 Bentham’s influence has been felt to a considerable extent in the field of economics, in which the felicific calculus provided the groundwork for the development of policy based on cost-benefit analysis. As we have seen, he shared Adam Smith’s view that the route to a nation’s prosperity is by individuals pursuing their interests in ways of their own choosing, with government intervention limited accordingly. However, he also developed the theory of diminishing marginal utility, furnishing the legislator with a conceptual tool by which to address the uneven distribution of social happiness. The collectivist conclusions Bentham drew from this principle were modest in scope, but later reformist economists like W. S. Jevons (1871), impressed by the idea that social utility could be calculated based on the aggregate of individual interests, developed the theory in the direction of modern welfare economics. F. Y. Edgeworth (1881) thought Bentham’s formula of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” a mathematical absurdity, and reformulated the goal in terms of the greatest total happiness (or greatest average happiness for a fixed number of people). The Fabian socialist Sidney Webb also applied utilitarian ideas to maximize and better distribute “total utility”—Webb’s wife Beatrice once described Bentham as her husband’s “intellectual godfather” (Mack 1955). Graham Wallas, another of the Fabians, was deeply impressed by Bentham’s legal, political and administrative innovations and hailed him as “Britain’s greatest political inventor” (Wallas 1926).