“It is common to distinguish necessaries, comforts, and luxuries,” wrote influential economist Alfred Marshall. “The first class including all things required to meet wants which must be satisfied, while the latter consist of things that meet wants of a less urgent character.” Marshall’s discernment between the various dimensions of the material economy – the influence of price, distinguishing human needs and wants, the utility of goods and services – allowed him to become not only an architect of neoclassical economics, but it allowed him to transform economics as a whole. For Alfred Marshall, immature economics had resulted in mass exploitation, plenty of poverty, and unequal distribution of wealth. This revealed much about the deficiencies in the study of economics as much as it did about its implementation: In his influential 1890 text The Principles of Economics, Marshall wrote about his urge to develop economics because “the study of the causes of poverty is the study of the causes of the degradation of a large part of mankind.” To understand economics required not only a moral dimension to be assigned to it, but it also required studying the political economy and social landscape of communities.
Although his drive was based on the inequality around him, Alfred Marshall was not a Marxist theorist in which he condemned the struggle between
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