Jevons, William Stanley (1835–1882)

Abstract

Stanley Jevons is generally known as one of the ‘fathers’ of the so-called marginal revolution in economics of the last decades of the 19th century. In his Theory of Political Economy (1871), with its ‘mechanics of utility and self-interest’, he analysed decisions of economic agents by means of the calculus, in terms of deliberations over marginal increments of utility. Economic agents- whether in their role as consumers, workmen or other — came to be seen as maximizing utility functions. Jevons is thus commonly considered to have broken with the labour theory of value of the classical economists. Value came to be identified with exchange value, and Jevons identified this with what we now call marginal utilities, not with costs of production. Jevons is also remembered for his innovative contributions to the empirical (statistical) study of the economy. He much favoured the use of graphs to picture and analyse statistical data. He introduced index numbers to make causal inferences about economic phenomena such as changes in the value of gold following the gold discoveries in California and Australia. In short, there is no particle of economics, theoretical or empirical, to which Jevons did not make important contributions that even in the 21st century are considered to have altered the field of economics in revolutionary fashion.