Alfred Marshall put it most vividly in his influential 1890 text Principles of Economics. ‘Human wants and desires are countless in number and very various in kind,’ he wrote. ‘The uncivilized man indeed has not many more than the brute animal; but every step in his progress upwards increases the variety of his needs … he desires a greater choice of things, and things that will satisfy new wants growing up in him.’8 Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, the caricature clearly depicted a solitary man, ever calculating his utility, and insatiable in his wants.
