essay on modern economics

Search form

Charting the rise of modern economic thought.

Emily Erikson

Today’s debates about economic policy often center on national prosperity. A stimulus bill will jumpstart the nation’s economy. Infrastructure investments will boost the gross domestic product. Tax cuts will spur economic growth.

These debates echo a shift in economic thinking that occurred in 17 th -century England, when members of a rising commercial class began publishing works on trade and finance in order to influence government policy. In arguing for their preferred policies, these writers generated a new economic discourse — one that emphasized national growth and prosperity and set the stage for today’s discipline of economics.

In Emily Erikson’s latest book, “ Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought ” (Columbia University Press), the Yale sociologist examines this revolution in economic thinking, focusing on the years between 1570 and 1720.

Erikson, an associate professor of sociology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and director of the Fox International Fellowship, recently spoke with Yale News about the project. The interview has been condensed and edited.

What inspired you to write the book?

Emily Erikson: While working on my previous book, “ Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company , 1600–1757” [Princeton University Press], I noticed that a surprisingly large number of important economic tracts of the period were written by people associated with companies. I thought that was striking and it made me think that there was something about the companies and economic theory that hadn’t been fully uncovered. It’s strange to think about. Imagine if Jeff Bezos was writing treatises on economics. I think people might find it a little suspect. People found it a little suspect back then, too, but conditions were different.

As I worked on the book, I realized that I was answering an important question: Why did economics in Europe start to focus less on inequity and more on national development? It’s not that national development isn’t important. It’s hugely important. But the inequity part got buried under the rising focus on national prosperity. I wanted to better understand why that happened, and how we might bring equity and fairness more clearly into focus today.

What was the status of economic thought before 1570?

In universities, economics was thought to be beneath the notice of philosophers and serious scholars. There were no economics departments and no real concept of “the economy” as a distinct system. Most of the people who were writing seriously about economics were Christian scholars and theologians. They were very concerned with the impact of economic behavior on the human soul. They thought about the kinds of economic behavior people can engage in and still be fair to other human beings. Setting a just price was one of their central concerns. How much can you justly charge for bread when people are starving? At what point does a price become evil?

There was no concern for equality in the sense of raising people up to the same socioeconomic level, but they believed that wealthy people shouldn’t impoverish or take advantage of others, which would be considered sinful behavior. That was a central concern in debates about charging interest, which they called usury, and whether one can make money from money and what that implies about the value of money.

How did economic thinking change after 1580?

By the 1600s, you have a large influx of English merchants into the discourse who aren’t so interested in the implications of economic behavior on the human soul. They might gesture toward that theme, but it’s not their central concern. Instead, they’re making arguments about how economic behavior, such as charging interest, affects capital markets and how that impacts trade and, ultimately, the wealth and prosperity of the nation. They replaced the old moral framework that emphasized equity, justice, and salvation with one grounded in the nation’s wealth and prosperity.

Who were the merchants driving this change?

These were relatively wealthy individuals from large overseas trading companies. They were involved in complex corporate ventures that were granted rights to trade specific goods, such as white linen or dyed cottons, or rights to trade in goods to specific locations like the Baltic Sea or the East Indies. They largely operated outside the halls of government and were very interested in influencing trade policy, such as the granting of the charters that allowed companies to operate. Many produced tracts laying out their arguments. In so doing they forged a new kind of economic discourse almost inadvertently.

Why did England become the engine for this shift in economic thought?

From the perspective of the early modern era, it’s strange that this happened in England because the Dutch Republic was much more economically dynamic at the time — and politically powerful. It was the “Golden Age” of the Dutch. The important difference was that the Dutch government was dominated by merchants. If Dutch merchants wanted to change a policy, they didn’t need to go outside the halls of government to do it. English merchants, on the other hand, were in a minority position in Parliament. They needed to persuade state actors to implement new policies that were favorable to their commercial interests. To do so, they made their appeals in the public sphere using the tools of persuasion available to them, including writing and publishing economic tracts. In order to convince people that their arguments were legitimate and not simply about self-interest, they tried to show how their preferred policies would benefit the nation.

What did you learn while working on this book that most surprised you?

When I started this project, I thought that the huge expansion in the economic literature in this era was probably the result of the global expansion of trade. That was my initial hypothesis: As trade becomes more complex, more sophisticated intellectual tools were needed to understand it. But it turns out that’s not the case. It wasn’t the early stage of globalization that triggered the revolution in economic thought; it was the political context and the position of merchants within English politics that drove the discourse. That surprised me.

The shift in economic thought you document began more than a century before Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations,” in 1776, one of the fundamental texts in modern economics. How did Smith make use of the work that had preceded him?

Many of the materials I examine in the book set the foundation for “The Wealth of Nations.” The way that Adam Smith melded the observations of people making somewhat self-interested arguments into a cohesive whole was an extraordinary accomplishment. He tied ideas about national development and growth to a theory of moral behavior and action, lending them a moral perspective that people often seem to overlook. He was very concerned with fair and equitable exchange between individuals and the negative impacts of colonialism. He was deeply opposed to slavery and very concerned about the way that monopolies can take advantage of the population. He weaved a moral perspective into what had become a very empirical literature in a way that I find amazing.

Arts & Humanities

Social Sciences

Media Contact

Bess Connolly : [email protected] ,

Implementing a new pathway to measure and value biodiversity

ADHD and DNA: International study sheds light on genetics

Is there a better way to use RICE for your injury?

House call: A new study rethinks early Christian landmark

• Show More Articles

Economics Essay Examples

Ace Your Essay With Our Economics Essay Examples

Published on: Jun 6, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 31, 2024

Share this article

Are you struggling to understand economics essays and how to write your own?

It can be challenging to grasp the complexities of economic concepts without practical examples.

But don’t worry! 

We’ve got the solution you've been looking for. Explore quality examples that bridge the gap between theory and real-world applications. In addition, get insightful tips for writing economics essays.

So, if you're a student aiming for academic success, this blog is your go-to resource for mastering economics essays.

Let’s dive in and get started!

On This Page On This Page -->

What is an Economics Essay?

An economics essay is a written piece that explores economic theories, concepts, and their real-world applications. It involves analyzing economic issues, presenting arguments, and providing evidence to support ideas. 

The goal of an economics essay is to demonstrate an understanding of economic principles and the ability to critically evaluate economic topics.

Why Write an Economics Essay?

Writing an economics essay serves multiple purposes:

• Demonstrate Understanding: Showcasing your comprehension of economic concepts and their practical applications.
• Develop Critical Thinking: Cultivating analytical skills to evaluate economic issues from different perspectives.
• Apply Theory to Real-World Contexts: Bridging the gap between economic theory and real-life scenarios.
• Enhance Research and Analysis Skills: Improving abilities to gather and interpret economic data.
• Prepare for Academic and Professional Pursuits: Building a foundation for success in future economics-related endeavors.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

If you’re wondering, ‘how do I write an economics essay?’, consulting an example essay might be a good option for you. Here are some economics essay examples:

Short Essay About Economics

A Level Economics Essay Examples

Here is an essay on economics a level structure:

Band 6 Economics Essay Examples

Here are some downloadable economics essays:

Economics essay pdf

Economics essay introduction

Economics Extended Essay Examples

In an economics extended essay, students have the opportunity to delve into a specific economic topic of interest. They are required to conduct an in-depth analysis of this topic and compile a lengthy essay. 

Here are some potential economics extended essay question examples:

• How does foreign direct investment impact economic growth in developing countries?
• What are the factors influencing consumer behavior and their effects on market demand for sustainable products?
• To what extent does government intervention in the form of minimum wage policies affect employment levels and income inequality?
• What are the economic consequences of implementing a carbon tax to combat climate change?
• How does globalization influence income distribution and the wage gap in developed economies?

IB Economics Extended Essay Examples 

IB Economics Extended Essay Examples

Economics Extended Essay Topic Examples

Extended Essay Research Question Examples Economics

Tips for Writing an Economics Essay

Writing an economics essay requires specific expertise and skills. So, it's important to have some tips up your sleeve to make sure your essay is of high quality:

• Start with a Clear Thesis Statement: It defines your essay's focus and argument. This statement should be concise, to the point, and present the crux of your essay.
• Conduct Research and Gather Data: Collect facts and figures from reliable sources such as academic journals, government reports, and reputable news outlets. Use this data to support your arguments and analysis and compile a literature review.
• Use Economic Theories and Models: These help you to support your arguments and provide a framework for your analysis. Make sure to clearly explain these theories and models so that the reader can follow your reasoning.
• Analyze the Micro and Macro Aspects: Consider all angles of the topic. This means examining how the issue affects individuals, businesses, and the economy as a whole.
• Use Real-World Examples: Practical examples and case studies help to illustrate your points. This can make your arguments more relatable and understandable.
• Consider the Policy Implications: Take into account the impacts of your analysis. What are the potential solutions to the problem you're examining? How might different policies affect the outcomes you're discussing?
• Use Graphs and Charts: These help to illustrate your data and analysis. These visual aids can help make your arguments more compelling and easier to understand.
• Proofread and Edit: Make sure to proofread your essay carefully for grammar and spelling errors. In economics, precision and accuracy are essential, so errors can undermine the credibility of your analysis.

These tips can help make your essay writing journey a breeze. Tailor them to your topic to make sure you end with a well-researched and accurate economics essay.

To wrap it up , writing an economics essay requires a combination of solid research, analytical thinking, and effective communication. 

You can craft a compelling piece of work by taking our examples as a guide and following the tips.

However, if you are still questioning "how do I write an economics essay?", it's time to get professional help from the best essay writing service -  CollegeEssay.org.

Our economics essay writing service is always ready to help students like you. Our experienced economics essay writers are dedicated to delivering high-quality, custom-written essays that are 100% plagiarism free.

Also try out our AI essay writer and get your quality economics essay now!

Barbara P (Literature)

Barbara is a highly educated and qualified author with a Ph.D. in public health from an Ivy League university. She has spent a significant amount of time working in the medical field, conducting a thorough study on a variety of health issues. Her work has been published in several major publications.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That’s our Job!

Legal & Policies

• Privacy Policy
• Cookies Policy
• Terms of Use
• Refunds & Cancellations
• Our Writers
• Success Stories
• Our Guarantees
• Affiliate Program
• Referral Program
• AI Essay Writer

Disclaimer: All client orders are completed by our team of highly qualified human writers. The essays and papers provided by us are not to be used for submission but rather as learning models only.

1st Edition

Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics

• Taylor & Francis eBooks (Institutional Purchase) Opens in new tab or window

Description

What do modern academic economists do? What currently is mainstream economics? What is neoclassical economics? And how about heterodox economics? How do the central concerns of modern economists, whatever their associations or allegiances, relate to those traditionally taken up in the discipline? And how did economics arrive at its current state? These and various cognate questions and concerns are systematically pursued in this new book by Tony Lawson. The result is a collection of previously published and new papers distinguished in providing the only comprehensive and coherent account of these issues currently available. The financial crisis has not only revealed weaknesses of the capitalist economy but also highlighted just how limited and impoverished is modern academic economics. Despite the failings of the latter being more widely acknowledged now than ever, there is still an enormous amount of confusion about their source and true nature. In this collection, Tony Lawson also identifies the causes of the discipline’s failings and outlines a transformative solution to its deficiencies. Amongst other things, Lawson advocates for the adoption of a more historical and philosophical orientation to the study of economics, one that deemphasizes the current focus on mathematical modelling while maintaining a high level of analytical rigour. In so doing Lawson argues for a return to long term systematic and sustained projects, in the manner pursued by the likes of Marx, Veblen, Hayek and Keynes, concerned first and foremost with advancing our understanding of social reality. Overall, this forceful and persuasive collection represents a major intervention in the on-going debates about the nature, state and future direction of economics.

Table of Contents

Tony Lawson is Professorial Research Fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation and Reader in Economics at Cambridge University, UK.

Critics' Reviews

 This is a book of genuine originality, something that is rare in modern academia and all too often confused with mere novelty. Few thinkers can legitimately claim to have had a significant impact on their chosen field. Fewer still can claim to have substantively changed the terms of debate of that field. Tony Lawson is one of those few. These essays are for anyone with an interest in the future of the discipline. Jamie Morgan, Reader in Economics, Leeds Beckett University; Co-editor Real World Economics Review   Tony Lawson has changed the conversation. Edward Fullbrook, Executive Director of the World Economics Association.   Lawson writes with clarity and with an intellectual passion. 　A must read for any student of economics and political economy. Peter Boettke, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, USA   This book should be read by everyone concerned to remedy the deficiencies in economics exposed by the 2008 financial crisis. Through rigorous argument, Lawson shows that the answer is not more complex forms of mathematical modelling, but the adoption of…　methods that recognize the open-ended, relational , and processual character of economies. Diane Elson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, UK   Tony Lawson provides the "L-correction" to Friedman's "F-twist", by forcing economics to consider its ontology. Steve Keen, Professor and Head of Economics, History & Politics, Kingston University London, UK   [...] should be required reading for all serious economists, regardless of their approach. G.C. Harcourt, Professorial Fellow, University of New South Wales   Tony Lawson is the enfant terrible of modern economic methodology. Whether you agree with him or not, he makes you think. This collection of papers is no exception. Highly recommended for all those with the slightest interest in the current state and nature of economic science. Dimitris Milonakis, Professor of Political Economy and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Crete, Greece.   The book by Tony Lawson entitled Essays on the nature and state of modern economics comes at a particularly fitting time in the history of the economic academic discipline. After what has been regarded by many as one of its major setbacks—namely the failure to predict the 2008 global financial crisis—economics has been severely shaken, marginally challenged, but ultimately left untouched by the debates on its conditions that have sparked in the last few years. Therefore, Lawson's choice to assemble a number of previously published papers and a new one into this collection constitutes an important and welcome contribution to the methodology and philosophy of economics literature. Marco Sebastianelli, Institute for Advanced Study of Pavia

About VitalSource eBooks

VitalSource is a leading provider of eBooks.

