Samuel Mountiford Longfield

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Samuel Mountiford Longfield (1802 - 1884) was an Irish lawyer and economist, and the first holder of the Whately Chair in Political Economy at Trinity College, Dublin. A member of the Oxford-Dublin school of proto-Marginalists, Longfield promoted the idea of supply and demand as the joint determinants of value, which earned him a sharp rebuke from John Stuart Mill (1848).

Longfield was among the first to recognize that the principle of diminishing marginal productivity applied generally to factors of production. He also expanded the principle of comparative advantage in international trade to more than the typical "two-commodity" case.

[edit] Major Works

  • Four Lectures on Poor Laws, 1834.
  • Lectures on Political Economy, 1834.
  • Three Lectures on Commerce and One on Absenteeism, 1835

[edit] Secondary sources

  • Moss, Laurence S. (1975). Mountifort Longfield. Ireland's First Professor of Political Economy
  • Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1954). History of Economic Analysis.
  • Seligman, E.R.A. (1903). "On Some Neglected British Economists" EJ

[edit] Reference

Samuel Mountiford Longfield at the History of Economic Thought website.