ИПИ Библиотека

"Principles of Economics" (Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre; 1871) is a book by economist Carl Mengerwhich is credited with the founding of the Austrian School of economics. It was one of the first modern treatises to advance the theory of marginal utility.
Menger advanced his theory that the marginal utility of goods, rather than labor inputs, is the source of their value. This marginalist theory solved the diamond-water paradox that had been puzzling classical economists: the fact that mankind finds diamonds to be far more valuable than water although water is far more important.
Menger stressed uncertainty in the making of economic decisions, rather than relying on ""homo economicus"" or the rational man who was fully informed of all circumstances impinging on his decisions. This was a deviation from classical and neoclassical economic thought. Menger asserted that such perfect knowledge never exists, and that therefore all economic activity implies risk. The entrepreneurs' role was to collect and evaluate information and to act on those risks.
Menger saw that time was the root of uncertainty within economics. As production takes time then producers have no certainty on the supply or demand for their product. Thus the price of the finished product bears no resemblance to the costs of production, since the two represent market conditions at very different points in time.
The labour theory of value was the explanation that had been reached by Adam Smith among others, and the Marxist school of economics still relies on this theory. The labour theory of value was that the value of an object was reliant on the labour that had gone into producing it, including any training or investment that supplemented the labour.
According to neoclassical economists the labour theory of value could not explain fluctuating values for different kinds of labour, nor did it explain how found goods could be more valuable than extracted goods.
As the price of a commodity is the average cost of production, it includes the fact that a tiny proportion of commodities may be found, although finding goods is hardly typical of modern manufacturing processes.
Marginal utility as the source of value meant that the perceived need for an object was seen to be dictating the value, on an individual rather than a general level. The implication was that the individual mind is the source of economic value.
Although Menger accepted the marginal utility theory, he made deviations from the work of other neoclassical pioneers. Most importantly he fundamentally rejected the use of mathematical methods insisting that the function of economics was to investigate the essences rather than the specific quantities of economic phenomena.

In the beginning, there was Menger. It was this book that reformulated, and really rescued, economic science. It kicked off the Marginalist Revolution, which corrected theoretical errors of the old classical school. These errors concerned value theory, and they had sown enough confusion to make the dangerous ideology of Marxism seem more plausible than it really was. Menger set out to elucidate the precise nature of economic value, and root economics firmly in the real-world actions of individual human beings. For this reason, Carl Menger (1840-1921) was the founder of the Austrian School of economics. It is the book that Mises said turned him into a real economist. What's striking is how nearly a century and a half later, the book still retains its incredible power, both in its prose and its relentless logic.

Carl Menger

Carl Menger (1840-1921) was one of the founders of the Austrian School of economics. Menger, along with Jevons and Walras, published a work in 1871 which revolutionized the way economists viewed value and price theory by introducing innovations in the theory of marginal utility. His work was profoundly influential in Europe where it inspired the work of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.