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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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