New Names

Another name I'm ashamed to not know much about...

Carl Menger

or for another concise bio, part of which is quoted below...

Carl Menger

Carl Menger has the twin distinction of being the founder of Austrian economics and a cofounder of the marginal utility revolution. Menger worked separately from William Jevons and Leon Walras and reached similar conclusions by a different method. Unlike Jevons, Menger did not believe that goods provide "utils," or units of utility. Rather, he wrote, goods were valuable because they served various uses whose importance differed. For example, the first pails of water are used to satisfy the most important uses, and successive pails are used for less and less important purposes.

Menger used this insight to resolve the diamond-water paradox that had baffled Adam Smith (see Marginalism). He also used it to refute the labor theory of value. Goods acquired their value, he showed, not because of the amount of labor used in producing them, but because of their ability to satisfy people's wants. Indeed, Menger turned the labor theory of value on its head. If the value of goods is determined by the importance of the wants they satisfy, then the value of labor and other inputs of production (he called them "goods of a higher order") derived from their ability to produce these goods. Mainstream economists still accept this theory.