Economies of scale
In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to size, output, or scale of operation, with cost per unit of output generally decreasing with increasing scale as fixed costs are spread out over more units of output.
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Quotes
[edit]- Productive economy of scale is "unlimited" only when the state absorbs the diseconomies of large scale production. Overall economies of scale reflect a package of costs. And those costs are themselves influenced by direct and indirect subsidies that distort price as an accurate signal of the actual cost of providing a service. If the state had not allowed big business to externalize many of its operating costs (especially long-distance shipping) on the public through subsidies (especially subsidized transportation), economy of scale would have been reached at a much lower level of production. The state's subsidies have the effect of artificially shifting the economy of scale upward to higher levels of output than a free market can support.
- As for large landed property, its defenders have always sophistically identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, received its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit.
- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, M. Milligan, trans. (1988), p. 66
