William Stanley Jevons

(1835 - 1882)

Born in Liverpool, economist William Stanley Jevons is best known for outlining the marginal utility theory in his book The Theory of Political Economy, which made him part of the marginal revolution group among nineteenth-century economic thinkers. His work expounding on the finite amount of British coal led some to call him the first scholar to apply ecology to economics, and he once delivered a lecture titled “On the Influence of the Sunspot Period upon the Price of Corn.” He drowned in Sussex at the age of forty-six.