raise price above this level, the demanders whose intensity of demand was measured by the former price would cease to be purchasers. ‘Thus the market price is measured by that demand, which being of the least intensity leads to actual purchases’ (Longfield, 1834, p. 113; Seligman, 1903, p. 526). Seligman went on to note that, for Longfield, not only did intensity of demand vary between persons but also that ‘the same person may be said to have in himself several demands of different degrees of intensity’. Longfield wrote:Each individual contains as it were within himself, a series of demands of successively increasing degrees of intensity; that the lowest degree of this series which at any time leads to a purchase, is exactly the same for both rich and poor, and is that which regulates the market price and that in the case of the rich man, the series increases more rapidly, that is to say, the intensity of his demand increases more rapidly in proportion to the diminution of his consumption than in the case of the poor man. (Longfield, 1834, p. 115)