If Alfred Marshall had been a baseball player, he be in
the Hall of Fame. In fact, he was a great English economist who made his
contribution to economics at the end of the nineteenth century. Before
Marshall, economics was considered to be an esoteric discipline, intellectually
accessible to only a small number of people. He had the view that economics
ought to be accessible to ordinary intelligent people and he set out to
demonstrate the essential ideas of what we call microeconomics using simple
algebra and geometry. A century later, the introductory economics texts
used in colleges everywhere, are still indebted to his book Principles
of Economics.