WORLD FAMOUS ECONOMISTS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS - ALFRED MARSHALL

ALFRED MARSHALL

1842–1924

·         Alfred Marshall was one of the most influential economists of his time.

·         His book, Principles of Economics (1890), was the dominant economic textbook in England for many years.

·      It brings the ideas of supply and demand, marginal utility, and costs of production into a coherent whole.

·         He is known as one of the founders of neoclassical economics.

·       Although Marshall took economics to a more mathematically rigorous level, he did not want mathematics to overshadow economics and thus make economics irrelevant to the layman.

·     He is credited with the development of the demand-supply graph and for popularizing the use of diagrams in teaching economics. He also played an important role in the “marginalist revolution”

·         Alfred Marshall was the first to develop :

Ø  Standard Supply And Demand Graph demonstrating a number of fundamentals regarding supply and demand including the supply and demand curves,

Ø  Market Equilibrium,

Ø  Relationship Between Quantity And Price In Regards To Supply And  Demand,

Ø  Law Of Marginal Utility,

Ø  Law Of Diminishing Returns, and

Ø  Ideas Of Consumer And Producer Surpluses.

·  This model is now used by economists in various forms using different variables to demonstrate several other economic principles. Marshall's model allowed a visual representation of complex economic fundamentals where before all the ideas and theories were only capable of being explained through words.

·     These models are now critical throughout the study of economics because they allow a clear and concise representation of the fundamentals or theories being explained.

SOME OF HIS FAMOUS QUOTES

·         “The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings”

·         “The laws of economics are to be compared with the laws of the tides, rather than with the simple and exact law of gravitation. For the actions of men are so various and uncertain, that the best statement of tendencies, which we can make in a science of human conduct, must needs be inexact and faulty.”

·     “(1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry.

(2) Keep to them till you have done.

(3) Translate into English.

(4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life

(5) Burn the mathematics.

(6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often.”

·         “The price of everything rises and falls from time to time and place to place; and with every such change the purchasing power of money changes so far as that thing goes.”