• Access your materials anywhere, at anytime.
• Customer preferences like text size, font type, page color and more.
• Take annotations in line as you read.

Multiple eBook Copies

This eBook is already in your shopping cart. If you would like to replace it with a different purchasing option please remove the current eBook option from your cart.

Book Preview

Economics and the Modern Economic Historian

I reflect on the role of modern economic history in economics. I document a substantial increase in the percentage of papers devoted to economic history in the top-5 economic journals over the last few decades. I discuss how the study of the past has contributed to economics by providing ground to test economic theory, improve economic policy, understand economic mechanisms, and answer big economic questions. Recent graduates in economic history appear to have roughly similar prospects to those of other economists in the economics job market. I speculate how the increase in availability of high quality micro level historical data, the decline in costs of digitizing data, and the use of computationally intensive methods to convert large-scale qualitative information into quantitative data might transform economic history in the future.

This essay was presented at the session on the future of economic history at the 75th anniversary of the Economic History Association. I would like to thank Martha Bailey, Ann Carlos, and Paul Rhode for organizing the session, and Daron Acemoglu, Leah Boustan, Tim Bresnahan, Davide Cantoni, Liran Einav, Matthew Gentzkow, Claudia Goldin, Avner Greif, Phil Hoffman, Pete Klenow, Aprajit Mahajan, Joel Mokyr, Kaivan Munshi, Suresh Naidu, Santiago Pérez, and Gavin Wright for useful discussions. I am grateful to Santiago Pérez for superb research assistance and to Aditya Kanukurthy for help with data collection. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

Download Citation Data

• October 9, 2015

Published Versions

Ran Abramitzky, 2015. " Economics and the Modern Economic Historian, " The Journal of Economic History, vol 75(04), pages 1240-1251.

More from NBER

In addition to working papers , the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter , the NBER Digest , the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability , the Bulletin on Health , and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship  — as well as online conference reports , video lectures , and interviews .

Economics Essay Topics: 162 Practical Ideas & Useful Tips

Essay writing is an inherent part of the economics studying process. Nevertheless, it is quite a challenging task. Are you a high school or college student who is struggling with an economic essay topic choice? Or maybe you are unsure about your writing skills?

We know how to help you .

The following article will guide you in choosing the best topic for your essay on economics. Here, you can find a variety of ideas for high school or college. The economic essay topics are divided into several categories that will help you with your research. And a pleasant bonus from our team! We have created a great guide on how to write an economics essay.

So, don’t miss your chance to write an outstanding economic paper! Check out our essay ideas, read our tips carefully, and be ready to receive your grade A!

• ⭐ Best Economic Topics
• 🤝 Socio-Economic
• 🗺️ International Economics
• 🛠️ Labor Economics
• 🌆 Urban Economics
• ⚽ Sports Economics
• 💉 Health Economics
• 💼 Business Economics
• 🏤 Globalization
• 🧮 Economic History
• 💫 How to Write?

⭐ 15 Best Economic Essay Topics

• 2008 Economic Crisis.
• Socio-economic policy.
• Economic systems – Singapore.
• Racial pay gap.
• Economic globalization.
• History of online trading.
• Child labor policies.
• The Economic Naturalist.
• Foundations of economic theory.
• Impact of unemployment.
• Universal Basic Income.
• The role of consumerism.
• Healthcare economics – Canada’s Medicare.
• Reasons for recession.
• Cryptocurrency & environmental issues.

✨ Excellent Economic Essay Topics

Has economics always been a subject of meticulous research? The question is quite controversial, right? There is no specific time when economics started its rapid progress. Generally, economics remains the topic of interest since the establishment of capitalism in the Western world.

Nowadays, the economy is the main engine that moves our world forward. The way we do business determines the geopolitical situation in the world. Moreover, it influences many other parts of our lives.

Economics studying is of utmost importance nowadays. It helps to gain a better understanding of processes that put everything in motion.

Economics is quite broad, so it has a great variety of subfields. And this is a fantastic opportunity for us to generate as many essay ideas as possible. Here, you will find great economic topics for your paper. As mentioned before, we have divided them into several sections to ease your selection process. There’s a wide selection of free college essays samples on economics in our database, too. So be sure to check that out.

🤝 Socio-Economic Essay Topics

• The economic impact of racial segregation in America in the 1950s.
• Designing a just socio-economic system.
• Socio-economic status of Hong Kong in modern-day China. Explain how the city of Hong Kong gained a special status in China. Why did it emerge as one of the most important cities in its economy? Comment on the significance of Hong Kong in the international economic arena.
• Economic growth in the United States in the post-World War 2 period.
• Mobile banking in Saudi Arabia: towards understanding the factors that affect the sector.
• The importance of Dior’s bar suit to the women’s fashion industry.
• Economic problems in the 1980’s Soviet Union. Talk about the significant problems with the economy the USSR had in the 1980s. What role did they play in its collapse?
• What socio-economic problems did segregation in South Africa cause?
• History of economic development in the UAE. Discuss the economic miracle in the UAE and Dubai. Explain how the government could turn the city of Dubai into one of the most famous tourist destinations. What strategies were applied?
• Gender inequality and socio-economic development .
• The problem of poverty in Venezuela.
• How the socio-economic and political position of women changed between 1880 and 1940.
• The economic impact of COVID-19 on global trade.

• How do the three main economic groups interact with each other? There are three critical economic groups: – Consumers – Producers – Government Analyze the interaction of these groups with each other.
• Extended essay: how the study of economic data helped our society to advance?
• Western industrialization socio-economic impacts.
• Inequality at the top: not all billionaires have the same powers. Analyze billionaires’ net worth, liquidity, political power, and wealth security. Explain why they have unequal social status. What factors determine the influence of billionaires?
• An analysis of systems that help us measure agricultural development in a country.
• Is social media a useful tool for brand promotion?
• The phenomenon of dualism in economic development.

🗺️ International Economics Essay Topics

• Globalization and its impact on international economic relations. Define the term globalization. What role does globalization play in international economic relations? Provide specific examples of globalization’s impact on the global political economy.
• The lack of justice for the cheap international labor market. Discuss the issue of cheap labor in various countries. Why do some workers often lack fundamental human rights while others abuse moral norms? Analyze the causes and effects of inequality in the workplace.
• Japan macroeconomics: problems and possible solutions.
• The issue of mercantilism in the history of Great Britain. Analyze the rise and development of mercantilism in the history of Great Britain. To solidify your ideas, provide persuasive arguments, and appropriate examples of mercantilism.
• Why does the problem of environmental protection remain unresolved among global economies?
• Nissan Motor company’s international business.
• International environmental concerns in economics: the case of China .
• The issue of international criminal justice in industry. Explain why international businesses often avoid criminal justice after wrongdoings. Select one case of unethical behavior of a company’s CEO or regular employee. Briefly introduce the problem. What were the causes and effects? How was the issue resolved? Express your own opinion regarding the lack of criminal justice in business.
• The economy of Singapore and its role in international trade.
• International microeconomics trade dispute case study: US-China dispute on the exportation of raw materials.
• The phenomenon of the “gig economy” and its impact on the global economy.
• The effect of population growth in the international economy.
• International economics in the context of globalization.

• How does Brexit affect the economy of the European Union? Analyze the immediate impact of Brexit on the EU’s economy. Predict future advantages and disadvantages of Brexit for both: Great Britain and the EU.
• South Africa: international agribusiness, trade, and financing.
• Historical essay: the economy of the Dutch East India company.
• The issue of Mozambique’s economy and possible solutions. Investigate the issue of extreme poverty in Mozambique. What are some possible solutions to the problem of poverty? Base your suggestions on the country’s cultural, historical, and geographical aspects.
• Imbalances in the global economy. Discuss the imbalances between trading countries on the scale of the global economy. What solutions would you suggest to deal with this issue?
• How will global economies adapt to China’s growing power?
• Etihad Airways company managerial economics.

🛠️ Labor Economics Essay Topics

• Ford Motor company’s labor economics.
• Labor economics: child labor.
• The UPS firm perspective: the labor market.
• Gender inequality of wage rate in modern business. Research how and why gender inequality is still an issue in the modern world of economics. What are some ways to deal with the problem? Present your ideas accurately and effectively. Provide solid arguments and appropriate examples to prove your position.
• What are the best ways to increase labor productivity in business?
• Labor unions adverse effects on economics.
• The decrease of the labor force in modern industries. Talk about the rising rates of robotization in the majority of industries. How will it affect the traditional labor force? Comment on the problem of unemployment caused by labor automatization.
• Violations of labor rights of workers.
• Modern labor essay: how can an entrepreneur guarantee the minimum wage to their workers?
• How can labor geography help develop a special economic zone? Talk about labor geography and its effects on developing an exclusive economic zone. How does the geopolitical location of a particular country influence its level of economic development?
• Entrepreneurship in the organic cosmetics sphere.
• Gender-oriented labor trade unions. A case study. Discuss the gender-oriented trade unions and analyze their impact on our society.
• Child labor in the Turkish cotton industry.

• The connection between economic growth and demography. Analyze the connection between economic growth and its demographic context. Investigate both sides: – The issue of overpopulation – The problem of low birth rate. From an economic perspective, what problem is more dangerous?
• The issue of sex discrimination in the workplace.
• The effects of Landrum-Griffin Labor Act. Explore the labor Act of Landrum-Griffin that was passed in the US Congress in 1959. Discuss its implications and consequences. Discuss its implications and consequences.

🌆 Urban Economics Essay Topics

• Cities and their role in aggregate economics.
• Urbanization in Hong Kong and its effects on citizens.
• The urban planning of the city of New York: a critical analysis. Analyze the urban history of NY. How has the city been developing? Discuss revolutionary solutions to the past and problems of modern times.
• The impact of a city’s design on the local traffic.
• Dubai’s spatial planning: creative solutions for building a city in the desert.
• Globalization, urban political economy, and economic restructuring.
• How do urban areas affect local wildlife? Comment on how modern production technologies in urban areas impact the natural diversity of wildlife. What impact does the rapid economic progress have on the environment? Suggest possible solutions.
• Urban sociology: does the city make us better people?
• Why should people be more careful about investing in real estate? Discuss the issues of overinvestment into real estate. Consider the economic crisis of 2008 as an example.
• How can regional authorities help improve a city?
• Urban life and its effects on education.
• The economic development of a city’s metropolitan area: challenges and solutions.
• Main factors for the emergence of cities in the Middle Ages.
• The ethics of relocation: is it justified? Talk about the case of relocating locals when building projects of great magnitude. To what extent can it be justified? Mention its economic and ethical side.
• The difficulties behind the construction of “green” buildings. Discuss the relatively new phenomenon of environmentally friendly buildings. Analyze both sides: the pros and cons. What obstacles lie behind the “green” building? What opportunities do the “green” buildings offer? Elaborate on your ideas by providing clear arguments or counterarguments.
• What factors play a critical role in the success of retail productivity in cities?

⚽ Sports Economics Essay Topics

• Do teams with higher budgets perform better on the field?
• Corruption in European football leagues: a critical analysis. Investigate the corruption issue in the European football leagues. State reasons and solutions for the problem.
• The managerial catastrophe of Arsenal F.C.

• The NextG sports company’s communication planning.
• Roger D. Blair’s Sports Economics literary review. Write a literary analysis of Sports Economics by Roger D. Blair. Discuss his opinion on the economy of sports. Do you agree or disagree with his position? Provide compelling supportive arguments or strong counterarguments.
• How significant is the impact factor of a local team on a city’s economy?
• Kinsmen Sports Centre: marketing metrics innovation.
• What role does statistical data play in sports? Analyze the part of economic statistical data in different sports organizations. How can statistics help to develop an effective financing plan? Comment on the impact of financing on the performance of a sports club.
• Sports and energy drinks marketing analysis.
• Is there a connection between the lack of money and any contemporary issues in a sports team?
• Performance-enhancing drugs in sports.
• The business of FIFA: a financial analysis. Investigate the finances of FIFA. What economic factors make them so influential in the modern world of football?
• The global sports retail industry.
• The Olympics: logistics and economy. Discuss the logistics behind the Olympics Games event. How the Olympic Games impact the economy of the host country?

💉 Health Economics Essay Topics

• Is bioprinting the new future of medicine? Analyze the new market of organ printing and discuss its challenges. Investigate bioprinting from an economic perspective. Will the outputs cover the inputs? How will bioprinting impact the financial aspect of the health care sector?
• Cost-effectiveness of pharmaceutical products in the United States. Comment on the immense cost-effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. What do you think is the price of pharmaceutical products reasonable? Is it ethical to set extremely high prices on the medicals?
• An economic evaluation of the antibiotics market.
• Health economics-SIC and NAICS.
• The financial side of cancer treatment: is it too expensive? Analyze the market for cancer treatment programs in various countries. Explore its costs and complications. What are some possible ways to reduce the price of cancer treatment and make it more affordable?
• The issue of fast food consumption: a multibillion-dollar market . Fast food has always been one of the notable causes of obesity, diabetes, and other illnesses. Investigate the economic aspect of the issue. Are high profits from fast food production worth peoples’ health conditions?
• History and evolution of healthcare economics.

• The financial management of a hospital: a case study.
• The issue of public healthcare in the USA. Write about the long-standing issue of medical sector operation in the USA. Analyze its history, financial, and social aspects.
• Demand in healthcare economics.
• What are the economic outcomes of a global pandemic? Taking the COVID-19 outbreak as an example, conduct research on the effects of a pandemic on the economy. How does it affect local economies? What impact does the quarantine have on the international economy? Provide appropriate examples to support your ideas.

