A Few Polymathic Interesting Bits by Jevons

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2337

Can We See More or Less than We Used To Be Able To See?

An early study of attention and perception (or “How Many Items Can it Embrace at Once?”) popped out at me while muscling my way through another year of Nature magazine for 1871.  The article was by the polymatic W. Stanley Jevons ("The Power of Numerical Discrimination," in Nature volume III, 1871)  who contributes an interesting and very early experimental bit on the success of the brain to correctly formulate an accurate memory when in a flash shown a number of items. (That is to say, when shown a certain group of X-number of items instantaneously and then removed, how often will the mind be able to remember the correct number upon recall--and without committing them to memory per se or counting them?) In this fascinating study Jevons records not only right/wrong answers but how "close" the remembered fit is to the original number, and in effect is a pioneering scientific effort towards understanding our abilities and limits in information processing. And as it turns out the ability to precisely recognize and remember groups of objects with success and without counting stops at about four items for the vast number of people texted. (It is another display of a famous four, including the four faces of Brahma, directions, Gospels, minute mile, playing card suits, seasons, corners of a square, virtues, color problem and of course four- letter words, to name a few.)

 

 

Here's another example of the exceptional and versatile Jevons who looks at the coincidence of death and the solar cycle.  It is a short piece¹--two paragraphs--and reprinted in full below, appearing in the journal Nature in February 1879.

And just a few months later and in the same journal, Jevons published a longer piece² on the incidence of sunspots and commercial crisis--a plague of an economic nature

   

This is the weekly issue for 24 April 1879, and although the Jevons article occupies only 588-590 it contains some 3000 words--meaning that this is a densely-printed journal.

This is a very early example of statistical interpretation in economic research.  "Jevons studied natural science, and worked as an assayer to the Australian Mint from 1853 to 1859. He became Professor of Logic at Owens College, Manchester, in 1866 and in 1876 at University College, London. His main theoretical economic work is Theory of Political Economy (1871). Other aspects of his work are collected together in Investigations in Currency and Finance (1884). He was one of the three economists to put forward a marginal utility theory in the 1870s. He argued that one commodity will exchange for another such that the ratio of the prices of the two commodities traded equals the ratio of their marginal utilities. Edgeworth criticized the way Jevons developed these ideas, and in so doing invented the indifference curve. Jevons also made an important contribution to the theory of capital, many aspects of which were, in fact, taken up by the Austrian school. He superimposed on the classical economic theory the idea that capital should be measured in terms of time as well as quantity. An increase in the amount invested is the same as an increase in the time period in which it is being employed. Output can be increased by extending the period in which the investment is available by, for instance, reinvesting the output instead of consuming it at the end of the production period. With given levels of labour and capital, output becomes a function of time only. He derived from this a definition of the rate of interest as the ratio of the output gained, by an increase in the time capital remains invested divided by the amount invested (see Böhm-Bawerk, E. von; internal rate of return). Jevons was also one of the founders of econometrics: he invented moving averages."-- See Gossen,H. H.; Menger, C.; Walras, M. E. L.    

Notes:

1.  Jevons, William Stanley.  "Sun-Spots and the Plague", in Nature, 13 February 1879, page 338 int he weekly issue of pp 333-356. 

2.  Jevons,    William Stanley.     "Sun-spots and Commercial Crises."    London:    Nature,    1879.    1st edition.    In:  Nature, a Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, pp 588-590    8vo.    Wrappers.