Our tour of elementary production theory will be optional for most auditors; and will probably find its greatest use as an introduction to our notation. The trained economist might, however, find some provocation in respect to what we omit from this topic’s usual scope, viz.: we find it sufficient to describe no more than the optimal operations of one economic agent. This treatment is pedestrian in that we presume optimality is fully described by interaction of the agent’s production functions with the prices of his inputs. Prices and the shape of an agent’s loci of technical indifference are considered known throughout this exposition.

Full explications of production theory would of course proceed from here to discussions about how agents interact, how they might operate to improve suboptimal situations, etc. Thus complete production theory eventuates in some sort of stand-alone dynamic of economic adjustment. We do not participate in these exercises 1) because of our conviction that any satisfying description of production dynamics requires a complete model of global macroeconomics, and 2) our ultimate objective is to instantiate the possibility of such models.

While nothing is added to familiar production theory, we do emphasize the importance of visual references to the alignment of marginal costs with marginal revenues in the operations of economic agents. Though the three dimensions of our visual imaginations limit us to treatments of one or two inputs creating an output, these visualizations are essential to the auditor’s comfort with the formal mathematics by which we describe technical and utility tradeoffs among any number of inputs.