Lessons From History 8-1
Jacob Viner and the Clever Draftsman
Jacob Viner (1892–1970) was born in Montreal and studied
economics at McGill University under Stephen Leacock (1869–
1944). Viner was clearly an outstanding student and, according
to some of his McGill classmates, knew much more about
economics than did Leacock, who was actually better known
as a humorist than an economist. Viner was such a good
economist that he was the first person to work out the
relationship between a firm’s long-run average costs and its
short-run average costs. He went on to teach economics at the
University of Chicago and at Princeton University and became
one of the world’s leading economic theorists.
If you find the relationship between SRATC and LRAC hard to
understand you may take some comfort from the fact that
when Jacob Viner first worked out this relationship, and
published it in 1931, he made a crucial mistake. In preparing a
diagram like Figure 8-3 , he instructed his draftsman to draw
the LRAC curve through the minimum points of all the SRATC
curves, “but so as to never lie above” the SRATC curves. Viner
later said of the draftsman: “He is a mathematician, however,
not an economist, and he saw some mathematical objection to
this procedure which I could not succeed in understanding. I
could not persuade him to disregard his scruples as a