William Stanley Jevons

Book Review of The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy. Ryan A. Bourne, Ed. Price controls have grown increasingly common across large sectors of the economy such as finance and healthcare, especially in the wake of laws like Dodd-Frank and Obamacare.

0:37 Intro. [Recording date: October 17, 2021.] Russ Roberts: Today is October 17th, 2021 and my guest is astronomer Sandra Faber of the University of California, Santa Cruz. We're going to have a conversation about humanity. We're going to go back about 14 billion years and we're going to go forward about a million years. So, hold on to your hats. Sandra's field is the formation of galaxies. She's published hundreds of scientific papers.

Is 1871 the most important year in the history of social science? I think so. That year, Austrian financial journalist Carl Menger published his Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre—or Principles of Economics. Later that year another eminent British economist, William Stanley Jevons, published his Theory of Political Economy. Both treatises offered a (similar) solution to the famous “value paradox”: Why are diamonds, a frippery, so expensive compared to water, something essential to sustaining life?