John Craig of Glasgow was elected in 1818 to the Fellowship of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh
The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established i ...
, from which he resigned about 1840. Otherwise, very little is known about his life.
Craig wrote the three-volum
''The Elements of Political Science'' (1814)an
He studied under
John Millar (philosopher)
John Millar of Glasgow (22 June 1735 – 30 May 1801) was a Scottish philosopher, historian and Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow from 1761 to 1800.
Biography
Born a son of the manse of the Kirk o' Shotts, Shotts, Lanark ...
.
Bruce (1938)
states that Craig "is continually on the verge of expressing the idea of
marginal utility
In economics, utility is the satisfaction or benefit derived by consuming a product. The marginal utility of a Goods (economics), good or Service (economics), service describes how much pleasure or satisfaction is gained by consumers as a result o ...
", became "the first exponent of the idea of the connection between utility and value", and "comes close to expressing the idea of consumers' surplus". Craig "not only pioneered in opposing the theories of his time, but laid the groundwork for the utility theory to follow."
His outstanding contribution to the discussion of wages is his opposition to the theories of the classical school: first, their theory that wages are fixed by the standard of life; second, the theory that a tax on wages necessarily raises wages; and third, the doctrine that wages and profits must vary inversely to each other.
Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter (; February 8, 1883 – January 8, 1950) was an Austrian-born political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of German-Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Ha ...
(1954)
states that Craig's ''Fundamental Doctrines'' was "a performance of considerable merit" and "a whole Marshall ''in nuce''" (in a nutshell).
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Craig, John
19th-century British economists
British economists