Eugen Böhm von Bawerk

Eugen Böhm was born in 1851 and became a key figure in the Austrian school of economics. Between 1895 and 1904 he moved in and out of Austria's Ministry of Finance while developing ideas that would outlast his political career. He argued that what mattered in investment wasn't just how much capital you threw at something, but how long the process took—a concept he called Roundaboutness. He built an interest rate theory around time preference: the idea that people value present goods over future ones. He also wrote a sweeping critique of Marx's labor theory of value, challenging it from the gro…