William Forster Lloyd FRS (1795 – 2 June 1852) was a British writer on economics.
He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating BA in 1815 and MA in 1818.[1]
He was Greek Reader in 1823, Mathematical lecturer and Drummond Professor of Political Economy (1832–1837) at Christ Church, Oxford (successor to Nassau Senior).
He published several of his lectures. In his Two Lectures on the Checks to Population (1833) he introduced the concept of the overuse of a common by its commoners (i.e. those with rights of use and access to it), which was later to be developed by the ecologist Garrett Hardin and termed by Hardin "The Tragedy of the Commons". Lloyd observed that when a pastureland (a common) is available to all, cattle-owners have a short and long term interest in increasing the size of their herds. But, unchecked, the size of the herds on the common will sooner or later exceed its carrying capacity. The common will be run down by overgrazing, though it might still be capable of recovering under better management (unlike, say, fisheries driven to extinction by this mechanism). As this was seen in several cases, the observation applies to all commons under such arrangements - thus, The Tragedy of the Commons (plural). The argument was used by Lloyd to dispute Adam Smith's idea of the "invisible hand". Some modern economists argue that the problem can be "solved" by assigning private property rights to the field.
In his Lectures on Population, Value, Poor Laws and Rent (1837) he introduced a concise and complete statement of the concept of diminishing marginal utility, and connected demand to value, but he presents neither derivation nor elaboration. Still this contribution places him clearly in the ranks of the Oxford-Dublin school of proto-Marginalists.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1834. He died at Prestwood, Missenden, Buckinghamshire in 1852.