William Forster Lloyd, 1795-1852

 William Forster Lloyd was a fellow of the Royal Society and successively lecturer in Greek, mathematics and political economy at Oxford.  Lloyd succeeded Richard Whately as Drummond Chair at Oxford in 1832 and can be justly regarded as a member of the Oxford-Dublin school of British proto-Marginalists. 

William F. Lloyd was the son of Thomas Lloyd, rector of Aston-sub-Edge, Gloucestershire.  More significantly, W.F. Lloyd was the younger brother of the powerful Charles Lloyd, Regius Professor of Divinity and Bishop of Oxford (until his death in 1829).  In the early 1800s, while a fellow at Christ Church, Charles Lloyd had been the tutor of the famous British statesman Sir Robert Peel. 

W.F. Lloyd was educated at the prestigious Westminster School and entered his brother's college, Christ Church, in 1812. He received his B.A. in 1815, with a first in mathematics and second in classics.  He stayed on, receiving his M.A. in 1818 and went on to be ordained as an Anglican cleric (although he was never appointed to a position). 

William F. Lloyd's subsequent biographical details are scant.  It is known that in 1823, Lloyd was appointed reader in Greek, and then briefly lecturer in mathematics in 1823-24 at Christ Church, but he disappears off the radar thereafter.  In 1830, his first published work suddenly emerged, an empirical study of historical corn prices.  The next he is heard of is in 1832, when Lloyd was elected Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, succeeding Richard Whately who had resigned in 1831 to take up the position of Archbishop of Dublin.  The choice of Lloyd is puzzling.  There is no indication that Whately (or the prior holder Senior) knew Lloyd or had any role in the choice of his successor (indeed, Whately left Oxford under something of a cloud). 

Lloyd's first lectures were delivered in the fall of 1832, and subsequently published in 1833.

In his first series of lectures delivered at Oxford (1833) on population, Lloyd followed Senior in delving into the debates on Malthusian population dynamics that were then rocking the Classical school. Lloyd tried to understand the causes of high fertility rate among the poor.  He honed in on the precarious state of the male laborer. The uncertainty of employment and costs of living, an outcome of the business fluctuations of the industrial age, contributed to his lack of prudence. The industrial employment of women and children also weakened the traditional responsibility of male wage-earners.  But children were an asset and, being cheaper, often more readily employable by industry and thus a form of insurance against unemployment of the parents.   But in pre-industrial ages, where industrial fluctuations are rare, and among the middle classes, where employment and the prospect of advancement are more secure, fertility naturally declines.  Contrary to Malthus, Lloyd asserted, fertility wasn't merely a "bad habit" but had elements of necessary, rational calculation. Exhorting "moral restraint" in such a climate, Lloyd concluded, was foolhardy.

In the same lecture, W.F. Lloyd introduced the famous  parable of the "Tragedy of the Commons".  Lloyd observed that when a pasture field (the "commons") is available to all, individual cattle-owners have a short-term interest in increasing the size of their herds.  But, unchecked, the size of the herds on the commons will soon exceed its carrying capacity.  The commons will be doomed by overgrazing.  The argument was used by Lloyd to dispute Adam Smith's idea of the "invisible hand", that individual self-interest coincided with the common good. (Although some modern economists argue that Lloyd's paradox can be "solved" by assigning private property rights to the field). 

But W.F. Lloyd's chief claim to fame is as perhaps the earliest anticipator of the Neoclassical theory of value.  In his (second) series of lectures at Oxford on the Notion of Value,  Lloyd introduced the concept of diminishing marginal utility: 

"Let us suppose the case of a hungry man having one ounce, and only ounce of food, at his command.  To him, this ounce is obviously of very great importance.  Suppose him now to have two ounces.  These are still of great importance; but the importance of the second is not equal to that of the single ounce.  In other words, he would not suffer so much from parting with one of his two ounces, retaining one for himself, as he would suffer, when he had only one ounce, by parting with that one, and so retaining none...Thus while he is scantily supplied with food, he holds the given portion of it in great esteem -- in other words, he sets a great value on it; when his supply is increased, his esteem for a given quantity is lessened, or, in other words, he sets a less value on it." 

Lloyd proceeds to distinguish total from marginal utility, calling the former "abstract utility" and the latter "special utility".   Lloyd connects this notion with value: "in its ultimate sense, value undoubtedly signifies a feeling of the mind which shows itself always at the margin of separation between satisfied and unsatisfied wants."

However, Lloyd's work, like much of the rest of the Oxford-Dublin school did not have much of an impact on contemporaries,  He was really only rediscovered as late as 1903 by E.R.A. Seligman.

Lloyd was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1834.  Lloyd lived on his property in Buckinghamshire, until his death on 2 June, 1852.

Top

Top

Top

All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca