page_title: History of economic thought
section_title: William Stanley Jevons
hierarchical_section_title: History of economic thought / Neoclassical (19th and early 20th century) / Anglo-American neoclassical / William Stanley Jevons
caption_attribution_description: William Stanley Jevons
context_page_description: The history of economic thought deals with different thinkers and theories in the subject that became political economy and economics, from the ancient world to the present day in the 21st Century. This field encompasses many disparate schools of economic thought. Ancient Greek writers such as the philosopher Aristotle examined ideas about the art of wealth acquisition, and questioned whether property is best left in private or public hands. In the Middle Ages, scholasticists such as Thomas Aquinas argued that it was a moral obligation of businesses to sell goods at a just price.
  In the Western world, economics was not a separate discipline, but part of philosophy until the 18th–19th century Industrial Revolution and the 19th century Great Divergence, which accelerated economic growth.
context_section_description: In 1871 Menger's English counterpart Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) independently published Theory of Political Economy (1871), stating that at the margin the satisfaction of goods and services decreases. An example of the Theory of Diminishing Marginal Utility is that for every orange one eats, one gets less pleasure until one stops eating oranges completely.
caption: William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) helped popularize marginal utility theory.
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