💼 Business Economics Essay Topics

• When does an advertising campaign become unnecessary?
• Sustainable development of a nation’s economic stability. Discuss how a country can create a sustainable economy. Provide bright examples to solidify your position.
• How can a small business compete with monopolies?
• What are the limitations of the Lewis Model?
• The phenomenon of inflation: inevitable liability or a land of opportunity for our economies? Explore the process of inflation in modern economies. Does it only have adverse effects on the countries’ economies? Are there any advantages of inflation? Analyze it from a positive perspective.
• Economics, business, and sugar in the UK.
• The shadow economy of the finance sector. Dive into the backstage of the finance sector and research various “grey” areas where business can be done.
• Chinese and Japanese business systems comparison.
• Oil demand and its changes in the XXI century: a critical analysis. Analyze the oil sector and write about its fluctuation in the XXI century. How did the changes in oil demand affect the global economy?
• The social and economic impact of mass emigration.

🌠 40 More Good Economic Essay Topics

Scrolled through our ideas, but can’t find a suitable topic for yourself? No worries! We have more issues to share with you.

So, don’t stress out. Take a look at our list of economical essay topics. Here are 40 more ideas focusing on globalization and the history of economics.

🏤 Economic Globalization Essay Topics

• The impact of globalization on the tourist industry in the Caribbean . Analyze both: the positive and negative effects of globalization on the Caribbean. To make your paper well-structured, explore two advantages and two disadvantages. Don’t forget to improve your essay with strong evidence and appropriate examples!
• Toyota Motor Corporation: impacts of globalization.
• What are the effects of globalization on developing countries? To what extent do developing countries profit from globalization? Research the subject by comparing various examples.
• Defining globalization and its effects on current trade.
• Economic growth as a result of globalization: proper financial strategies. How can a country successfully achieve prosperity with globalization? Discuss proper economic strategies.
• The socio-political significance of the IT industry’s globalization.
• Human trafficking in developing nations as a result of globalization.

• Globalization and criminal justice policy.
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of globalization?
• Globalization challenges and countermeasures.
• The effect of globalization on worldwide trade and employment rates.
• Economic integration within the European Union: a critical analysis. Talk about the history of economic integration within the EU. What are the negative and positive outcomes of economic integration?
• Globalization and food in Japan.
• Does globalization bring negative effects to cultural heritage and identity?
• The Industrial Revolution as the first step towards globalization. Focus on the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Discuss its precursors and consequences. Why is the revolution considered to be a starting point of globalization? Provide specific examples of globalization processes that occurred in the economic sector after the Industrial revolution.
• Globalization 2.0 an analysis of a book by David Rieff.
• Globalization effects on fundamentalism growth.
• Does direct investment by foreign businesses come with strings attached? Dive into the shady area of globalization and discuss how to direct foreign investment can bring problems of geopolitical scale.
• Effects of globalization on sexuality.
• Alibaba’s globalization strategy: an economic analysis.

🧮 Economic History Essay Topics

• The rapid economic growth of Europe during the Age of Discovery. Analyze the factors that brought economic growth to Europe during the Age of Discovery. What factors contributed to the dynamic economic progress of that time?
• Brazil’s economic history.
• History of capitalism: from the Renaissance to the United States of America. Discuss the origins of capitalism and its centuries-long path towards XXth century America. How the establishment of capitalism impacted the economy of the USA?
• Max Weber: economic history, the theory of bureaucracy, and politics as a vocation.
• 2008 Economic Crisis: origins and fallout. Talk about the 2008 Financial Crisis. Discuss its causes and outcomes. What should have been done differently to avoid the global crisis? Comment on the economic strategies countries used to recover from it.
• The economic marvel of Communist China: from rags to riches.
• What made world economic growth of the Renaissance possible?

• The economic history of Canada: how did the settlers facilitate economic growth?
• What did the major powers of the XIXth century base their economies on?
• The Rothschilds: political and financial role in the Industrial Revolution. Research the dynasty of Rothschilds and how they came to power. What was their role in Europe’s Industrial Revolution?
• The link between the “oil curse” and the economic history of Latin America.
• Roman Empire’s monetary policy: a socio-economic analysis.
• How did the demand for different goods change their value in the 2000s years? Analyze the demand for goods in the 2000s years and their change in value. Why do these fluctuations in demand for products and services occur?
• The history of economic thought.
• Soviet Union’s economic timeline: from the new Economic Policy to Reformation. Discuss the economic issues of the Soviet Union from the historical perspective. Why did the Soviet Union collapse? What improvements in the financial sector should have been done?
• History of France economics over the past 20 years.
• The history of economic analysis.
• The concept of serfdom and slavery as the main economic engine of the past. Dive into the idea of feudalism and serfdom. Discuss its social and economic aspects.
• The World Bank’s structure, history, activities.
• The history of Islamic banking: concepts and ideas.

💫 How to Write an Economics Essay?

Generally, essay writing on economics has the same structure as any other essay. However, there are some distinctive features of economic papers. Thus, it is essential to figure them out from the very beginning of your work.

You might be wondering what those aspects of the economic paper are. Well, we have an answer.

Below, you will find a detailed plan that explains the fundamental concepts of the essay writing process. So, don’t hesitate to use our tips! They are indeed helpful.

Pick a topic and dissect it. Picking the right topic is the very basis of writing a successful essay. Think of something that you will be interested in and make sure you understand the issue clearly. Also, don’t forget to check our ultimate economics essay topics and samples list!

Research it. After selecting the right idea from our economical essay topics, research your subject thoroughly. Try to find every fascinating and intriguing detail about it. Remember that you can always ask your fellow students, friends, or a teacher for help.

Come up with a thesis statement. A thesis statement is an essential element of your essay. It will determine your focus and guide the readers throughout your paper. Make your thesis secure and try to catch the reader’s attention using context and word choice.

Outline your essay. Never underestimate the power of a well-structured outline! Creating an essay outline can significantly help you to determine your general plan. Evaluate which economic framework you will be using to address the issue. State the main points of your thesis and antithesis. Make sure that they answer the central question of your work.

Write your introduction. First and foremost, a practical introduction should capture the readers’ attention and state the essay’s key topic. So, put enough effort to develop an outstanding introduction. It will create the first impression of your paper.

Moreover, an introduction should include a thesis statement. As we have mentioned above, a thesis plays a crucial role. Thus, make sure it is clearly stated.

Another significant feature of the introduction is its coherence with the body of your essay. Consequently, the introductory paragraph’s last statement has to present the subject of the next section, generically. Also, keep in mind that no more than three key points can be discussed in a paper, even if it is an extended essay.

Thoroughly work on the body paragraphs. Usually, the body of the essay contains several paragraphs. The number of these paragraphs will depend on the nature of your question. Be sure to create one section for every critical point that you make. This will make your paper properly-structured, and the reader will quickly get your ideas. For your convenience, we created a plan to develop your ideas in each paragraph, So, use it and make your writing process easier!

• Argument. Present your argument in the topic sentence of the paragraph in a way that directly answers the question. A hint: the most effective way to introduce the critical point is to place the topic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph. This will help the readers to concentrate their attention on a specific idea.
• Comment and discussion. Explain the meaning of your argument and provide an economic analysis. Present clear evidence and persuasive arguments to solidify your position.
• Connection. Link your comments with the vital point of the paragraph. Demonstrate the coherence of your evidence with the point.
• Diagrams, tables, charts. If necessary, provide the reader with visual aids. Sometimes, an appropriate diagram or a suitable chart can say more than words. Besides, your paper will look more professional if you use any kind of visual aids.

Conclude your essay. In your conclusion, summarize and synthesize your work by restating your thesis. Also, it is crucial to strengthen it by mentioning the practical value of your findings. Remember to make your essay readable by choosing appropriate wording and avoiding too complex grammar constructions.

Thank you for visiting our page! Did you enjoy our article and learned something new? We are glad to help you. Don’t forget to leave a comment and share the article with others!

🔗 References

• High School Economics Topics: Econlib, The Library of Economics and Liberty
• Guide to Writing an Economics Essay: The Economics Tutor
• How to Write the Introduction of Your Development Economics Paper: David Evans, Center For Global Development
• Senior Essay: Department of Economics, Yale University
• Developing A Thesis: Maxine Rodburg and The Tutors of the Writing Center at Harvard University
• Academic Essay Writing, Some Guidelines: Department of Economics, Carleton University
• The Writing Process: Writing Centre Resource Guide, LibGuides at Dalhousie University
• Research Papers: KU Writing Center, the University of Kansas
• Unpacking the Topic: University of Southern Queensland
• Economic Issues: PIIE, Peterson Institute for International Economics
• Areas of Research: EPI, Economic Policy Institute
• Top 100 Economics Blogs Of 2023: Prateek Agarwal, Intelligent Economist
• Current Environmental Economic Topics, Environmental Economics: US EPA, United States Environmental Protection Agency
• Hot Topics in the U.S. Economy: The Balance
• Share via Facebook
• Share via X
• Share via LinkedIn
• Share via email

By clicking "Post Comment" you agree to IvyPanda’s Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions . Your posts, along with your name, can be seen by all users.

Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.

Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics

DOI link for Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics

Get Citation

What do modern academic economists do? What currently is mainstream economics? What is neoclassical economics? And how about heterodox economics? How do the central concerns of modern economists, whatever their associations or allegiances, relate to those traditionally taken up in the discipline? And how did economics arrive at its current state? These and various cognate questions and concerns are systematically pursued in this new book by Tony Lawson. The result is a collection of previously published and new papers distinguished in providing the only comprehensive and coherent account of these issues currently available.

The financial crisis has not only revealed weaknesses of the capitalist economy but also highlighted just how limited and impoverished is modern academic economics. Despite the failings of the latter being more widely acknowledged now than ever, there is still an enormous amount of confusion about their source and true nature. In this collection, Tony Lawson also identifies the causes of the discipline’s failings and outlines a transformative solution to its deficiencies.

Amongst other things, Lawson advocates for the adoption of a more historical and philosophical orientation to the study of economics, one that deemphasizes the current focus on mathematical modelling while maintaining a high level of analytical rigour. In so doing Lawson argues for a return to long term systematic and sustained projects, in the manner pursued by the likes of Marx, Veblen, Hayek and Keynes, concerned first and foremost with advancing our understanding of social reality.

Overall, this forceful and persuasive collection represents a major intervention in the on-going debates about the nature, state and future direction of economics.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | 12  pages, continuing myths and fallacies of modern economics 1, chapter 2 | 12  pages, modern economics: the problem and a solution, chapter 3 | 31  pages, the nature of heterodox economics *, chapter 4 | 49  pages, what is this ‘school' called neoclassical economics * †, chapter 5 | 25  pages, the current economic crisis: its nature and the course of academic economics * †, chapter 6 | 12  pages, contemporary economics and the crisis, chapter 7 | 27  pages, mathematical modelling and ideology in the economics academy: competing explanations of the failings of the modern discipline, chapter 8 | 19  pages, tensions in modern economics: the case of equilibrium analysis, chapter 9 | 16  pages, soros' theory of reflexivity: a critical comment * 1, chapter 10 | 16  pages, ontology, modern economics, and pluralism, chapter 11 | 32  pages, the varying fortunes of the project of mathematising economics: an evolutionary explanation 1.

• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Cookie Policy
• Taylor & Francis Online
• Taylor & Francis Group
• Students/Researchers
• Librarians/Institutions

Connect with us

Registered in England & Wales No. 3099067 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG © 2024 Informa UK Limited

Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics

• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 978-1-138-85102-3

• University of Cambridge

Discover the world's research

• 25+ million members
• 160+ million publication pages
• 2.3+ billion citations
• CAMB J ECON

• J THEOR SOC BEHAV

• John Embery

• Giorgos Argitis

• Mário Graça Moura
• W. Leontief
• Christian Arnsperger
• Y. Varoufakis

• Edward J. McKenna
• Diane C. Zannoni

• Helge Peukert

• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Geography & Travel
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts

• Introduction

Historical development of economics

• Methodological considerations in contemporary economics
• Fields of contemporary economics

economics , social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. In the 19th century economics was the hobby of gentlemen of leisure and the vocation of a few academics; economists wrote about economic policy but were rarely consulted by legislators before decisions were made. Today there is hardly a government, international agency, or large commercial bank that does not have its own staff of economists. Many of the world’s economists devote their time to teaching economics in colleges and universities around the world, but most work in various research or advisory capacities, either for themselves (in economics consulting firms), in industry, or in government. Still others are employed in accounting , commerce, marketing , and business administration; although they are trained as economists, their occupational expertise falls within other fields. Indeed, this can be considered “the age of economists,” and the demand for their services seems insatiable. Supply responds to that demand, and in the United States alone some 400 institutions of higher learning grant about 900 new Ph.D.’s in economics each year.

(Read Milton Friedman’s Britannica entry on money.)

No one has ever succeeded in neatly defining the scope of economics. Many have agreed with Alfred Marshall , a leading 19th-century English economist, that economics is “a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment, and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing”—ignoring the fact that sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists frequently study exactly the same phenomena. In the 20th century, English economist Lionel Robbins defined economics as “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between (given) ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” In other words, Robbins said that economics is the science of economizing. While his definition captures one of the striking characteristics of the economist’s way of thinking, it is at once too wide (because it would include in economics the game of chess) and too narrow (because it would exclude the study of the national income or the price level). Perhaps the only foolproof definition is that attributed to Canadian-born economist Jacob Viner : economics is what economists do.

Difficult as it may be to define economics, it is not difficult to indicate the sorts of questions that concern economists. Among other things, they seek to analyze the forces determining prices —not only the prices of goods and services but the prices of the resources used to produce them. This involves the discovery of two key elements: what governs the way in which human labour , machines, and land are combined in production and how buyers and sellers are brought together in a functioning market . Because prices of the various things must be interrelated, economists therefore ask how such a “price system” or “market mechanism” hangs together and what conditions are necessary for its survival.

These questions are representative of microeconomics , the part of economics that deals with the behaviour of individual entities such as consumers, business firms, traders, and farmers. The other major branch of economics is macroeconomics , which focuses attention on aggregates such as the level of income in the whole economy, the volume of total employment, the flow of total investment , and so forth. Here economists are concerned with the forces determining the income of a country or the level of total investment, and they seek to learn why full employment is so rarely attained and what public policies might help a country achieve higher employment or greater price stability.

