We can summarize our observations in the law of diminishing marginal utility: the units of a good become progressively less valuable as the stock of the good increases and more valuable as the stock decreases (). In the real world human beings deal, not with a good in the abstract, but with specific units of it that may added or subtracted from available stocks. Consequently, the subjective value of the good is precisely the utility of these incremental or decremental units—that is, their marginal utility. Like other praxeological principles, the law of diminishing marginal utility should not be thought of as a mere theoretical abstraction. Rather, it is a practical consequence of the fact that people seek values in order to realize certain services from them. Although it appears here in the context of subjective valuation, this law and its proof are also applicable to objective values, wherever the latter refer to goods divisible into homogeneous units.     

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