Alfred Marshall

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Alfred Marshall bigraphy, stories - English economist

Alfred Marshall : biography

26 July 1842 – 13 July 1924

Alfred Marshall (26 July 1842 – 13 July 1924) 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 economics.

Later career

He served as President of the first day of the 1889 Co-operative Congress.

Over the next two decades he worked to complete the second volume of his Principles, but his unyielding attention to detail and ambition for completeness prevented him from mastering the work’s breadth. The work was never finished and many other, lesser works he had begun work on – a memorandum on trade policy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1890s, for instance – were left incomplete for the same reasons.

His health problems had gradually grown worse since the 1880s, and in 1908 he retired from the university. He hoped to continue work on his Principles but his health continued to deteriorate and the project had continued to grow with each further investigation. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 prompted him to revise his examinations of the international economy and in 1919 he published Industry and Trade at the age of 77. This work was a more empirical treatise than the largely theoretical Principles, and for that reason it failed to attract as much acclaim from theoretical economists. In 1923, he published Money, Credit, and Commerce, a broad amalgam of previous economic ideas, published and unpublished, stretching back a half-century.

From 1890 to 1924 he was the respected father of the economic profession and to most economists for the half-century after his death, the venerable grandfather. He had shied away from controversy during his life in a way that previous leaders of the profession had not, although his even-handedness drew great respect and even reverence from fellow economists, and his home at Balliol Croft in Cambridge had no shortage of distinguished guests. His students at Cambridge became leading figures in economics, including John Maynard Keynes and Arthur Cecil Pigou. His most important legacy was creating a respected, academic, scientifically founded profession for economists in the future that set the tone of the field for the remainder of the 20th century.

Having died aged 81 at his home in Cambridge, Marshall is buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground. A Guide to Churchill College, Cambridge: text by Dr. Mark Goldie, pages 62 and 63 (2009) The library of the Department of Economics at Cambridge University (The Marshall Library of Economics), the Economics society at Cambridge (The Marshall Society)marshallsociety.com as well as the University of Bristol Economics department are named for him.

His home, Balliol Croft, was renamed Marshall House in 1991 in his honour when it was bought by Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.

Works

  • 1879 – The Economics of Industry (with Mary Paley Marshall)
  • 1879 – The Pure Theory of Foreign Trade: The Pure Theory of Domestic Values
  • 1890 – Principles of Economics
  • 1919 – Industry and Trade

Economics

He desired to improve the mathematical rigor of economics and transform it into a more scientific profession. In the 1870s he wrote a small number of tracts on international trade and the problems of protectionism. In 1879, many of these works were compiled into a work entitled The Theory of Foreign Trade: The Pure Theory of Domestic Values. In the same year (1879) he published The Economics of Industry with his wife Mary Paley.

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. Accordingly, Marshall tailored the text of his books to laymen and put the mathematical content in the footnotes and appendices for the professionals. In a letter to A. L. Bowley, he laid out the following system: