Meet William Stanley Jevons—the brilliant but contradictory figure who both built up and tore down marginalist economics. This episode explores the life and work of this Victorian polymath who helped launch the Marginal Revolution in the 1870s, only to later question its foundations. Why did Jevons simultaneously advance and undermine the very framework he helped create? What does his intellectual journey reveal about the tensions within economic science?

Key topics: William Stanley Jevons, Victorian economics, the paradox of building and destroying ideas