Alfred Marshall (1842–1924)

Who They Were

Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) was an English economist and the central figure of the neoclassical school proper. Trained at Cambridge, where he later taught, he helped turn economics into a professional academic discipline in Britain and trained a generation of economists -- including the young John Maynard Keynes, whose father was also an economist and a colleague of Marshall's. His major work, Principles of Economics (1890), became the dominant textbook of its era. Marshall's achievement was reconciliation rather than revolution: writing after Jevons, Menger and Walras had relocated the source of value from labour to marginal utility between 1871 and 1874, he fused that new marginalism with the older classical concern for cost of production, showing the two traditions to be complementary rather than opposed.

Key Contributions

Marshall's Principles of Economics (1890) synthesised classical cost-of-production reasoning with marginal utility and gave microeconomics much of the apparatus students still use. He introduced the supply-and-demand diagram in the form now universally taught, and his famous image described supply and demand as the two blades of a pair of scissors, neither of which cuts alone: price is set by both jointly. From the Principles come elasticity, consumer surplus, and the short-run/long-run distinction, tested today in essentially the form he left them. His partial-equilibrium method -- analysing one market while holding others fixed -- anchored the neoclassical microeconomics curriculum. By marrying marginal utility to cost of production, Marshall settled the long argument over whether supply or demand determines value in favour of both together.

On EconRecall

Founder of neoclassical economics whose 1890 Principles gave microeconomics supply-and-demand, elasticity, and consumer surplus. Play the games that feature Alfred Marshall:

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