But these examples still do not exhaust the range of problems that economists consider. There is also the important field of development economics , which examines the attitudes and institutions supporting the process of economic development in poor countries as well as those capable of self-sustained economic growth (for example, development economics was at the heart of the Marshall Plan ). In this field the economist is concerned with the extent to which the factors affecting economic development can be manipulated by public policy.

Cutting across these major divisions in economics are the specialized fields of public finance , money and banking , international trade , labour economics , agricultural economics , industrial organization, and others. Economists are frequently consulted to assess the effects of governmental measures such as taxation , minimum-wage laws, rent controls, tariffs , changes in interest rates, changes in government budgets , and so on.

The effective birth of economics as a separate discipline may be traced to the year 1776, when the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations . There was, of course, economics before Smith: the Greeks made significant contributions, as did the medieval scholastics, and from the 15th to the 18th century an enormous amount of pamphlet literature discussed and developed the implications of economic nationalism (a body of thought now known as mercantilism ). It was Smith, however, who wrote the first full-scale treatise on economics and, by his magisterial influence, founded what later generations were to call the “English school of classical political economy,” known today as classical economics .

Essays in Modern Macroeconomics

Repository uri, repository doi.

This PhD thesis consists of a short introduction followed by three papers. Each paper examines a different topic within the broad area of modern monetary and international macroeconomics.

The first paper, Product Quality, Measured Inflation and Monetary Policy, written in collaboration with Alex Rodnyansky and Alejandro van der Ghote, fills a gap in the New Keynesian literature, which has largely ignored product quality adjustments. This paper proposes a tractable model of a New Keynesian (NK) economy where, in addition to the standard price and quantity channels, firms are able to endogenously adjust the quality of their products in response to shocks. This new model, featuring endogenous product quality changes subject to adjustment costs, nests the canonical New Keynesian model, which is frequently used as the starting point for policy analysis by central banks. In this framework, endogenous product quality choices imply a larger slope than the traditional NK Phillips curve as, for a positive productivity shock that lowers marginal costs, quality-adjusted prices decline because firms are simultaneously able to increase the quality of their products. Allowing firms to adjust product quality also amplifies the economy’s response to productivity shocks. Following a positive productivity shock the natural real interest rate decreases by more as households look to smooth a larger increase in consumption, which is boosted by a rise in both the quantity and quality of the goods they consume. As a result, monetary policy responds by altering the nominal interest rate by more for a given productivity shock. Model misspecification of imperfectly observable quality adjustments matters more for macroeconomic stabilization than the mismeasurement of those adjustments. With no misperception of product quality by the monetary authority, the principles for optimal monetary policy are, nonetheless, unchanged as the product quality extensions to the canonical NK model preserve divine coincidence.

My second PhD paper, The Impact of Large-Scale Asset Purchases on Wealth Inequality examines the relationship between monetary policy and household wealth inequality through changes in the size and composition of the central bank’s balance sheet. I focus on the impact on household wealth inequality through the financial portfolio rebalancing channel of monetary policy transmission. I construct a theoretical model that has multiple assets (of differing liquidity), banks and heterogeneous agents, who experience idiosyncratic labor productivity shocks. This model is carefully calibrated to reproduce theoretical levels of wealth inequality which match those observed in the US Survey of Consumer Finances. I use the model to replicate the changes in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet which arose in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 financial crisis. This shows that an expansion of the central bank’s balance sheet can materially alter the distribution of wealth, causing inequality to increase, while even extreme changes in the composition of the central bank’s balance sheet (for example through maturity extension) have little effect. This arises as central bank purchases of longer term assets cause households to hold additional liquid financial wealth. Liquid financial assets are unevenly distributed in the population, and hence wealth inequality measures increase. When the model is calibrated to match the Federal Reserve’s Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPs) from 2008 until 2014, wealth inequality increases by 3.8%, as measured by the Gini coefficient, suggesting this channel leads to a significant increase in wealth inequality.

The final PhD paper, The Rise of Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson, begins by documenting two stylised facts. Firstly, over the past 70 years the positive cross-country relationship between aggregate consumer prices and real output per capita has strengthened (i.e. a rise in the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect), as demonstrated using data from the Penn World Tables. Secondly, border frictions have increased over the same time frame, with international borders effectively becoming wider and an increasing failure of the Law of One Price (LOOP). I construct my own dataset of city-level relative prices using national sources across five continents to document the increasing failure of the LOOP. I then use a two-country endowment model with a domestic distribution services sector to construct an equilibrium failure of the LOOP. An increase in the relative size of the distribution services sector can simultaneously explain both stylized facts, while the standard explanation (a higher share of non-traded goods) may only explain the first. Furthermore, I extend the model to include production by monopolistically competitive firms, before solving and calibrating the model to closely replicate the two stylised facts.

Description

Qualification, awarding institution, collections.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Modern economic theory and development

… of Development Economics: The Future in …

Modern Economic Theory and Development Karla Hoff Joseph E. Stiglitz THE PAST 50 YEARS have seen marked changes in our understanding of development. We know that development is possible, but not inevi- table. We have had a wealth of experiments. There are clearly ...

Related Papers

MUSTAPHA NASIR USMAN

The past 50 years have seen marked changes in our understanding of development. We know that development is possible, but not inevitable. We have had a wealth of experiments. There are clearly no sure-fire formulas for success; if there were, there would be more successes. Some strategies seem to work for a while and then stall; some strategies seem to work in some countries and not in others. 1 Economic theory has evolved to account for the successes and failures. This chapter attempts to describe these changes in economic theory-both in the kinds of models used and in the factors that are identified as playing key roles. It focuses on two pivotal questions: What forces can explain the divergence in incomes across countries? What implications can we draw for the nature of the interventions most likely to promote development? A basic theme of this chapter is that industrial countries differ from developing countries by much more than their level of capital-or even their human capital. More capital may be helpful, but, remarkably, even a transfer of funds may not have a large effect on economic growth (see World Bank 1999a). Eliminating government-imposed distortions is also obviously desirable but seems neither necessary nor sufficient for sustained growth. 2 A view shared by all the perspectives on development that we explore in this chapter is that industrial and developing countries are on different production functions and are organized in different ways. Development is no longer seen primarily as a process of capital accumulation but rather as a process of organizational change. We discuss work done in three broad, interrelated research programs the economics of information, the theory of coordination problems , and institutional economics. These research programs depart from the strong assumptions of neoclassical theory. In that theory, every equi

Tufoin Romeo

Ronald Cherutich

Girls Lovely

Piotr Banaszyk , Marian Gorynia , Krzysztof Malaga

The text is devoted to new trends and changes emerging in the economic sciences, focused on growth, socio-economic development and income inequalities in the context of the idea of global rationality, understood as the ability to sustain the long-term existence of civilization on the entire planet. The thematic scope of this problem is broad; thus it is impossible to cover all its complexity in one study. Hence, attention is focused on selected aspects of the issues raised: on issues related to growth and development as well as economic inequalities, the economic foundations of growth, and the issue of substituting natural capital by human capital. A critical diagnosis and postulates for the future, with regard to measures of well-being in the context of the idea of sustainable development, are also considered as well as including the issue of sustainable development in development economics. The article ends with concluding remarks highlighting the thesis that economic growth should now be acceptable only when it does not excessively exploit natural capital and does contribute to deteriorating the quality of life. As for the methodological side of the text, it was created mainly through analysing the literature on the subject, but attention should be paid to the original nature of some predictions and recommendations, which were made as a result of the assumptions of the so-called diagnostic and prognostic analysis.

David Celetti

World Development

Subroto Roy

Garry Jacobs

Faith in endless progress and prosperity fueled economic growth during the 20 century. Today that faith has been undermined, even in technologically-sophisticated citadels of capitalism. Doubts about a better future have spurred fear of immigration and a retreat from globalization and free trade in Europe and North America. Awareness of ecological constraints supports the notion of limits flagged by Malthus around 1800 and revived in the 1970s by Club of Rome. Yet, the remarkable economic achievements of the past two centuries have cast an illusion of omniscience on the discipline of Economics, which even repeated catastrophic policy failures have still not entirely banished. The gap and disjuncture between prevailing economic wisdom and its effective application to promote human welfare and well-being is enormous and widening rapidly. The gap between current economic performance and the economic potential of global society has never been greater. Both have been aggravated by the ra...

Journal of Economic Theory

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

THE LAHORE JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

Dr.Qais Aslam

diana annisa

Sahara Ekka

Tim Hatcher

The American Economist

Vernon Smith

Moses Mukuka

D. Bernard,2018

Daniel Bernard

Songyos Pongrojphaw

Pedro Henrique

Partha Hazarika

Gandhi Museum

21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook

Peter Boettke

Economics World ISSN 2328-7144

EHU Proceedings of the International Student Scientific Conference

Juozas Kasputis

Davide Gualerzi

zenebe birhanu

Journal of Development Economics

jaime de Melo

THE TRUE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Pedro Sisnando Leite

SSRN Electronic Journal

Flavia Anghel

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Search Search Please fill out this field.

Economics in the Ancient World

• Smith: The Father of Economics
• Dismal Science: Marx and Malthus

The Marginal Revolution

Speaking in numbers, keynes and macroeconomics, the neoclassical synthesis, behavioral economics, factoring in social benefit, the bottom line, a brief history of economics.

• Economics Defined with Types, Indicators, and Systems
• Economy Definition
• History of Economics CURRENT ARTICLE
• Is Economics a Science?
• Understanding Finance vs. Economics
• Macroeconomics
• Microeconomics
• Four Economic Concepts
• Law of Supply and Demand
• Demand-Side Economics
• Supply-Side Economics
• Market Economy
• Command Economy
• Economic Value
• Keynesian Economics
• Social Economics
• Economic Indicator
• Top 10 US Economic Indicators
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
• What Is GDP and Why Is It So Important?
• Consumer Spending
• Retail Sales
• The Top 25 Economies in the World
• Examples of Free Market Economies
• Is the US a Market Economy or a Mixed Economy?
• Primary Drivers of the Chinese Economy
• How India Makes Its Money
• European Union (EU)
• The German Economic Miracle
• The Economy of the United Kingdom
• How the North Korean Economy Works

Economics is the science that studies how societies produce goods and services and how they consume them. Economic theory has influenced global finance at many important junctures throughout history and is an integral factor in our everyday lives. However, the assumptions that guide the study of economics have changed dramatically throughout history. Here is a brief look at the history of economic thought.

Key Takeaways

• Civilizations in the Middle East, China, and elsewhere employed sophisticated financial concepts and produced written guides of best economic practices and norms in the first millennium BCE.
• Tunisian philosopher Ibn Khaldun, writing in the 14th century, was among the first theorists to examine the division of labor, profit motive, and international trade.
• In the 18th century, Scottish economist Adam Smith used the ideas of French Enlightenment writers to develop a thesis on how economies should work. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Thomas Malthus expanded on their work.
• Late-19th century economists Léon Walras and Alfred Marshall used statistics and mathematics to express economic concepts, such as economies of scale.
• John Maynard Keynes developed theories in the early 20th century that the Federal Reserve still uses to manage monetary policy today.
• Most modern economic theories are based on the work of Keynes and the free-market theories of Milton Friedman, which suggest more capital in the system lessens the need for government involvement.
• More recent theories, such as those of Harvard University economist Amartya Sen, argue for factoring ethics into social welfare calculations of economic efficiency.

Economics in its basic form began during the Bronze Age (4000-2500 BCE) with written documents in four areas of the world: Sumer and Babylonia (3500-2500 BCE); the Indus River Valley Civilization (3300-1030 BCE), in what is today’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India; along the Yangtze River in China; and Egypt’s Nile Valley, beginning around 3500 BCE. Societies in these areas developed notation systems using markings on clay tablets, papyrus, and other materials to account for crops, livestock, and land.

These accounting systems, arising in tandem with written language, eventually included methods for tracking property transfers, recording debts and interest payments, calculating compound interest, and other economic tools still used today.

From the third millennium BCE onward, Egyptian scribes recorded the collection and redistribution of land and goods. Sumerian traders developed methods to calculate compound interest. The Code of Hammurabi (circa 1810–1750 BCE), the earliest work of economic synthesis, specifies norms for economic activity and provides a detailed framework for commerce, including business ethics for merchants and tradespeople.

Economics is not the result of one person's ideas and theories. Instead, the field has been developed over centuries of experience, thought, and discussion.

The first millennium BCE saw the emergence of more detailed written treatises on economic thought and practice. The Greek philosopher and poet Hesiod, writing in the eighth century BCE, laid out precepts for managing a farm in his "Works and Days."

Athenian military leader, philosopher, and historian Xenophon built on this in "Oikonomikon," a treatise on the economic management of an estate. In "Politics," Aristotle (circa 350 BCE) took these ideas further, concluding that while private property ownership was preferred, the accumulation of wealth for its own sake was “dishonorable.”

The Guanzi essays from China (circa the fourth century BCE) laid out one of the first explanations of supply and demand pricing; the crucial roles of a well-managed money supply and a stable currency. Among key insights was the notion that money, not armies, ultimately won wars.

In Western Europe during the Middle Ages, economic theory was often blended with ethics, as seen in the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and others.

Few of those writers went into the amount of detail that Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a Tunisian historian and philosopher, did. In "Al-Muqaddimah," Ibn Khaldun analyzes economic issues such as the perils of monopolies, the benefits of division of labor and the profit motive, and the rise and fall of economic empires. The importance of his work was recognized by Machiavelli and Hegel, and many of his ideas prefigured those of Adam Smith and those who followed him centuries later.

The Father of Modern Economics

Today, Scottish thinker Adam Smith is widely credited with creating the field of modern economics. However, Smith was inspired by French writers publishing in the mid-18th century, who shared his hatred of  mercantilism .

In fact, the first methodical study of how economies work was undertaken by the French physiocrats, notably Quesnay and Mirabeau. Smith took many of their ideas and expanded them into a thesis about how economies should work, as opposed to how they do work.

