ABSTRACT
There is no more difficulty in defining rent than there is in defining consumer surplus. Both are measures of a change in the level of welfare, and it is only for convenience of measurement that we separate them. In the preceding chapter, the consumer surplus of a single person was conceived as a measure of the change in his welfare following some alteration in the prices of goods – or, possibly, following some rationing or price-control schemes – given that his money income remains constant. For a community of individuals, an ideal measure of consumer surplus for a change in goods prices would require all factor prices to remain constant – an ideal requirement approached within a partial economic context which presupposes that any resulting factor price changes are negligible.
