Alfred Marshall

Alfred Marshallwas one of the chief founders of the school of English neoclassical economists and the first principal of University College, Bristol (1877–81).

Marshall was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was a fellow and lecturer in political economy at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1883 to 1885 and a professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge from 1885 to 1908 and thereafter devoted himself to his writing. From 1891 to 1894 he was a member of the Royal Commission on Labour.

Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890) was his most important contribution to economic literature. It was distinguished by the introduction of a number of new concepts, such as elasticity of demand, consumer’s surplus, quasirent, and the representative firm—all of which played a major role in the subsequent development of economics. In this work Marshall emphasized that the price and output of a good are determined by supply and demand, which act like “blades of the scissors” in determining price. This concept has endured: modern economists trying to understand changes in the price of a particular good start by looking for factors that may have shifted the demand or supply curves.

Marshall’s Industry and Trade (1919) studied industrial organization; Money, Credit and Commerce (1923) was written at a time when the economic world was deeply divided on the theory of value. Marshall succeeded, largely by introducing the element of time as a factor in analysis, in reconciling the classical cost-of-production principle with the marginal-utility principle formulated by William Jevons and the Austrian school of economics. Marshall is often considered to have been in the line of notable English economists that includes Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill.