,
Richard Whately
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
, in
Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution
de richesse
(1769), held that value derived from the general utility of the
class to which a good belonged, from comparison of present and future
wants, and from anticipated difficulties in procurement.
Like the Italian mercantists,
Étienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac
, saw value
as determined by utility associated with the class to which the good belong,
and by estimated scarcity. In
De commerce et le gouvernement
(1776),
Condillac emphasized that value is not based upon cost but that costs were
paid because of value.
This last point was famously restated by the Nineteenth Century proto-
marginalist,
Richard Whately
, who in
Introductory Lectures on Political
Economy
(1832) wrote
It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them;
but on the contrary, men dive for them because they fetch a high price.
[30]
(Whatley's student
Senior
is noted below as an early marginalist.)
Marginalists before the Revolution
[
edit
]
Gabriel Cramer
The first unambiguous published statement of any sort of theory of marginal
utility was by
Daniel Bernoulli
, in “Specimen theoriae novae de mensura
sortis”.
[31]
This paper appeared in 1738, but a draft had been written in 1731
or in 1732.
[32]
[33]
In 1728,
Gabriel Cramer
had produced fundamentally the
same theory in a private letter.
[34]
Each had sought to resolve the
St.
Petersburg paradox
, and had concluded that the marginal desirability of
