3. Still another idea of how man values things is that
of Carl Menger (1871), who never accepted the view
that value (by which he meant utility) is measurable.
Menger's position was that man's wants are hier-
archized and that the first unit of an individual's re-
sources has a higher importance than the second be-
cause it satisfies a more urgent need. This simple idea
is, in essence, a nonquantitative form of the Principle
of Decreasing Marginal Utility for any commodity that
may satisfy several wants. Perhaps this is why the first
formulations of this principle, by Daniel Bernoulli and
Bentham, pertained to money, not to a commodity.
Menger's nonmathematical approach soon died away
under the mathematical landslide caused in economics
by Jevons and Walras. Yet, every time a justification
of the Principle of Decreasing Marginal Utility is
offered in the current literature, it invokes only
Menger's hierarchy of wants.
