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Point of diminishing returns

Posted by Smokey Stover on June 09, 2006

In Reply to: Point of diminished returns Posted by Daniel J Murphy on June 09, 2006

: I would greatly appreciate it if someone could tell me the meaning of the phrase; "point of diminished returns" Thank you.

" The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.
diminishing returns, law of
An economic law propounded by David Ricardo, also called the law of diminishing marginal returns. It expresses a relationship between input and output, stating that adding units of any one input (labor, capital, etc.) to fixed amounts of the others will yield successively smaller increments of output. 1
In common usage, the "point of diminishing returns" is a supposed point at which additional effort or investment in a given endeavor will not yield correspondingly increasing results."

So when you have reached that point, it's better to give up the endeavor, unless you have some non-economic interest being served by your efforts. SS

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