William Stanley Jevons

1835-1882

William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) was a British natural scientist turned economist. He was educated at University College, London, and taught at Manchester and London. He wrote many books and papers, but by far the most important is his Theory of Political Economy (1871). He is generally given credit for initiating the ‘Marginal Revolution‘ (the Marginal utility theory) and is also one of the founders of Econometrics.

I believe that William Stanley Jevons is responsible for exploring the idea of cycles applied in economics. Here, we find a man who did not sit in his ivory tower and pontificate to the masses below. Jevons was studying natural science at the University College in London. In 1854, he left school and took an exciting job far away in Australia as an assayer in Sydney. He was smitten by the Australian Gold Rush.

Jevons was exposed to the gold trade and the boom-bust cycle with a front-row seat and the migrations of people. Then came the Panic of 1857, a new global economic “contagion” spreading from one country to the next. This experience caused Jevons to return to England in 1859. He was probably inspired by the rise and fall of prices as I was in the 1960s and became curious to understand the cause of these machinations.

Jevons began to write his theory based on observation and produced the “General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy,“ held at Cambridge in October 1862. This was read before the Economic Science and Statistics Section of the British Association at Cambridge in the report of the Thirty-Second Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. It was followed by “A Serious Fall in the Value of Gold,“ published in 1863.