Carl Menger

Carl Menger was an Austrian economist and professor at the University of Vienna, generally credited as the founder of the Austrian school of economics. His 1871 book Principles of Economics set out an early version of the theory of subjective marginal utility, arguing that the value of a good derives from the subjective judgment of the individuals who want it rather than from any objective property of the good itself or the labor required to produce it, a position that placed Menger at the center of the marginal revolution alongside William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras, who developed similar ideas independently around the same time. Menger also set out an early account of the origin of money as an unplanned outcome of individual exchange rather than a deliberate government invention, an argument later Austrian economists including Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek extended into a broader theory of how markets can coordinate the dispersed knowledge of many individuals without central direction.