William Stanley Jevons

One of the first and most difficult steps in a science is to conceive clearly the nature of the magnitudes about which we are arguing.

My principal work now lies in tracing out the exact nature and conditions of utility. It seems strange indeed that economists have not bestowed more minute attention on a subject which doubtless furnishes the true key to the problems of …

By a commodity we shall understand any object, substance, action or service, which can afford pleasure or ward off pain.

PLEASURE and pain are undoubtedly the ultimate objects of the calculus of economics. To satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort - to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable at the expense of the least that is …

The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour.

The theory which follows is entirely based on a calculus of pleasure and pain; and the object of economics is to maximize happiness by purchasing pleasure, as it were, at the lowest cost of pain.

A correct theory is the first step towards improvement, by showing what we need and what we might accomplish.

Previous to the time of Pascal, who would have thought of measuring doubt and belief? Who could have conceived that the investigation of petty games of chance would have led to the most sublime branch of mathematical science - the theory …

but, in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.

It is clear that economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science.

Repeated reflection and inquiry have led me to the somewhat novel opinion, that value depends entirely upon utility.

There is no such thing as absolute cost of labour; it is all a matter of comparison. Every one gets the most which he can for his exertions; some can get little or nothing, because they have not sufficient strength, knowledge or ingenuity; …

Thus monopoly is limited by competition, and no owner, whether of labour, land or capital, can, theoretically speaking,obtain a larger share of produce for it than what other owners of exactly the same kind of property are willing to …

Property is only another name for monopoly.

Our English economists have been living in a fool's paradise.

to fling aside,once and forever, the mazy and preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian school.

As there are so many who talk prose without knowing it, or, again, who syllogize without having the least idea what a syllogism is, so economists have long been mathematicians without being aware of the fact.

In any case I hold that there must arise a science of the development of economic forms and relations.

Among minor alterations, I may mention the substitution for the name political economy of the single convenient term economics. I cannot help thinking that it would be well to discard, as quickly as possible, the old troublesome …

In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.

A correspondent, Captain Charles Christie R.E., to whom I have shown these sections after they were printed, objects reasonably enough that commodity should not have been represented by M, or Mass, but by some symbol, for instance Q, which …

In this work I have attempted to treat economy as a calculus of pleasure and pain, and have sketched out,almost irrespective of previous opinions, the form which the science,as it seems to me, must ultimately take.

There are many portions of economical doctrine which appear to me as scientific in form as they are consonant with facts.

The laws of thought are natural laws with which we have no power to interfere, and which are of course not to be in any way confused with the artificial laws of a country, which are invented by men and can be altered by them. Every science …