Alfred Marshall

After talking about the student, our focus is shift to his supervisor: Alfred Marshall. As once said by Sir Newton that his achievement was mostly due to his standing on the shoulder of the formers, to Keynes, Alfred is, to some extent, the shoulder provider.

Mr. Marshall was born in the suburb of London. Instead of burning buses to have fun like the guys in Paris, he studied with an appreciated assiduity, especially in math which prepared him for his later challenges. A series of steady pace lead him finally and reasonably to Cambridge (I wonder how the guys in Britain can enter Cambridge or Oxford so easy???)

Different from Keynes (even though being social could not certainly be Keynes’ initial choice), Alfred dedicated his life rather academic realm. He was professor all along his life with a great effort in establishing the world of economy by the stones of mathematics concretely. However, he himself didn’t quite agree on the absolute quantification of the subject to the public. What he preferred is an easy explanation with daily examples so that a prevalent or popular branch was thus able to serve the life.

Today, when we retrospect Alfred Marshall, his teaching or social contribution is hardly important than his theories and his books. A famous joke in economics is something like that: when you have just happened to have succeeded teaching a parrot to speak “demand” and “supply”, then congratulations for you have created a new economist! Indeed, the theory of supply and demand is sharply that fundamental to all the achievements based on it. Only this can already credit him as one of the most significant economist in the history, not mentioning the theory of marginal utility together with elasticity. Even today, they seem awesome to me that human behavior can be so perfectly concluded and articulated. His works “Principles of Economics” gave him his reputation at his time as well as today, even though it is not finished for the second volume. Our comment should not reside merely upon his academic brilliance since he was also a fruitful professor. Keynes and Pigou were two excellent representatives of the several but not massive instances.

But to him even those two earth quaking students are not his most successful one, you can never guess that the answer is his wife: Mary Paley Marshall, also an economist and co-author of Alfred's books.