Smith believed that competition was self-regulating and governments should take no part in business through  tariffs , taxes, or other means unless it were to protect  free-market  competition.

Many economic theories today are, at least in part, a reaction to Smith's pivotal work in the field, namely his 1776 masterpiece " The Wealth of Nations ." In this treatise, Smith laid out several mechanisms of capitalist production, free markets, and value. Smith showed that individuals acting in their own self-interest could as if guided by an " invisible hand ," create social and economic stability and prosperity for all.

Even devout followers of Smith’s ideas recognize that some of his theories were either flawed or have not aged well. Smith distinguishes between “productive labor,” such as manufacturing products that can be accumulated, and “unproductive labor,” such as tasks performed by a “menial servant,” the value of which “perish[es] in the very instant of their performance.”

One could argue that in today’s service-dominant economy, the excellent execution of services creates value by strengthening a brand through goodwill and in numerous other ways. His assertion that “equal quantities of labour, at all times and places, may be said to be of equal value to the labourer” ignores the psychological cost of working in hostile or exploitative environments.

As an extension of this, Smith’s labor theory of value —that the value of a good can be measured by the hours of labor needed to produce it—has also largely been abandoned.

The Dismal Science: Marx and Malthus

Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx had decidedly poor reactions to Smith's treatise. Malthus was one of a group of economic thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who were grappling with the challenges of emergent capitalism following the French Revolution and the rising demands of a burgeoning middle class. Among his peers were three of the greatest economic thinkers of the age, Jean-Baptiste Say , David Ricardo , and John Stuart Mill .

Malthus predicted that growing populations would outstrip the food supply. He was proved wrong, however, because he didn't foresee technological innovations that would allow production to keep pace with a growing population. Nonetheless, his work shifted the focus of economics to the  scarcity  of goods rather than the demand for them.

This increased focus on scarcity led Marx to declare that the means of production were the most important components of any economy. Marx took his ideas further and became convinced a class war would be sparked by the inherent instabilities he saw in  capitalism .

However, Marx underestimated the flexibility of capitalism. Instead of creating a clear division between two classes—owners and workers—the market economy created a mixed class wherein owners and workers held the interests of both parties. Despite his overly rigid theory, Marx accurately predicted one trend: businesses grow larger and more powerful to the degree that free-market capitalism allows.

As the ideas of wealth and scarcity developed in economics, economists turned their attention to more specific questions about how markets operate and how prices are determined. English economist William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), Austrian economist Carl Menger (1840-1921), and French economist Léon Walras (1834-1910) independently developed a new perspective in economics known as marginalism .

Their key insight was that, in practice, people aren't actually faced with big-picture decisions over entire general classes of economic goods. Instead, they make decisions around specific units of an economic good as they choose to buy, sell, or produce each additional (or marginal) unit. In doing so, people balance the scarcity of each good against the value of the use of the good at the margin.

These decisions explain, for example, why the price of an individual diamond is relatively higher than the price of an individual unit of water. Though water is a basic need to live, it is often plentiful, and though diamonds are often purely decorative, they are scarce. Marginalism quickly became, and remains, a central concept in economics.

Walras went on to mathematize his theory of marginal analysis and made models and theories that reflected what he found.  General equilibrium theory  came from his work, as did the practice of expressing economic concepts statistically and mathematically instead of just prose. Alfred Marshall took the mathematical modeling of economies to new heights, introducing many concepts that are still not widely understood, such as economies of scale,  marginal utility , and the real-cost paradigm.

It is nearly impossible to expose an economy to experimental rigor; therefore, economics is on the edge of science. Through mathematical modeling, however, some economic theories have been rendered testable.

The theories developed by Walras, Marshall, and their successors would develop in the 20th century into the neoclassical school of economics—defined by mathematical modeling and assumptions of rational actors and efficient markets. Later, statistical methods were applied to economic data in the form of econometrics , allowing economists to propose and test hypotheses empirically and in a methodologically rigorous manner.

John Maynard Keynes developed a new branch of economics known as Keynesian economics or macroeconomics. Keynes styled the economists who had come before him as "classical" economists. He believed that while their theories might apply to individual choices and goods markets, they did not adequately describe the operation of the economy as a whole. 

Instead of marginal units or even specific goods markets and prices, Keynesian macroeconomics presents the economy in terms of large-scale aggregates that represent the rate of unemployment, aggregate demand, or average price-level inflation for all goods. Moreover, Keynes's theory says that governments can be influential players in the economy—saving it from recession by implementing expansionary fiscal and monetary policy to increase economic output and stability.

By the mid-20th century, these two strands of thought—mathematical, marginalist microeconomics, and Keynesian macroeconomics—would rise to near-complete dominance in the field of economics throughout the Western world.

This became known as the neoclassical synthesis, which has since represented mainstream economic thought. It is taught in universities and practiced by researchers and policymakers, with other perspectives labeled as heterodox economics . 

Within the neoclassical synthesis, various streams of economic thought have developed, sometimes in opposition to one another. The inherent tension between neoclassical microeconomics (which portrays free markets as efficient and beneficial) and Keynesian macroeconomics—which views markets as inherently prone to catastrophic failure—has led to persistent academic and public policy disagreements, with different theories ascendant at different times. 

Various economists and schools of thought have sought to refine, reinterpret, redact, and redefine neoclassic and Keynesian macroeconomics.

Most prominent is  monetarism and the Chicago School, developed by  Milton Friedman , which retains neoclassical microeconomics and the Keynesian macroeconomic framework but shifts the emphasis of macroeconomics from fiscal policy (favored by Keynes) to monetary policy. Monetarism was widely espoused through the 1980s, '90s, and 2000s.

Several different streams of economic theory and research have been proposed to resolve the tension between micro- and macroeconomists. This attempt incorporates aspects or assumptions from microeconomics (such as rational expectations) into macroeconomics or further develops microeconomics to provide micro-foundations (such as price stickiness or psychological factors) for Keynesian macroeconomics.

In recent decades, this has led to new theories, such as behavioral economics, and to renewed interest in heterodox theories, such as Austrian-school economics, which were previously relegated to the economic backwaters.

Classical economic theory and theory of markets, from Smith through Friedman, have mainly rested on the assumption that consumers are rational actors who behave in their best interests.

However, current economists such as Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman , the late Gary Becker , and Amos Tversky have shown that people often do not act in their own best material interests but allow themselves to be swayed by non-material psychological factors and biases.

Behavioral economics has helped popularize several new concepts that make economic modeling and forecasting more difficult than ever. These concepts include:

• The sunk cost fallacy : Continuing to invest in a failing project because of what has been invested so far.
• Availability heuristics : Thinking a specific consequence of an action is more likely because it comes more easily to mind than other outcomes.
• Bounded rationality : People acting without complete information when they know that more information is available.

A rising cohort of economists has emphasized the importance of factoring in inequalities in income distribution and social well-being when measuring the success of a given economic policy. Pre-eminent among them is Anthony Atkinson (1944-2017), who focused on income redistribution within a given country.

Also highly regarded and noteworthy is  Amartya Sen , a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, whose work on global inequality won him the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998.

Sen’s work is also notable for reintroducing ethical behavior into his analysis. This concern ties Sen’s thinking back to the writing of the earliest economic thinkers, who saw the over-accumulation of wealth by individuals or groups as ultimately harmful to society.

What Is Economics and Its History?

Economics is the science and study of a society's ability to produce goods and services, buy and sell them, and consume them. Documentation, theories, and discussions go back thousands of years.

Who Invented Economics First?

There is no one person that "invented" economics. Instead, many notable thinkers and societies throughout history have contributed to the field of economics.

When Did Economic History Start?

Modern economics is attributed to Adam Smith, who published " The Wealth of Nations " in 1776 . However, the practices and ideas that led to Smith's paper were developed over centuries of discussions and ideas around the globe.

Economic theory grew out of societies’ need to account for resources, plan for the future, and exchange and allocate goods. Over time, these basic accounting tools grew into increasingly complex financial models, blending the mathematics required to calculate compound interest with ethics and moral philosophy.

Economics as a system to understand and control the material world and mitigate risk emerged and evolved across the globe in a staggered fashion—the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, China and India, ancient Greece, and the Arab world.

As societies grew wealthier and trade grew more complex, economic theory turned to the mathematics, statistics, and computational modeling that economists use to help guide policymakers. The business cycle, booms and busts, anti-inflation measures, and mortgage interest rates are outgrowths of economics.

Understanding them helps the market and government adjust for these variables. Balancing out the mathematical modeling approach is the study of factors that are more difficult to quantify but crucial to understand—most notably, the foibles and unpredictability of human psychology.

Princeton University Press. " Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible ."

Cambridge University Press. " The Early Dynastic Period (c. 3000–2686 BCE) ."

Britannica. " Code of Hammurab i."

Theoi. " Hesiod, Works and Days ."

Walter de Gruyter GmbH. " The Economics Book: From Xenophon to Cryptocurrency ."

Online Library of Liberty. " Aristotle's Politics ."

Britannica. " St. Thomas Aquinas ."

Britannica. " Ibn Khaldun ."

Ibn Khaldun. " The Muqaddimah ."

Cairn Info. " The Political Failure of an Economic Theory: Physiocracy ."

Adam Smith. "The Wealth of Nations," Sterling Publishing Company Inc., 2022 Edition.

Online Library of Liberty. " Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. 3 vols. [1909] ."

Britannica. " Léon Walras ."

Britannica. " Carl Menger ."

Britannica. " William Stanley Jevons ."

Online Library of Liberty. " Principles of Economics [1871] ."

International Relations and Security Network. " The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money By John Maynard Keynes ," Pages 8-1 and 125-151.

International Monetary Fund. " The IMF and the Silent Revolution ."

Online Library of Liberty. " The Intellectual Portrait Series: A Conversation with Milton Friedman [2003] ."

Tony Atkinson. " The Personal Website of Professor Sir Tony Atkinson ."

The Nobel Prize. " Amartya Sen Facts ."

Harvard University. " Amartya Sen ."

Econlib. " An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ."

• Terms of Service
• Editorial Policy
• Privacy Policy

Suggestions or feedback?

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Machine learning
• Sustainability
• Black holes
• Classes and programs

Departments

• Aeronautics and Astronautics
• Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• Architecture
• Political Science
• Mechanical Engineering

Centers, Labs, & Programs

• Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
• Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
• Lincoln Laboratory
• School of Architecture + Planning
• School of Engineering
• School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
• Sloan School of Management
• School of Science
• MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

The power of economics to explain and shape the world

Press contact :.

Previous image Next image

Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo sympathizes with students who have no interest in her field. She was such a student herself — until an undergraduate research post gave her the chance to learn first-hand that economists address many of the major issues facing human and planetary well-being. “Most people have a wrong view of what economics is. They just see economists on television discussing what’s going to happen to the stock market,” says Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics. “But what people do in the field is very broad. Economists grapple with the real world and with the complexity that goes with it.”

That’s why this year Duflo has teamed up with Professor Abhijit Banerjee to offer 14.009 (Economics and Society’s Greatest Problems), a first-year discovery subject — a class type designed to give undergraduates a low-pressure, high-impact way to explore a field. In this case, they are exploring the range of issues that economists engage with every day: the economic dimensions of climate change, international trade, racism, justice, education, poverty, health care, social preferences, and economic growth are just a few of the topics the class covers. “We think it’s pretty important that the first exposure to economics is via issues,” Duflo says. “If you first get exposed to economics via models, these models necessarily have to be very simplified, and then students get the idea that economics is a simplistic view of the world that can’t explain much.” Arguably, Duflo and Banerjee have been disproving that view throughout their careers. In 2003, the pair founded MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a leading antipoverty research network that provides scientific evidence on what methods actually work to alleviate poverty — which enables governments and nongovernmental organizations to implement truly effective programs and social policies. And, in 2019 they won the Nobel Prize in economics (together with Michael Kremer of the University of Chicago) for their innovative work applying laboratory-style randomized, controlled trials to research a wide range of topics implicated in global poverty. “Super cool”

First-year Jean Billa, one of the students in 14.009, says, “Economics isn’t just about how money flows, but about how people react to certain events. That was an interesting discovery for me.”

It’s also precisely the lesson Banerjee and Duflo hoped students would take away from 14.009, a class that centers on weekly in-person discussions of the professors’ recorded lectures — many of which align with chapters in Banerjee and Duflo’s book “Good Economics for Hard Times” (Public Affairs, 2019). Classes typically start with a poll in which the roughly 100 enrolled students can register their views on that week’s topic. Then, students get to discuss the issue, says senior Dina Atia, teaching assistant for the class. Noting that she finds it “super cool” that Nobelists are teaching MIT’s first-year students, Atia points out that both Duflo and Banerjee have also made themselves available to chat with students after class. “They’re definitely extending themselves,” she says. “We want the students to get excited about economics so they want to know more,” says Banerjee, the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, “because this is a field that can help us address some of the biggest problems society faces.”   Using natural experiments to test theories

Early in the term, for example, the topic was migration. In the lecture, Duflo points out that migration policies are often impacted by the fear that unskilled migrants will overwhelm a region, taking jobs from residents and demanding social services. Yet, migrant flows in normal years represent just 3 percent of the world population. “There is no flood. There is no vast movement of migrants,” she says. Duflo then explains that economists were able to learn a lot about migration thanks to a “natural experiment,” the Mariel boat lift. This 1980 event brought roughly 125,000 unskilled Cubans to Florida over a matter a months, enabling economists to study the impacts of a sudden wave of migration. Duflo says a look at real wages before and after the migration showed no significant impacts. “It was interesting to see that most theories about immigrants were not justified,” Billa says. “That was a real-life situation, and the results showed that even a massive wave of immigration didn’t change work in the city [Miami].”

