What do you think of Alfred Marshall (author of 'Principles of Economics')?

0:00When I grew up, I cut my IT's on Marshall. We had a very interesting college seminar, senior seminar, I spent the entire year on Marshall, coming through every chapter, and it was very interesting, so I recommended it, especially if you had nothing else to read, but it was certainly better than Keynes, and it was very interesting because that was considered economics, and what he did with marginal utility theory, he trivialized it, he said, well, it's interesting, it fills a gap in the Ricardian program, because Ricard really didn't consider consumers, and sort of explains consumer demand, We finish it off because, of course, as you know, the famous Marshallian scissors, every price is determined partly by the man, the man's blade, and the supply blade or the cost blade. Of course, the really important thing is the cost blade because that's the long run, the real gutsy thing, the equilibrium thing, whereas consumers are sort of, yeah, they're sort of, the creatures are caprice and whim and they change their minds all the time, however.

0:56And so the really important thing about economics is the cost, and the real important thing about cost is labor pain or a back to Ricardo and Marx and all the rest of it. So it was a very clever device that he used, you can't say he ignored marching utility, he just trivialized it, encapsulated it in a couple of appendices or whatever and that was it. I remember when I was taking history at Columbia, in those days the Columbia graduate school was the top department, no question about it, and my form was present salary state ranked I'm on the top three graduate schools, and my professor, J.M. Clark, is a weird figure. And I asked him, I said, well, well, I didn't know anything about Austria, and I asked him about Jevons, because Jevons was so important, I don't have to read Jevons, he said, it's all incorporated into Marshall. I'm sure if I had known about Austria, he would have said the same thing about that.

1:41So that takes, it sort of shoves everything aside, Marshall then takes care of everything else. And this is before the Keynesian takeover, this was the, this was the Marshallian takeover, But the Keynesian Tetra was really part of that. In the larger sense, Keynes was a martial student.