William Stanley Jevons

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) was an English economist and logician who helped establish marginal utility theory and mathematical economics. He also developed influential work in logic, statistics, and the study of coal resources.

Marginal utility: The additional satisfaction gained from consuming one more unit of a good. Jevons made diminishing marginal utility central to explaining consumer choice and value.
Theory of exchange: An explanation of how buyers and sellers determine exchange quantities and prices through trade. Jevons used equations of exchange to derive the conditions for mutually advantageous trade.
Marginal revolution: The late nineteenth-century shift toward explaining prices through marginal utility and choice. Jevons was one of three independent founders of this transformation in economic thought.
John Stuart Mill: A British philosopher and economist whose writings shaped nineteenth-century liberal thought. Jevons criticized Mill’s economics and sought to replace its account of value with marginal utility.
Jevons paradox: The observation that efficiency gains can increase total resource consumption by making use cheaper. Jevons described this rebound effect in his analysis of coal use and industrial efficiency.
Utility: A measure of the satisfaction or benefit a person derives from an action or outcome. Jevons treated utility as the basis for explaining economic decisions mathematically.
Equimarginal principle: The rule that a decision-maker allocates resources until marginal returns are equal across available uses. Jevons’s consumer theory describes choice as balancing marginal utility against price.
The Theory of Political Economy: Jevons’s 1871 book presenting a mathematical theory of utility, exchange, and value. This work set out his mature case for treating economics as a mathematical science.
Henry Sidgwick: An English philosopher and economist who wrote on ethics and political economy. Sidgwick succeeded Jevons as professor of political economy at Cambridge.
Coal question: The nineteenth-century debate over whether Britain’s coal resources could sustain industrial growth. Jevons argued that rising coal consumption made Britain’s economic prosperity difficult to maintain indefinitely.

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