Dear Colleagues,

I am hoping you could perhaps help me retrace the origins of the common maximisation problem of u(C, L) function under the leisure-paid work constraint. Who was the first to pose the consumption-leisure bundle of goods? Who popularised the use of this model?

Was it predated by a (consumption, time worked) bundle (where work is a negative good)?
I saw that Becker (1965) refers to the “the traditional labour-leisure approach”. Marshall seems to make a big deal of the value of leisure, but I did not find an explicit conceptualisation of this idea. Jevons seems to connect utility to labour and commodities, but in the production side, not as consumption of commodities and leisure.

Any help on those questions would be greatly appreciated!

Best wishes,

Maxime



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Dr Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay
Senior Lecturer in Economics
Institute of Management Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
UK
http://desmarais-tremblay.com<http://desmarais-tremblay.com/>
Book Review Editor, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rejh20/current>