Question assumptions, find the facts in data Since this is a broad survey course, there is always more to unpack. The goal, faculty say, is simply to help students understand the power of economics to explain and shape the world. “We are going so fast from topic to topic, I don’t expect them to retain all the information,” Duflo says. Instead, students are expected to gain an appreciation for a way of thinking. “Economics is about questioning everything — questioning assumptions you don’t even know are assumptions and being sophisticated about looking at data to uncover the facts.” To add impact, Duflo says she and Banerjee tie lessons to current events and dive more deeply into a few economic studies. One class, for example, focused on the unequal burden the Covid-19 pandemic has placed on different demographic groups and referenced research by Harvard University professor Marcella Alsan, who won a MacArthur Fellowship this fall for her work studying the impact of racism on health disparities.

Duflo also revealed that at the beginning of the pandemic, she suspected that mistrust of the health-care system could prevent Black Americans from taking certain measures to protect themselves from the virus. What she discovered when she researched the topic, however, was that political considerations outweighed racial influences as a predictor of behavior. “The lesson for you is, it’s good to question your assumptions,” she told the class. “Students should ideally understand, by the end of class, why it’s important to ask questions and what they can teach us about the effectiveness of policy and economic theory,” Banerjee says. “We want people to discover the range of economics and to understand how economists look at problems.”

Story by MIT SHASS Communications Editorial and design director: Emily Hiestand Senior writer: Kathryn O'Neill

Share this news article on:

Press mentions.

Prof. Esther Duflo will present her research on poverty reduction and her “proposal for a global minimum tax on billionaires and increased corporate levies to G-20 finance chiefs,” reports Andrew Rosati for Bloomberg. “The plan calls for redistributing the revenues to low- and middle-income nations to compensate for lives lost due to a warming planet,” writes Rosati. “It also adds to growing calls to raise taxes on the world’s wealthiest to help its most needy.”

Previous item Next item

Related Links

• Class 14.009 (Economics and Society’s Greatest Problems)
• Esther Duflo
• Abhijit Banerjee
• Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab
• Department of Economics
• Video: "Lighting the Path"

Related Topics

• Education, teaching, academics
• Climate change
• Immigration
• Social justice
• Health care
• School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences

Related Articles

Popular new major blends technical skills and human-centered applications

Report: Economics drives migration from Central America to the U.S.

MIT economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee win Nobel Prize

More mit news.

Risk, culture, and control

Read full story →

A new approach to fine-tuning quantum materials

D-Lab off-grid brooder saves chicks and money using locally manufactured thermal batteries

MIT chemists synthesize plant-derived molecules that hold potential as pharmaceuticals

Alex Shalek named director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science

New framework empowers pavement life-cycle decision-making while reducing data collection burden

• More news on MIT News homepage →

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, USA

• Map (opens in new window)
• Events (opens in new window)
• People (opens in new window)
• Careers (opens in new window)
• Accessibility
• Social Media Hub
• MIT on Facebook
• MIT on YouTube
• MIT on Instagram

• Business & Money

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics (Economics as Social Theory) 1st Edition

What do modern academic economists do? What currently is mainstream economics? What is neoclassical economics? And how about heterodox economics? How do the central concerns of modern economists, whatever their associations or allegiances, relate to those traditionally taken up in the discipline? And how did economics arrive at its current state? These and various cognate questions and concerns are systematically pursued in this new book by Tony Lawson. The result is a collection of previously published and new papers distinguished in providing the only comprehensive and coherent account of these issues currently available.

The financial crisis has not only revealed weaknesses of the capitalist economy but also highlighted just how limited and impoverished is modern academic economics. Despite the failings of the latter being more widely acknowledged now than ever, there is still an enormous amount of confusion about their source and true nature. In this collection, Tony Lawson also identifies the causes of the discipline’s failings and outlines a transformative solution to its deficiencies.

Amongst other things, Lawson advocates for the adoption of a more historical and philosophical orientation to the study of economics, one that deemphasizes the current focus on mathematical modelling while maintaining a high level of analytical rigour. In so doing Lawson argues for a return to long term systematic and sustained projects, in the manner pursued by the likes of Marx, Veblen, Hayek and Keynes, concerned first and foremost with advancing our understanding of social reality.

Overall, this forceful and persuasive collection represents a major intervention in the on-going debates about the nature, state and future direction of economics.

• ISBN-10 1138851027
• ISBN-13 978-1138851023
• Edition 1st
• Publication date April 22, 2015
• Part of series Economics as Social Theory
• Language English
• Dimensions 6.14 x 0.63 x 9.21 inches
• Print length 276 pages
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

This is a book of genuine originality, something that is rare in modern academia and all too often confused with mere novelty. Few thinkers can legitimately claim to have had a significant impact on their chosen field. Fewer still can claim to have substantively changed the terms of debate of that field. Tony Lawson is one of those few. These essays are for anyone with an interest in the future of the discipline.

Jamie Morgan, Reader in Economics, Leeds Beckett University; Co-editor Real World Economics Review

Tony Lawson has changed the conversation.

Edward Fullbrook, Executive Director of the World Economics Association.

Lawson writes with clarity and with an intellectual passion. A must read for any student of economics and political economy.

Peter Boettke, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, USA

This book should be read by everyone concerned to remedy the deficiencies in economics exposed by the 2008 financial crisis. Through rigorous argument, Lawson shows that the answer is not more complex forms of mathematical modelling, but the adoption of… methods that recognize the open-ended, relational , and processual character of economies.

Diane Elson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, UK

Tony Lawson provides the "L-correction" to Friedman's "F-twist", by forcing economics to consider its ontology.

Steve Keen, Professor and Head of Economics, History & Politics, Kingston University London, UK

[...] should be required reading for all serious economists, regardless of their approach.

G.C. Harcourt, Professorial Fellow, University of New South Wales

Tony Lawson is the enfant terrible of modern economic methodology. Whether you agree with him or not, he makes you think. This collection of papers is no exception. Highly recommended for all those with the slightest interest in the current state and nature of economic science.

Dimitris Milonakis, Professor of Political Economy and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Crete, Greece.

The book by Tony Lawson entitled Essays on the nature and state of modern economics comes at a particularly fitting time in the history of the economic academic discipline. After what has been regarded by many as one of its major setbacks―namely the failure to predict the 2008 global financial crisis―economics has been severely shaken, marginally challenged, but ultimately left untouched by the debates on its conditions that have sparked in the last few years. Therefore, Lawson's choice to assemble a number of previously published papers and a new one into this collection constitutes an important and welcome contribution to the methodology and philosophy of economics literature.

Marco Sebastianelli, Institute for Advanced Study of Pavia

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (April 22, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 276 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1138851027
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1138851023
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.14 x 0.63 x 9.21 inches
• #1,563 in Economic Theory (Books)
• #6,179 in Theory of Economics
• #82,544 in Specific Topics in Politics & Government

About the author

Tony lawson.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 100%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 0% 100% 0% 0% 0% 0%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

No customer reviews

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

1.1 What Is Economics, and Why Is It Important?

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Discuss the importance of studying economics
• Explain the relationship between production and division of labor
• Evaluate the significance of scarcity

Economics is the study of how humans make decisions in the face of scarcity. These can be individual decisions, family decisions, business decisions or societal decisions. If you look around carefully, you will see that scarcity is a fact of life. Scarcity means that human wants for goods, services and resources exceed what is available. Resources, such as labor, tools, land, and raw materials are necessary to produce the goods and services we want but they exist in limited supply. Of course, the ultimate scarce resource is time- everyone, rich or poor, has just 24 expendable hours in the day to earn income to acquire goods and services, for leisure time, or for sleep. At any point in time, there is only a finite amount of resources available.

Think about it this way: In 2015 the labor force in the United States contained over 158 million workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total land area was 3,794,101 square miles. While these are certainly large numbers, they are not infinite. Because these resources are limited, so are the numbers of goods and services we produce with them. Combine this with the fact that human wants seem to be virtually infinite, and you can see why scarcity is a problem.

Introduction to FRED

Data is very important in economics because it describes and measures the issues and problems that economics seek to understand. A variety of government agencies publish economic and social data. For this course, we will generally use data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank's FRED database. FRED is very user friendly. It allows you to display data in tables or charts, and you can easily download it into spreadsheet form if you want to use the data for other purposes. The FRED website includes data on nearly 400,000 domestic and international variables over time, in the following broad categories:

• Money, Banking & Finance
• Population, Employment, & Labor Markets (including Income Distribution)
• National Accounts (Gross Domestic Product & its components), Flow of Funds, and International Accounts
• Production & Business Activity (including Business Cycles)
• Prices & Inflation (including the Consumer Price Index, the Producer Price Index, and the Employment Cost Index)
• International Data from other nations
• U.S. Regional Data
• Academic Data (including Penn World Tables & NBER Macrohistory database)

For more information about how to use FRED, see the variety of videos on YouTube starting with this introduction.

If you still do not believe that scarcity is a problem, consider the following: Does everyone require food to eat? Does everyone need a decent place to live? Does everyone have access to healthcare? In every country in the world, there are people who are hungry, homeless (for example, those who call park benches their beds, as Figure 1.2 shows), and in need of healthcare, just to focus on a few critical goods and services. Why is this the case? It is because of scarcity. Let’s delve into the concept of scarcity a little deeper, because it is crucial to understanding economics.

The Problem of Scarcity

Think about all the things you consume: food, shelter, clothing, transportation, healthcare, and entertainment. How do you acquire those items? You do not produce them yourself. You buy them. How do you afford the things you buy? You work for pay. If you do not, someone else does on your behalf. Yet most of us never have enough income to buy all the things we want. This is because of scarcity. So how do we solve it?

Visit this website to read about how the United States is dealing with scarcity in resources.

Every society, at every level, must make choices about how to use its resources. Families must decide whether to spend their money on a new car or a fancy vacation. Towns must choose whether to put more of the budget into police and fire protection or into the school system. Nations must decide whether to devote more funds to national defense or to protecting the environment. In most cases, there just isn’t enough money in the budget to do everything. How do we use our limited resources the best way possible, that is, to obtain the most goods and services we can? There are a couple of options. First, we could each produce everything we each consume. Alternatively, we could each produce some of what we want to consume, and “trade” for the rest of what we want. Let’s explore these options. Why do we not each just produce all of the things we consume? Think back to pioneer days, when individuals knew how to do so much more than we do today, from building their homes, to growing their crops, to hunting for food, to repairing their equipment. Most of us do not know how to do all—or any—of those things, but it is not because we could not learn. Rather, we do not have to. The reason why is something called the division and specialization of labor , a production innovation first put forth by Adam Smith ( Figure 1.3 ) in his book, The Wealth of Nations .

The Division of and Specialization of Labor

The formal study of economics began when Adam Smith (1723–1790) published his famous book The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Many authors had written on economics in the centuries before Smith, but he was the first to address the subject in a comprehensive way. In the first chapter, Smith introduces the concept of division of labor , which means that the way one produces a good or service is divided into a number of tasks that different workers perform, instead of all the tasks being done by the same person.

To illustrate division of labor, Smith counted how many tasks went into making a pin: drawing out a piece of wire, cutting it to the right length, straightening it, putting a head on one end and a point on the other, and packaging pins for sale, to name just a few. Smith counted 18 distinct tasks that different people performed—all for a pin, believe it or not!

Modern businesses divide tasks as well. Even a relatively simple business like a restaurant divides the task of serving meals into a range of jobs like top chef, sous chefs, less-skilled kitchen help, servers to wait on the tables, a greeter at the door, janitors to clean up, and a business manager to handle paychecks and bills—not to mention the economic connections a restaurant has with suppliers of food, furniture, kitchen equipment, and the building where it is located. A complex business like a large manufacturing factory, such as the shoe factory ( Figure 1.4 ), or a hospital can have hundreds of job classifications.

Why the Division of Labor Increases Production

When we divide and subdivide the tasks involved with producing a good or service, workers and businesses can produce a greater quantity of output. In his observations of pin factories, Smith noticed that one worker alone might make 20 pins in a day, but that a small business of 10 workers (some of whom would need to complete two or three of the 18 tasks involved with pin-making), could make 48,000 pins in a day. How can a group of workers, each specializing in certain tasks, produce so much more than the same number of workers who try to produce the entire good or service by themselves? Smith offered three reasons.

First, specialization in a particular small job allows workers to focus on the parts of the production process where they have an advantage. (In later chapters, we will develop this idea by discussing comparative advantage .) People have different skills, talents, and interests, so they will be better at some jobs than at others. The particular advantages may be based on educational choices, which are in turn shaped by interests and talents. Only those with medical degrees qualify to become doctors, for instance. For some goods, geography affects specialization. For example, it is easier to be a wheat farmer in North Dakota than in Florida, but easier to run a tourist hotel in Florida than in North Dakota. If you live in or near a big city, it is easier to attract enough customers to operate a successful dry cleaning business or movie theater than if you live in a sparsely populated rural area. Whatever the reason, if people specialize in the production of what they do best, they will be more effective than if they produce a combination of things, some of which they are good at and some of which they are not.

Second, workers who specialize in certain tasks often learn to produce more quickly and with higher quality. This pattern holds true for many workers, including assembly line laborers who build cars, stylists who cut hair, and doctors who perform heart surgery. In fact, specialized workers often know their jobs well enough to suggest innovative ways to do their work faster and better.

A similar pattern often operates within businesses. In many cases, a business that focuses on one or a few products (sometimes called its “ core competency ”) is more successful than firms that try to make a wide range of products.

Third, specialization allows businesses to take advantage of economies of scale , which means that for many goods, as the level of production increases, the average cost of producing each individual unit declines. For example, if a factory produces only 100 cars per year, each car will be quite expensive to make on average. However, if a factory produces 50,000 cars each year, then it can set up an assembly line with huge machines and workers performing specialized tasks, and the average cost of production per car will be lower. The ultimate result of workers who can focus on their preferences and talents, learn to do their specialized jobs better, and work in larger organizations is that society as a whole can produce and consume far more than if each person tried to produce all of their own goods and services. The division and specialization of labor has been a force against the problem of scarcity.

Trade and Markets

Specialization only makes sense, though, if workers can use the pay they receive for doing their jobs to purchase the other goods and services that they need. In short, specialization requires trade.

