Léon Walras.

Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras (December 16, 1834 – January 5, 1910) was a French mathematical economist. He formulated the marginal theory of value, independently of William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger, and pioneered the development of general equilibrium theory.

Quotes

  • I say that things are useful whenever they can be put to any use at all; whenever they are seen to be capable of satisfying a want. In this connection, there is no need to consider the subtle shades of meaning classified in ordinary language under terms ranging from the necessary to the useful, from the useful to the agreeable, from the agreeable to the superfluous. For present purposes, necessary, useful, agreeable and superfluous simply mean more or less useful. Furthermore, we need not concern ourselves with the morality or immorality of any desire which a useful thing answers or serves to satisfy. From other points of view the question of whether a drug is wanted by a doctor to cure a patient, or by a murderer to kill his family is a very serious matter, but from our point of view, it is totally irrelevant. So far as we are concerned, the drug is useful in both cases, and may even be more so in the latter case than in the former.
    • Léon Walras, Elements d'économie pure, ou théorie de la richesse sociale, 1874, Translation, Routledge, 1954/2013, p. 65.
  • It took from a hundred to a hundred and fifty or two hundred years for the astronomy of Kepler to become the astronomy of Newton and [[Laplace], and for the mechanics of Galileo to become the mechanics of d'Alembert and Lagrange. On the other hand, less than a century has elapsed between the publication of Adam Smith’s work and the contributions of Cournot, Gossen, Jevons, and myself.
    • In : John Cunningham Wood (1993), Léon Walras: The life of Léon Walras and perspectives on his thought. Taylor & Francis, p. 32-33.

Quotes about Léon Walras

  • L. Walras first formulated the state of the economic system at any point of time as the solution of a system of simultaneous equations representing the demand for goods by consumers, the supply of goods by producers and the equilibrium condition that supply equal demand on every market.
  • The landmark figure in general equilibrium theory was French economist Léon Walras (1834–1910), whose complex simultaneous equations essentially created this branch of economics in the nineteenth century. Back in the eighteenth century, however, another Frenchman, François Quesnay (1694–1774), was groping toward some notion of general equilibrium with a complex table intersected by lines connecting various economic activities with one another. Karl Marx, in the second volume of Capital, likewise set forth various equations showing how particular parts of a market economy affected numerous other parts of that economy. In other words, Walras had predecessors, as most great discoverers do, but he was still the landmark figure in this field.
    • Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 4th ed. (2010), Ch. 25. The History of Economics.
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