The “Improvement of Mankind”: William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger on Decision Making and Learning

Abstract This paper examines William Stanley Jevons’s approach to human “improvement” in comparison with that of Carl Menger. In Jevons’s view, people are relatively static when left to their own devices. Thus, to “attack” the “citadel of poverty” they must be improved by those who know what is “best” for them. Menger’s view of people as planners, by contrast, is one in which people are capable of improving themselves. Jevons was a social reformer who placed great faith in education, and painful training and instruction, broadly defined, as key mechanisms of reform. Less frequently acknowledged but no less important, Menger also foresaw “the improvement of mankind” from within, as consumers came to better understand how best to attain their wants and needs over time.