Marshall and the Marshallian Heritage by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030530327
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3 Marshall’s Move from Graphs to Narrative

In the previous sections, we looked at Jevons’s and Marshall’s use of the methods of graphs and diagrams. We have seen that Jevons used the empirical method of graphs as a stepping-stone to find the mathematical laws governing the phenomena. Marshall used the analytical method of diagrams as a tool to perform mental experiments on concepts and theories of his own and of his precursors. The empirical method of graphs was used by Marshall to compare different phenomena, not to find a mathematical law that governed them, but to put these phenomena themselves into causal connection. These efforts moved Marshall in a distinctly different direction than Jevons. In this section, I will use two examples from Marshall’s work to show how this different orientation played out in Marshall’s later published work. I will first take an example from Marshall’s Red Book and then a fragment from a large plate which served as a script to think about the causal concatenation of specific events through time. The fragment tallies with the explanation Marshall gave in Industry and Trade about why the repeal of the Corn Laws did not immediately have the expected effect on wheat imports in Britain.

Figure 4 shows a fragment of a graph of the price of government bonds (“consols”) which I take from Marshall’s Red Book. Marshall added to the individual high and low values specific causes that were clearly designed to explain the specific highs and lows (e.g., “Napoleon returns from Elba”). Doing so was in no way peculiar for Marshall. Jevons similarly annotated one of the plates of his Statistical Atlas project. In this plate, Jevons noted, for example, that the extraordinary spikes in wheat prices in the years around 1800 coincided with the Napoleonic wars, thus similarly correlating a specific event to this rise in prices. But when Jevons made the comparison between nineteenth-century grain prices and those of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, he did so to exclude such specific causes from consideration; fundamental explanations of movements in economic prices and quantities were to be sought in a mechanical common cause.

Fig. 4Fragment of page from Marshall’s Red Book showing the “causes affecting the price of consols” (government bonds). The curves show the price of consols and the discount rate, respectively. Marshall inserted comments on the specific causes of specific price changes, which he connected to general causal patterns

(Source Reproduced by kind permission of the Marshall Librarian, Marshall Library, Cambridge. Marshall archives identity code Marshall 7/5)

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