Lexis, Wilhelm

Born July 17, 1837, in Eschweiler; died Aug. 24, 1914, in Göttingen. German economist and statistician, a representative of the school of vulgar political economics.

Lexis graduated from the University of Bonn. In 1872 he became a professor in Strasbourg, then going to Dorpat, Freiburg, and Breslau; from 1887 to 1914 he taught in Göttingen. Lexis founded the statistical theory of measuring the dispersion of random fluctuations by comparing this dispersion with the dispersion derived under the conditions of Bernoulli’s theorem. He also worked out a mortality theory using a geometrical method. He studied the problems of money circulation and supported the metallic theory of money. Lexis criticized the second volume of Das Kapital, by Karl Marx (see reference by F. Engels in Marx and Engels, Sock, 2nd ed., vol. 25, part 1, pp. 12–14).