LabLynx Wiki

Carl Menger von Wolfensgrün
Carl Menger von Wolfensgrün, founder of the Austrian school
Born	(1840-02-28)28 February 1840 Neu Sandez, Galicia, Austrian Empire (now Nowy Sącz, Poland)
Died	26 February 1921(1921-02-26) (aged 80) Vienna, Austria
Resting place	Vienna Central Cemetery[2]
Nationality	Austrian
Academic career
Field	Economics
School or tradition	Austrian school
Alma mater	Charles University, Prague University of Vienna Jagiellonian University
Other notable students	Prince Rudolf
Influences	Aristotle Condillac Smith Kant Brentano[1] Spencer
Contributions	Marginal utility, subjective theory of value

Part of a series on the
Austrian school
Principal works Capital and Interest Human Action Individualism and Economic Order Man, Economy, and State Principles of Economics
Origins School of Salamanca Classical economics French liberal school School of Brentano Methodenstreit
Theories and ideologies Austrian business cycle Catallactics Creative destruction Economic calculation problem View of inflation Right-libertarianism Libertarianism in the United States Malinvestment Marginalism Methodological individualism Praxeology Roundaboutness Spontaneous order Subjective theory of value Theory of interest
Organizations, universities, and think tanks Cato Institute University of Chicago George Mason University Foundation for Economic Education The Independent Institute Liberty Fund Mises Institute Mercatus Center Property and Freedom Society Reason Foundation
People Böhm-Bawerk Block Boettke DiLorenzo Fetter Garrison Haberler Hayek Hazlitt Heydel Higgs Hoppe Horwitz Hülsmann Huerta de Soto Kirzner Lachmann Lavoie Leeson Machlup Menger Mises Morgenstern Murphy Peterson Rothbard Röpke Salerno Skousen Strigl Wieser
Variants and related topics Anarcho-capitalism Economic freedom Perspectives on capitalism
Business and economics portal

Carl Menger von Wolfensgrün^[3] (/ˈmɛŋɡər/; German: [ˈmɛŋɐ]; 28 February 1840^[4] – 26 February 1921) was an Austrian economist and the founder of the Austrian school of economics. Menger contributed to the development of the theories of marginalism and marginal utility,^[5] which rejected cost-of-production theory of value, such as developed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. As a departure from such, he would go on to call his resultant perspective, the subjective theory of value.^[6]

Carl Menger von Wolfensgrün^[3] was born in the city of Neu-Sandez in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austrian Empire, which is now Nowy Sącz in Poland. He was the son of a wealthy family of minor nobility; his father, Anton Menger, was a lawyer. His mother, Caroline Gerżabek, was the daughter of a wealthy Bohemian merchant. He had two brothers, Anton and Max, both prominent as lawyers. His son, Karl Menger, was a mathematician who taught for many years at Illinois Institute of Technology.^[7]

After attending Gymnasium, he studied law at the universities of Prague and Vienna and later received a doctorate in jurisprudence from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In the 1860s Menger left school and enjoyed a stint as a journalist reporting and analyzing market news, first at the Lemberger Zeitung in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia (now Lviv, Ukraine) and later at the Wiener Zeitung in Vienna.^{[citation needed]}

During the course of his newspaper work, he noticed a discrepancy between what the classical economics he was taught in school said about price determination and what real world market participants believed. In 1867 Menger began a study of political economy which culminated in 1871 with the publication of his Principles of Economics (Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre), thus becoming the father of the Austrian school of economics.^[8] It was in this work that he challenged classical cost-based theories of value with his theory of marginality – that price is determined at the margin.

In 1872 Menger was enrolled into the law faculty at the University of Vienna and spent the next several years teaching finance and political economy both in seminars and lectures to a growing number of students. In 1873, he received the university's chair of economic theory at the very young age of 33.

In 1876 Menger began tutoring Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, the crown prince of Austria, in political economy and statistics. For two years, Menger accompanied the prince during his travels, first through continental Europe and then later through the British Isles.^[9] He is also thought to have assisted the crown prince in the composition of a pamphlet, published anonymously in 1878, which was highly critical of the higher Austrian aristocracy. His association with the prince would last until Rudolf's suicide in 1889.

In 1878 Rudolf's father, Emperor Franz Joseph, appointed Menger to the chair of political economy at Vienna. The title of Hofrat was conferred on him, and he was appointed to the Austrian Herrenhaus in 1900.

Ensconced in his professorship, he set about refining and defending the positions he took and methods he utilized in Principles, the result of which was the 1883 publication of Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics (Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der politischen Oekonomie insbesondere). The book caused a firestorm of debate, during which members of the historical school of economics began to derisively call Menger and his students the "Austrian school" to emphasize their departure from mainstream German economic thought – the term was specifically used in an unfavourable review by Gustav von Schmoller.

In 1884 Menger responded with the pamphlet The Errors of Historicism in German Economics and launched the infamous Methodenstreit, or methodological debate, between the historical school and the Austrian school. During this time Menger began to attract like-minded disciples who would go on to make their own mark on the field of economics, most notably Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser.

In the late 1880s, Menger was appointed to head a commission to reform the Austrian monetary system. Over the course of the next decade, he authored a plethora of articles which would revolutionize monetary theory, including "The Theory of Capital" (1888) and "Money" (1892).^[10] Largely due to his pessimism about the state of German scholarship, Menger resigned his professorship in 1903 to concentrate on study.

Menger used his subjective theory of value to arrive at what he considered one of the most powerful insights in economics: "both sides gain from exchange". Unlike William Jevons, Menger did not believe that goods provide "utils," or units of utility. Rather, he wrote, goods are valuable because they serve various uses whose importance differs. Menger also came up with an explanation of how money develops that is still accepted by some schools of thought today.^[11]

Menger believed that gold and silver were the precious metals that were adopted as money for their unique attributes like costliness, durability, and easy preservation, making them the "most popular vehicle for hoarding as well as the goods most highly favoured in commerce."^[12] Menger showed that "their special saleableness" tended to make their bid-ask spread tighter than any other market good, which led to their adoption as a general medium of exchange and evolution in many societies as money.

• 1871 – Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre, Erster, Allgemeiner Theil. Wien: Wilhelm Braumüller. 1871 – via Internet Archive.; Translated as Principles of Economics, First, General Part. Translated by Dingwall, James; Hoselitz, Bert F. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press. 1950.
• 1883 – Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der politischen Oekonomie insbesondere. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. 1883 – via Internet Archive.; Translated as Schneider, Louis, ed. (1963). Problems of Economics and Sociology [Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics]. Translated by Nock, Francis J. Urbana: University of Illinois Press – via Internet Archive.
• 1884 – The Errors of Historicism in German Economics
• 1888 – The Theory of Capital
• 1892 – Menger, Karl (1892). "On the Origin of Money". The Economic Journal. 2 (6). Translated by Caroline A. Foley: 239–255. doi:10.2307/2956146. JSTOR 2956146.

• History of macroeconomic thought
• Historical school of economics

• Media related to Carl Menger at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Carl Menger at Wikiquote
• Works by or about Carl Menger at the Internet Archive
• H. Abele [in German]. "Menger (von Wolfensgrün), Karl (1840–1921), Nationalökonom". Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon ab 1815 (online) (in German). Vol. 6. Austrian Academy of Sciences. pp. 221–222.
• Profile on Carl Menger at the History of Economic Thought Website
• Carl Menger Papers, 1857–1985, Rubenstein Library, Duke University