The idea that capital theory might lead economists to discover forms of ‘paradoxical’ behaviour has emerged in the economic literature of the 1960s largely as an outcome of developments in the field of production theory (theory of linear production models). What happened in capital theory is in fact a special instance of a more general phenomenon. Economists sometimes tend to examine a large
... [Show full abstract] domain of economic phenomena by adapting theoretical concepts that had originally been devised for a much narrower range of special issues. The discoveries of ‘paradoxical’ relations derive from the fact that their process of generalization often turns out to be ill-conceived and misleading, if not entirely unwarranted.
