CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

314 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
The first of these was William Stanley Jevons. Entering Bentham’s
citadel, University College London, in 1851, Jevons intended to study
mathematics and chemistry. Financial pressures forced him to depart, taking
a position in Sydney, Australia, as an assayer of precious metals at the Royal
Mint. Returning to England five years later via Peru, Panama, the West Indies,
and the United States, he reentered UCL, finally receiving his master’s
degree in 1862.
The following year Jevons published his first work, taking off from Bentham
and Mill and incorporating his own fascination with numbers. It was
entitled Pure Logic or the Logic of Quantity apart from Quality with Remarks
on Boole’s System and the Relation of Logic and Mathematics. Within a decade
Jevons built a logic machine, a forerunner of the computer, and Boolean algebra
eventually became a fundamental tool in the design of computer chips
and integrated circuits.
In 1866 Jevons took a professorship at Owens College in Manchester,
and in 1871 he published his most significant treatise, The Theory of Political
Economy. He set out to “treat economy as a calculus of pleasure and
pain,” 1 in the same manner that “positive and negative quantities are treated
in algebra.” 2 But he found Bentham’s seven measures of pleasure and pain to
be cumbersome, so he reduced them to two—intensity and duration—thus
simplifying mathematical applications. Summarizing, Jevons wrote: “Utility
must be considered as measured by, or even as actually identical with, the
addition made to a person’s happiness. It is a convenient name for the aggregate
of the favorable balance of feeling produced—the sum of the
pleasure created and the pain prevented.” 3 In other words, advantage and
usefulness—utility—are equated with happiness.
Besides solidifying basic utilitarian commitments into economic analysis,
Jevons was also one of three co-founders of the “marginal revolution.”
Recognizing that for a thirsty person the last sip of water conveys less pleasure
than the first sip and for a wage earner the last shilling earned which
might be spent on luxuries is less advantageous than the first shilling earned
which might be spent on food, Jevons wrote that the “final degree of utility
is that function upon which the Theory of Economics will be found to
turn.” 4 Diminishing marginal utility, much refined since Jevons’ day, continues
to be a key analytical concept.
In 1876 Jevons became professor of political economy at his alma mater,
University College London. Throughout his career he was a workaholic, an