Carl Menger
Founder of the Austrian School of economics (1840-1921) · Austria · Academics · Died at 81
Carl Menger is read about 254 times a day, in 48 languages.
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Something wrong?He junked the labor theory of value that had anchored classical economics and replaced it with a simpler idea: things are worth what people agree they're worth. That shift - subjective value, prices born from mutual exchange rather than production cost - seeded an entire school of thought that still divides economists.
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In their own words 2
, There is no better means of reducing a fallacious variety of thought to absurdity than to let it live itself out completely.
The time period lying between command of goods of a higher order and possession of the corresponding goods of lower order can never be eliminated.
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Menger started as a lawyer and business journalist, watching buyers make decisions that existing theory couldn't explain. After formal training he joined the University of Vienna in 1872, building a marginalist framework that rejected both the classical cost-of-production view held by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, and the German school's insistence that theory could be derived from history. Few read him outside Vienna for years, but disciples Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser carried the work outward. He also tutored Rudolf von Habsburg, Austria's crown prince, until leaving the university in 1903. Hayek later wrote that the Austrian school's core ideas belonged "fully and wholly" to Menger.
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