You do not have to know anything about electronics or sound systems to play music—you just buy an iPod or MP3 player, download the music, and listen. You do not have to know anything about artificial fibers or the construction of sewing machines if you need a jacket—you just buy the jacket and wear it. You do not need to know anything about internal combustion engines to operate a car—you just get in and drive. Instead of trying to acquire all the knowledge and skills involved in producing all of the goods and services that you wish to consume, the market allows you to learn a specialized set of skills and then use the pay you receive to buy the goods and services you need or want. This is how our modern society has evolved into a strong economy.

Why Study Economics?

Now that you have an overview on what economics studies, let’s quickly discuss why you are right to study it. Economics is not primarily a collection of facts to memorize, although there are plenty of important concepts to learn. Instead, think of economics as a collection of questions to answer or puzzles to work. Most importantly, economics provides the tools to solve those puzzles.

Consider the complex and critical issue of education barriers on national and regional levels, which affect millions of people and result in widespread poverty and inequality. Governments, aid organizations, and wealthy individuals spend billions of dollars each year trying to address these issues. Nations announce the revitalization of their education programs; tech companies donate devices and infrastructure, and celebrities and charities build schools and sponsor students. Yet the problems remain, sometimes almost as pronounced as they were before the intervention. Why is that the case? In 2019, three economists—Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer—were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work to answer those questions. They worked diligently to break the widespread problems into smaller pieces, and experimented with small interventions to test success. The award citation credited their work with giving the world better tools and information to address poverty and improve education. Esther Duflo, who is the youngest person and second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, said, "We believed that like the war on cancer, the war on poverty was not going to be won in one major battle, but in a series of small triumphs. . . . This work and the culture of learning that it fostered in governments has led to real improvement in the lives of hundreds of millions of poor people.”

As you can see, economics affects far more than business. For example:

• Virtually every major problem facing the world today, from global warming, to world poverty, to the conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia, has an economic dimension. If you are going to be part of solving those problems, you need to be able to understand them. Economics is crucial.
• It is hard to overstate the importance of economics to good citizenship. You need to be able to vote intelligently on budgets, regulations, and laws in general. When the U.S. government came close to a standstill at the end of 2012 due to the “fiscal cliff,” what were the issues? Did you know?
• A basic understanding of economics makes you a well-rounded thinker. When you read articles about economic issues, you will understand and be able to evaluate the writer’s argument. When you hear classmates, co-workers, or political candidates talking about economics, you will be able to distinguish between common sense and nonsense. You will find new ways of thinking about current events and about personal and business decisions, as well as current events and politics.

The study of economics does not dictate the answers, but it can illuminate the different choices.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/principles-economics-3e/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Steven A. Greenlaw, David Shapiro, Daniel MacDonald
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Principles of Economics 3e
• Publication date: Dec 14, 2022
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/principles-economics-3e/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/principles-economics-3e/pages/1-1-what-is-economics-and-why-is-it-important

© Jul 18, 2024 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

On the site

• business & economics

Critical Essay on Modern Macroeconomic Theory

by Frank Hahn and Robert M. Solow

ISBN: 9780262581547

Pub date: August 21, 1997

• Publisher: The MIT Press

208 pp. , 6 x 9 in ,

• Rights: not for sale in Europe or the UK Commonwealth, except Canada

ISBN: 9780262082419

Pub date: December 8, 1995

• 9780262581547
• Published: August 1997
• 9780262082419
• Published: December 1995
• Amazon.co.uk
• Bookshop.org
• Waterstones

Other Retailers:

• MIT Press Bookstore
• Penguin Random House
• Barnes and Noble
• Books a Million
• Description

Macroeconomics began as the study of large-scale economic pathologies such as prolonged depression, mass unemployment, and persistent inflation. In the early 1980s, rational expectations and new classical economics dominated macroeconomic theory, with the result that such pathologies can hardly be discussed within the vocabulary of the theory. This essay evolved from the authors' profound disagreement with that trend. It demonstrates not only how the new classical view got macroeconomics wrong, but alsohow to go about doing macroeconomics the right way. Hahn and Solow argue that what was originally offered as a normative model based on perfect foresight and universal perfect competition—useful for predicting what an ideal, omniscient planner should do—has been almost casually transformed into a model for interpreting real macroeconomic behavior, leading to Panglossian economics that does not reflect actual experience. Following an explanation of microeconomic foundations, chapters introduce the basic elements for a better macro model. The model is simple, but combined with the appropriate model of the labor market it can say useful things about the fluctuation of employment, the correlation between wages and employment, and the role for corrective monetary policy.

Frank Hahn, one of Britain's most eminent economists, is Professor of Economics at Cambridge University and author of Equilibrium and Macroeconomics (MIT Press 1985).

Robert M. Solow is Institute Professor of Economics.

Like the great debate between Einstein and Bohr on quantum physics,the debate between Hahn-Solow and Lucas's rational expectationismis a must for all serious students of macro. This is how scientificprogress should be done—by sober analysis rather than cleverrhetoric or frenzied ideology. Paul A. Samuelson, Professor of Economics, M.I.T.

Professors Hahn and Solow pick up the simple general equilibrium models of new classical macroeconomics and run with them. Of course, they head off in directions that are theirs alone. Critics of these models, and enthusiasts, will want to read this book and see how far they get. Paul M. Romer, Professor of Economics, University of Californiaat Berkeley

Related Books

• An Essay on Economic Theory
• An Essay on Economic Theory.pdf
• An Essay on Economic Theory.epub
• naturaleza-del-comercio-electronico.pdf
• naturaleza-del-comercio-facsimile.pdf
• Related Content:

Here is the first accurate translation of Richard Cantillon’s 1755 masterpiece on economics. This treatise is widely credited with being the first to describe the market process as one driven by entrepreneurship. William Stanley Jevons, in the first blush of discovery, proclaimed Cantillon’s Essai , “the cradle of political economy.”

A cradle holds new life; and there can be little doubt that the Essai added new life to the organizing principles of economics. But “political economy” does not accurately describe the subject Cantillon addressed. Indeed, he scrupulously avoided political issues in order to concentrate on the mechanics of eighteenth-century economic life. When confronted by “extraneous” factors, such as politics, Cantillon insisted that such considerations be put aside, “so as not to complicate our subject,” he said, thus invoking a kind of ceteris paribus assumption before it became fashionable in economics to do so.

Murray Rothbard, for this reason, called Cantillon the “founding father of modern economics.”

This book preceded Adam Smith by a generation. Unlike any previous writer, Cantillon explicated the vital role of the entrepreneur with perception and vigor. Hence, he deserves to be called “the father of enterprise economics.”

We know little of Cantillon’s life and the circumstances of his authorship. The manuscript that was eventually published in 1755 circulated privately in France for almost two decades before; when published, it appeared under mysterious circumstances.

Mark Thornton and Chantal Saucier have accomplished the arduous task of bringing forth a new and improved translation of Cantillon’s famous work. Heretofore the only English translation of the Essai available has been the 1931 edition produced by Henry Higgs for the Royal Economic Society. Though competent, it has become less serviceable over time, as more and more of its shortcomings devolved (not the least of which is the antiquated use of “undertaker” in place of “entrepreneur”).

Saucier provides a more accurate and lucid account, better suited to the 21st century. Thornton’s hand shows not only in competent guidance of the translator but in the inclusion of numerous explanatory footnotes that add historical context.

Robert F. Hébert writes the foreword.

The honor of being called the “father of modern economics” belongs not to its usual recipient, Adam Smith, but to a gallicized Irish merchant, banker, and adventurer who wrote the first treatise on economics more than four decades before the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Richard Cantillon (1680s–1734) — a proto-Austrian — is one of the most fascinating characters in the history of social or economic thought.

On the Cause and Effect of Interest Rates 11/18/2021 • Mises Daily • Richard Cantillon It is a common idea, accepted by all those who have written on commerce, that an increased quantity of money in a state decreases the rate of interest, because when money is abundant it is easier to...

Cantillon defines wealth as the consumption goods produced by land and labor.

1.7. The Labor of the Plowman is of Less Value than that of the Artisan 12/01/2014 • Richard Cantillon Skilled workers must be paid higher wages than unskilled workers.

Mises Institute, 2010

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. 

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Economics in Early Modern Philosophy

Economic discourse of the early modern period offers an analysis of specific core phenomena: property, money, commerce, trade, public finance, population growth, and economic development, as well as investigations into economic inequality and distributive justice. Many of the leading early modern philosophers, from Nicholas Copernicus to Adam Smith, made significant contributions to economics. This list includes Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Jeremy Bentham. Other philosophers of renown addressed the principles of property and commercial obligations, notably Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Thomas Paine, Immanuel Kant, Condorcet, and Sophie de Grouchy. If economics is construed more broadly as reflections on the moral dimensions of material betterment, then the list much expands, to include, for example, Bernard Mandeville, Frances Hutcheson, Voltaire, Thomas Reid, and Antonio Genovesi. If one expands the ambit of economics to include the complex interplay between reason and the passions as directed at the pursuit of happiness, then countless men and women of letters in the early modern period contributed to this discourse.

There were at least a dozen schools of economic thought in the early modern period. Impressively, by the close of the eighteenth century, many of the core principles and laws on money, markets, and trade had been articulated, and many of the methods of economics—model building, time series analysis, statistical estimation, game theory and decision theory—were already extant. In sum, the “science of commerce” as economics was mostly known at the time, was a mature inquiry and, as held true of the natural sciences in the early modern period, drew substantially on its philosophical roots.

1. Schools of Economic Thought

2. temporal boundaries, 3. pre-modern economic thought, 4. ethics of commerce and trade, 5. principles of property and contracts, 6. philosophy of money, 7. scientific status of economics and its methodology, 8. distributive justice, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) is without question the single most influential tome, both for the early modern period and for the entire history of economics. Smith’s analysis not only unpacked the core features of money and markets, but also provided a dynamic analysis of the “progress of opulence”, sweeping across the globe and reaching back to ancient times (see Rothschild & Sen 2006). He covered the entire range of economics, from price theory to public finance. Significantly—and this may prove his greatest contribution—his first and only other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), developed a moral psychology that served as the foundation for his economics and, arguably, for economics to the present insofar as it still commits to the self-interest axiom (see Davis 2003; Schliesser 2017; Fleischacker 2013 [2020]). Smith’s first book motivated the universal sympathetic regard that binds us to one another, even to strangers, and it established a restless desire for approbation and hence for wealth as the driving force of human betterment. Finally, his essays on the history of science served to elevate the epistemic standing of economics, and by the first half of the nineteenth century the science of political economy, as it came to be known, was widely esteemed (see Redman 1997).

Smith remains nonpareil, not only because of the breadth and depth of his work, but also because he provided one of the most penetrating analyses of human behavior to explain our economic condition. If Hobbes offered a political solution to conflict and penury, Smith grasped a century later that economic forces, the accumulation of wealth and the ever-expanding global trade, overrode the power of the most ambitious of sovereigns. Recognition of the immense power of markets, both local and international, commenced in the seventeenth century, as a number of prominent twentieth-century economists came to recognize. John Maynard Keynes paid tribute to the English Mercantilists, John Locke, and William Petty; Friedrich Hayek honored the insights of Bernard Mandeville and Richard Cantillon; Paul Samuelson admired François Quesnay; and Milton Friedman praised John Law. All four—Keynes, Hayek, Samuelson, and Friedman—admired and wrote about David Hume’s economics (see Schabas & Wennerlind 2020: Ch. 7).

Smith owed a sizable debt to his immediate predecessors, above all to his close friend Hume with whom he exchanged ideas for over twenty-five years (see Harris 2015). There is a grain of truth to Joseph Schumpeter’s harsh judgment that

the Wealth of Nations does not contain a single analytic idea, principle, or method that was entirely new in 1776. (Schumpeter 1954: 184)

This, however, is testament to the theoretical maturity of economics by the second half of the eighteenth century. The most robust verities of economics, even to this day, are to be found in the pre-Smithian literature (see Hutchison 1988). The core elements of the theory of prices had been broached, its grounding in use-value and exchange-value, the appeal to the costs of labor and the imperative of cost-recovery, as well as the laws of supply and demand in various guises, including the concept of the price-elasticity of demand. Pre-Smithian economists are renowned for contributions to monetary theory, stipulating the form and function of money, the principles of bimetallism, debasement and devaluation, the quantity theory of money, the specie-flow mechanism and the multiplier (see Murphy 2009; Arnon 2010). Gresham’s law, devised circa 1560, was extended from domestic currencies to foreign exchange markets. Financial markets became increasingly sophisticated, with a wide array of equities, bonds, and discounted banknotes in circulation. The state issued public debt in the form of bonds and Exchequer notes, and amassed significant funds through lotteries and annuities (see Neal 1990). In the stock markets of Hamburg (1558), Amsterdam (1602), and London (1698), one could find short selling ( windhandel ), bond-equity swaps, and futures (see De Marchi & Harrison 1994). In 1747, Émilie du Châtelet is reputed to have devised and profited from contracting a percentage of future tax revenues, a novel instrument akin to a modern derivative (Bodanis 2006: 217–218).

Economists before Smith, such as Cantillon, Hume, James Steuart, and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, discerned some of the key arguments for the gains from trade and the dynamics of economic growth that stemmed from the division of labor, population growth, economies of scale and, above all, capital accumulation (see Murphy 2009). Because of the growth of markets and factor mobility, eighteenth-century economists recognized the regional manifestation of a uniform wage and profit rate, and thus made insights not only about the inverse relationship between profits and wages but also about the tendency of the profit rate to decline over time. Above all, they did what is essential to most if not all philosophical thought—drive a wedge between appearance and reality—distinguishing prices from underlying values, and the nominal or money wage from the real wage, its purchasing power. Petty, Hume, and Smith firmly entrenched the central distinction of the nominal and the real in economic discourse while also grappling with efforts to measure inflation.

