Marginal Revolution
14th February 2026
The most successful economics blog in the world is called Marginal Revolution. That is not an accident.
It could have been called Markets and Power, or Inequality Today, or Political Economy. It could even have been called Capitalism Explained. Instead, it is named after a nineteenth-century intellectual earthquake: the marginal revolution. A quiet reminder that modern economics begins not with slogans or moral postures, but with a way of thinking.
That reminder matters today more than we like to admit.
…
In the 1870s, almost simultaneously and largely independently, three economists overturned classical political economy. William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras broke with the Ricardian tradition that explained value through labor, costs, or embedded substance. Value, they argued, does not come from the total amount of work put into something. It comes from the last unit—from what economists would soon call marginal valuation.
[insert my usual rant about how ‘there is no such thing as capitalism’ here]
[insert my usual rant about how ‘economics’ is a Pretend Science, like psychiatry or Grievance Studies, here]
The Marginal Revolution site is run by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tubarrok, whom regular readers of this blog will recall my having cited many times.