William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882)

Who They Were

William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) was an English economist and logician, one of the three founders of the Marginal Revolution in economic thought. In 1871 he published The Theory of Political Economy, the same year Carl Menger published his Principles of Economics in Vienna, and three years before Leon Walras's Elements of Pure Economics began to appear in Lausanne. The three worked independently but converged on the same insight in the same decade. Jevons brought a mathematical and scientific cast of mind to a field long dominated by the verbal, deductive style of the classical school, and pressed for the use of statistics and formal reasoning in economics. He died young, drowning at the age of 46.

Key Contributions

Jevons's central contribution came in The Theory of Political Economy (1871), where he argued that value depends on marginal utility -- the benefit of one more unit of a good, which declines as a person consumes more -- rather than on the labour embodied in it. This was the same insight reached independently and almost simultaneously by Carl Menger and, from 1874, Leon Walras; together the three touched off the Marginal Revolution and dissolved the classical labour theory of value that Marx had just placed at the centre of his system. The marginal analysis that runs through modern economics -- marginal utility per dollar, marginal revenue equal to marginal cost, marginal factor cost -- is a direct legacy of Jevons, Menger and Walras. Jevons also did notable empirical work on statistics, index numbers and business cycles.

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