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Carl Menger Quotes

Carl Menger was an Austrian economist and the founder of the Austrian School of economics. Menger contributed to the development of the theory of marginalism , which rejected the cost-of-production theories of value, such as were developed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Menger used his “Subjective Theory of Value” to arrive at what he considered one of the most powerful insights in economics: both sides gain from exchange.

✵ 23. February 1840 – 26. February 1921
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Carl Menger: 6   quotes 0   likes

Famous Carl Menger Quotes

“How can it be that institutions which serve the common welfare and are extremely significant for its development come into being without a common will directed toward establishing them?”

Carl Menger

Source: Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, 1883, p. 146

“The solution of the most important problems of the theoretical social sciences in general and of theoretical economics in particular is thus, closely connected with the question of theoretically understanding the origin and change of 'organically' created social structures.”

Carl Menger

Source: Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, 1883, p. 147

“There is no better means of reducing a fallacious variety of thought to absurdity than to let it live itself out completely.”

Carl Menger

Attributed to Carl Menger in: Ludwig Von Mises, " Comments about the mathematical treatment of economic problems https://mises.org/journals/jls/1_2/1_2_2.pdf." Journal of Libertarian Studies, Spring 1977, 1(2), p. 100

“Assuming… that all available goods of higher order are employed in the most economic fashion, the value of a concrete quantity of a good of higher order is equal to the difference in importance between the satisfactions that can be attained when we have command of the given quantity of the good of higher order whose value we wish to determine and the satisfactions that would be attained if we did not have this quantity at our command.”

Carl Menger

Source: Principles,, p. 164-5; cited in: Randall G. Holcombe, Great Austrian Economists, p. 90

“Not only in the realm of the ethical world, and of economy, but also in that of natural phenomena, the realistic orientation of theoretical research can lead only to "real types" and "empirical laws." And in the above point of view, at any rate, no essential difference between the ethical and the natural sciences exists, but at most only one of degree. The realistic orientation of theoretical research excludes in principle, rather, in all realms of the world of phenomena the possibility of arriving at strict (exact) theoretical knowledge.”

Carl Menger

Source: Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, 1883, p. 58

“The time period lying between command of goods of a higher order and possession of the corresponding goods of lower order can never be eliminated.”

Carl Menger

Source: Principles,, p. 67; cited in: Randall G. Holcombe, Great Austrian Economists, p. 90

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