Journal

réf. 000898 — Hardcover. Good. MacMillan London 1886 first edition; large 8vo 150 x 225mm; pp viii 473 2; steel engraved portrait frontispiece of W S Jevons; original brown pebbled cloth spine titled gilt; small ink spot and evidence of a 20 x 15mm repair to an earlier tear in the spine corners and ends of the spine a little bumped traces from the removal of a label on the front board and vestiges of the same on the front pastedown but despite all that still a sound tight and reasonable good copy. . . . This collection of Jevons's letters was compiled and edited by his widow for publication four years after his accidental death aged 46. Educated as a chemist and botanist financial considerations led Jevons to Sydney as an assayer at the Mint. Returning to Britain five years later in 1859 he enrolled as a student at University College London. Retaining his interest in natural sciences he also studied political economy and wrote works as an economist making the case for economics as a science and thereby necessarily mathematical. He's recognised as an important figure in the history of economics and credited particularly with his development of the marginal utility theory of value and regarded also as the first economist of any significance to develop an ecological perspective on the economy this through the so-called Jevons Paradox where he pointed out that increases in energy production efficiency lead to greater and not less consumption. hardcover