Friedrich von Wieser

Friedrich von Wieser was an economist who was one of the principal members of the Austrian school of economics, along with Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.

Wieser attended the University of Vienna from 1868 to 1872 and then entered government service. Like his colleague, Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser was permitted to study under the three founders of the German school of historical economics—Karl Knies at Heidelberg, Wilhelm Georg Roscher at Leipzig, and Bruno Hildebrand at Jena. Menger’s work exercised a profound influence upon Wieser. In 1884 he went to the University of Prague and in 1903 succeeded Menger at the University of Vienna. He subsequently occupied official positions and served as minister of commerce in the last government of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

His two most important works are Der natürliche Wert (1889; “Natural Value”) and Grundriss der Sozialökonomik (1914; “Foundations of Social Economy”). In the first of these he developed the Austrian-school theory of costs, building on Menger’s subjective-value approach and introducing the concept of opportunity cost. In Sozialökonomik the principle of marginal utility is the starting point for an analysis of successively more elaborate systems of economic relationships.