The Marginalization of Work in Economic Theory

Abstract

In my training as an economist, I have been taught that the core of my subject is to understand how people’s subjective state leads them to consummate a transaction. In the words of William Stanley Jevons, one of the founders of this type of analysis, “the theory presumes to investigate the condition of a mind” (Jevons 1871:86). According to this version of economic theory, the economy is a collection of individual firms and consumers, each of which has an initial endowment of capital or wealth, respectively, which they use to make voluntary exchanges. Transactions occur only when both seller and buyer think they will be better off by completing the exchange.