At the same time that Gorman was solving the problems associated with the aggregation of fixed factors, the natural extension of these arguments to variable goods––that is, commodities that are efficiently distributed throughout the economy––was clearly also on his mind. However, there are only incomplete sets of notes that address a somewhat special case. The complete solution appears in ’Aggregation in the short and long run’ (Ch. 25), which did not begin to appear before the early 1980s. One set of notes is an LSE draft from 1967, of which only Sect. 1 survives, while another set was prepared for the Berkeley–Stanford Seminar in February 1967, but here an extract has been chosen from a set of notes presented at the University of North Carolina in 1970. The main purpose of the paper is not to solve a problem in aggregation, but to illustrate a style of argument that is not generally used, but is sometimes useful.
Keywords: aggregates, aggregation, duality, variable goods