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Barkley Rosser wrote: 
One of those bad old jokes about economists runs, "they know the price of 
everything and the value of nothing." 
 
 
It is possible to tell exactly how old the joke is; at least the aphorism 
on which the joke is based on (without particular reference to economists) 
can be dated. It was coined by Oscar Wilde in the early 1890s. First, it 
appeared in the Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) as "Nowadays people know the 
price of everything and the value of nothing", to return in a somewhat 
wittier and sharper version, as a dialogue, in Lady Windermere's Fan 1892): 
"What is a cynic?" - "A man who knows the price of everything and the value 
of nothing." 
 
This leads us to two questions: 
(1) More serious, less important: The aphorism emerged just two decades 
after the key publications of Menger, Walras and Jevons, i.e. at a point 
when the subjective theory of value had not only become fairly indisputable 
within the community of economists, but also became known to a broader 
audience as the new economic paradigm. Is this just coincidence? 
(2) Less serious, more important: Are economists cynical altogether? 
 
And by the way, the riposte to the definition of a cynic runs as follows: 
"And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd 
value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single 
thing." 
 
 
Alexander Engel 
Goettingen University (Germany) 
 
 
 
 
 
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