Routledge Dictionary of Economics, Second Edition
Jevons, William Stanley, 1835–82 (B3)
A leader of the MARGINALIST School who was educated at the Mechanics Institute High School, Liverpool, and University College, London. His university studies began with chemistry and mathematics and were interrupted by four years in Australia as assayer to the Sydney Mint before he returned to study political economy and logic. In Australia, his first researches were into climate and the effects of railways on land values and rent; also there he acquired the habit of ‘pricking off curves’ on squared paper to study fluctuations in economic time series. He held academic posts at Owen’s College, Manchester, and Queen’s College, Liverpool, before becoming professor of political economy at University College, London from 1876 to 1881. He drowned in 1882.
His principal works were A Serious Fall in the Value of Gold Ascertained and its Social Effects Set Forth (1863) which introduced a new method of measuring price changes, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of the Coalmines (1865) which caused a national scare and his Theory of Political Economy (1871) which was regarded by Keynes as ‘the first modern book on economics’. Jevons’s theory of exchange was the focal point of his Theory: by switching from cost to subjective UTILITY as the basis of value he was able to begin the precise theorizing which constitutes NEOCLASSICAL microeconomics.
His theory of the RATE OF INTEREST made a contribution to the development of marginal productivity theory. His influence on the development of economics in England was profound.
See also: marginalism; Menger; Walras
References
Collison Black, R.D. and Konckamp, R. (eds) (1972) Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jevons, Vols 1–7, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Schabas, M. (1990) A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stigler, G.J. (1946) Theories of Production and distribution: The Formative Period, ch. 11, New York: Macmillan.
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