WICKSTEED, Philip Henry.

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The Common Sense of Political Economy, Including a Study of the Human Basis of Economic Law. First edition, with the author's compliments slip loosely inserted, of Wicksteed's magnum opus, expounding and refining the Jevonian marginal theory of economics. For Schumpeter, Wicksteed's ideas "were much ahead of his time... he shook off so many old things that still stuck to Jevons' exposition and added so many corrections and developments - partly under Austrian influence - that he may be said to have worked out something that, though of course a revision of the marginal utility system, was his own" (p. 832).An early reader has taken exception to Wicksteed's discussion of decreasing psychic returns, writing on page 438 that "Almost entirely true and very interesting. But what has it to do with Economics? The theory of decreasing psychic returns does not lead to his conclusions about interests and wages. These theories that wages are fixed by public's taste has nothing to do with marginal theory"

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