As a field of inquiry, economics was prodigious during the early modern period. From the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, the catalogue of French and English publications on economics exceeded five thousand entries (see Massie 1760; Théré 1998; Hoppit 2006). These took the form of books, short tracts, essays, pamphlets, and dictionaries, as well as entries in periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine or Éphémérides du citoyen .

There were at least a dozen distinct schools of economic thought in early modern Europe (see Hutchison 1988). By far the largest and most long-lived were the Cameralists, and their voluminous output is not included in the figure of five thousand given above. Cameralists were to be found across the Germanic, Scandinavian, and Italian principalities or republics for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kameralwissenschaft , or the economics of the chamber, was primarily a set of courses for young men as preparation for government positions. They also studied philosophy, the metaphysics of Christian Wolff for example, as well as botany, chemistry and metallurgy (see Tribe 1978; Wakefield 2009). Some of the leading Cameralists, notably Johann Joachim Becher, Joseph von Sonnenfels, and Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, advanced distinct doctrines pertaining to autarky or public finance, vestiges of which endured in twentieth-century Fascism. Justi’s last book, System des Finanzwesens (1766), synthesized much of the extant knowledge of Cameralism, specifically on fiscal policy. As a group, they concentrated on resource extraction—mining and logging—as the means to enrichment and self-sufficiency, but there were also schemes, particularly by the Swedish botanist and Cameralist, Carl Linnaeus, to domesticate non-native plants as a means to reduce trade dependencies (see Koerner 1999).

Innumerable writings on money, trade and commerce were posthumously grouped by Adam Smith under the rubric of the “Mercantile System”, or what eventually came to be known as Mercantilism. Many of the texts were polemical and self-serving, and endorsed Crown rights and monopolistic trade. Mercantilist writings sprang up across western Europe, particularly in seventeenth-century Sweden, Holland, and England (see Magnusson 1994; Stern & Wennerlind 2014). Among these were important works by Gerard de Malynes (1622) and Edward Misselden (1623), each of whom made efforts to discover the underlying factors for the economic depression of the 1620s (see Appleby 1978). The two most influential English mercantilists, Thomas Mun (1664) and John Cary (1695) theorized about the gains from trade and its benefits for national wealth and well-being, and were by no means crude bullionists (see Reinert 2011).

Other schools were more localized and less enduring than the Cameralists or Mercantilists. One of the first is the Salamanca school of mid-sixteenth-century Spain that included Luis de Molina, Martín de Azpilcueta, and Francisco Suárez (see Grice-Hutchinson 1978). Another school drew inspiration from the natural law theories of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, who had addressed the principles governing contractual obligations in general, and the complexities of property rights in particular (see Skinner 1999). Johan De Wit and Christiaan Huygens of the Dutch Golden age recorded important insights into commercial mathematics (see Daston 1988; Sylla 2003). The Political Arithmeticians of seventeenth-century England and Ireland, notably William Petty, Edmund Halley, and John Graunt, devised ingenious methods for measuring population, the money supply, and the movement of core prices (see Rusnock 1999). The Stadialists of eighteenth-century Scotland, namely Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar, offered a theory of economic development based on four stages, hunting and gathering, shepherding, cultivation, and commerce and trade that was partly adopted by Hume and Smith (see Wolloch 2011).

Early modern France spawned a number of distinct groups, each one adhering to the dictates of a single leader, namely the Colbertistes (Jean-Baptiste Colbert), the Gournay Circle (Jacques-Claude-Marie-Vincent de Gournay), and most famously, the Physiocrats, who were also known as “les économistes” devoted to their founder François Quesnay, court physician at Versailles (see Meek 1962; Larrère 1992; Faccarello 1989 [1999]). In the Italian cities, Milan and Naples, Enlightenment circles were renowned for espousing the ideals of pubblica felicità (public happiness) and economia civile (civil economy). Some of the leading thinkers were Antonio Genovesi, Cesare Beccaria, Pietro Verri, and Ferdinando Galiani (see Robertson 2005; Reinert 2018). Portugal housed an active group of economic thinkers, notably António de Vasconcelos Nogueira and Isaac da Pinto (Cardoso 1990). In colonial America and its early days as the republic of the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, among others, devised a distinct set of principles on money, banking, capital markets, and property rights that were directly indebted to the teachings of Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith (see Pocock 1985).

From the standpoint of present mainstream economics, the legacy of the British utilitarians was by far the deepest and longest, starting with Francis Bacon, Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), and Francis Hutcheson, who coined the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” (1725 [1726: §3.8]), a governing principle for both Hume and Smith in their economic inquiries (see Gill 2006; Driver 2009 [2014]). Hume’s quartet of “happiness essays” (1742 but collected in 1758), and Smith’s two books (1759, 1776) are replete with insights on the ethical dimensions of the pursuit of wealth. Each one recognized that there were many impediments to happiness, that humans are prone to self-deception, to overestimate their luck and to underestimate the adversities that life holds. They each positioned non-pecuniary goods, equanimity and friendship, as more valuable than material wealth, and issued numerous insights on the various paths one might take with one’s life. While the debate about the degree to which either Hume or Smith adhered more to virtue ethics than to utilitarianism may never be resolved, when it comes to their respective economic analyses, their consequentialist observations about untoward ambition or the value of foresight fits a utilitarian sensibility (see Sakamoto 2016: Schabas 2015).

The early utilitarians, grounded in British empiricism, laid the foundation for both the classical school of political economy and for neoclassical economics that commenced with the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s. Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick made major contributions to the moral doctrine of utilitarianism and to political economy. It is important to distinguish the moral doctrine of utilitarianism from the utility theory of value that unpacks the formation of prices. Utilitarianism provided a framing for economic thought from the seventeenth century, whereas the utility theory of value, while broached multiple times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only replaced the labor theory of value in the 1870s.

Interestingly, the majority of the leading contributors to nineteenth economics lived in Britain. This list features David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall—even Karl Marx, notwithstanding Jean-Baptiste Say, Léon Walras, or the Austrians. The prevalence of economic discourse in Britain might partly reflect its hegemonic standing in global trade, but a more significant factor might be its enlightened culture that fostered freedoms of the press, liberal mores, and religious toleration (see Winch 1996).

Eighteenth-century economic discourse was more evenly spread across the Continent, but the empiricist school in Britain left the most enduring imprint. Locke, Hume and Smith made important contributions to economics, whereas scholars have yet to locate significant economic insights in the work of the leading rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza, or Leibniz, although Leibniz also wrote extensively on politics. One discernible pattern is that the leading anglophone contributors to eighteenth-century economics were, for the most part, not English-born, but Dutch, Scottish or Irish; nor were they particularly devout. Locke is the notable exception on both counts. It is important to point out that Mandeville (Dutch), Cantillon (Irish-French), and the Scots Law, Hume, and Smith, were inclined to study and promote commerce and trade as the progressive face of a more secular world. If much of modern economic thinking builds upon moral philosophy, it is and was, with a few exceptions, grounded in non-sacred sources.

This pattern of thinkers on the periphery of the religious status quo is also manifest in the nineteenth century, with Say, Ricardo, and the Mills, père et fils. To engage in the study of economics demands a willingness to overcome the Biblical restrictions on commercial activities. As Voltaire observed, praising the degree of religious diversity in the London stock market,

where there is not liberty of conscience, there is seldom liberty of trade, the same tyranny encroaching upon commerce as upon Religion. (Voltaire [1952: 43])

The fact that individual liberties and religious toleration were more prevalent in Britain might provide a more plausible explanation as to why mainstream economic thought was most cultivated in the English language over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Mokyr 2009). This is in marked contrast to the natural sciences, which were most concentrated in France in the eighteenth century and in Germany in the nineteenth century.

Many contributors to economics were actively engaged in scientific and philosophical societies. The members of the Hartlib Circle of mid-seventeenth century England conjoined natural science with economic objectives, not least alchemical pursuits as a solution to the dire shortage of coins (see Wennerlind 2014). Its best known member, the Irish philosopher William Petty, was a leading contributor to monetary theory and demography, as well as a founding member of the Royal Society. His economic writings fill two large volumes and he broached the concepts of the transactions level and the velocity of money, two key variables that cemented the core principle of the quantity theory of money. Two of the most renowned philosophers of the period, Locke and Isaac Newton, were actively engaged in debates over the value of the currency, specifically when Newton served as Warden and then Master of the Mint (see Westfall 1981). Hume and Smith were members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society (Hume was co-secretary) and were close friends of the leading contributors to mainstream science, William Cullen, Joseph Black, and James Hutton in Scotland, as well as, in Hume’s case, the French proto-evolutionist Comte de Buffon and, in Smith’s case, the French botanist Charles Bonnet. Smith’s essays on the history of astronomy and of physics, first sketched in the 1750s but updated and revised for the rest of his life, display a sophisticated command of science and the history and philosophy of science. His stance was one of fallibilism and instrumentalism, and he broached the possibility that the Newtonian system, while ascendant, would one day be superseded (see Schliesser 2017).

In France, the Académie des Sciences offered prizes for contributions to economics, and the multi-volume Encyclopédie (1751–1780) produced by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert distinctly positioned economics on the tree of knowledge, as one of the three branches of the moral sciences (politics and natural jurisprudence were the other two). It contained numerous entries on mining, metallurgy and textiles, including one that illustrated the production of metal pins that most likely inspired Smith for his analysis of the division of labor (Ross 1995, 273-274). There were important entries by Rousseau, entitled “économie ou œconomie” (1755), by Quesnay, entitled “fermiers” (1756) and “grains” (1757), and by Turgot, entitled “foire” (1756). In sum, eighteenth-century economics was conjoined with natural philosophy, both theoretical and applied. It is not by accident that Turgot, best known as an economist and as Contrôleur général des finances (1774-1776), devised one of the most critical breakthroughs for the Chemical Revolution. His concepts of expansibilité and vaporization recognized that each substance, when heated, underwent state changes from solid, to liquid, to gas. A number of the leading contributors to eighteenth-century science, notably Carl Linnaeus, Leonhard Euler and Antoine Lavoisier, also wrote about economics.

When writing the history of a segment of the past there is always a degree of arbitrariness in demarcating its temporal boundary. Early modern philosophy spans the early sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century, but where to draw the precise boundaries will forever garner debate. In the history of economics, there is little question that Adam Smith constitutes the founding authority on the subject. A few general treatises appeared before Adam Smith’s, starting with Antoine de Montchrétien’s Traicté de l’économie politique (1615), Pierre de Boisguilbert, Dissertation de la nature des richesses (1707) and culminating with Turgot’s Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richessess (1766), James Steuart’s Principles of Political Œconomy (1767), and Condillac’s Le Commerce et le gouvernement considérés relativement l’un à l’autre (1776). Nevertheless, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) was the definitive work of the period, although it took about two decades to reach that stature, and serve as the founding text for the classical school of political economy of the nineteenth century.

As Michel Foucault discerned in Les mots et les choses ( The Order of Things , 1966 [1970]), there was a significant transformation in economic discourse circa 1800, but not for the reasons he gave. It was not that the concept of wealth was merely represented before 1800, and then gained materiality. What distinguishes early modern economics from the classical period that took hold in the early nineteenth century was that the latter organized their analysis around “the economy”. Prior to that, the various core phenomena were either treated separately or, if bundled together, were for the most part treated as part of the natural order (see Schabas 2005).

It is important to recognize that “the economy” is a theoretical construct, an emergent order that sits upon patterns of human activity directed at production, distribution, and consumption. As a social kind, recognition of “the economy” took hold with Ricardo (1817) and John Stuart Mill (1848), among others (see Tribe 1981). This shift in part reflected the great economic transformation of the time, what has come to be known as the Industrial Revolution. Smith and his predecessors were still under the grip of a pre-industrial world, one of mercantile and agrarian capitalism, with only fleeting acknowledgments of the industrial take-off that had commenced by the 1760s.

Finally, the adjective “political” became paramount in the nineteenth century, but was seldom used in the early modern period. The primary name for economics in the eighteenth century was the “science of commerce”, as is evident in the titles of a number of leading texts at the time, for example by Forbonnais, Cantillon, Tucker, and Condillac. Moreover, the primary focus was on public debt, and appeals to significant political reforms were peripheral rather than central. As Hume observed in 1741, “trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century” (“Of Civil Liberty”, [1987: 88])—Niccolò Machiavelli made no mention of trade; moreover, it might prove too challenging to arrive at “general truths in politics” (ibid. [1987: 87–88]). When Smith took up the “science of political economy” in Book Four of the Wealth of Nations , he limited it to the policies of the legislator and public finance. Notwithstanding attention to the political restrictions on trade and commerce, the leading economists of the latter half of the eighteenth century, namely Hume, Quesnay, Turgot, and Smith, were inclined to downplay the influence of politics, and were conservative when it came to property rights. It was an age dominated by Montesquieu in France, and Edmund Burke in Britain, and the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 were bourgeois rather than socialist (see Pocock 1985; Sonenscher 2007).

In this respect as well, political economy of the nineteenth century was significantly different in tenor; it put center-stage the plight of the poor, the expansion of suffrage to working men, and their entitlement to form trade unions. Socialist economic thought only emerged in the beginning of the nineteenth century, particularly in France. There were antecedents, such as the English Levellers Gerrard Winstanley and John Lilburne, and the Dutch reformers Johan De Witt and Pieter de la Court, but they were not important contributors to economic discourse. To a significant degree, Smith served as the inflection point, with his famous statement that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable”, or that merchants “have an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public” (Smith 1776 [1976: 96, 267]). British and French economic thought, with some exceptions, leaned primarily toward socialism throughout the nineteenth century. Ricardo exposed the parasitical standing of the landowning class, and spawned a radical following that included both James and John Stuart Mill, as well as a group known as the Ricardian socialists. In fact, many of the early neoclassical economists, for example William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, and Léon Walras, were democratic socialists of one stripe or another. It is not a challenge to plaster a very different and far more conservative tenor to mainstream economics of the twentieth century, whether one looks to Vilfredo Pareto, Irving Fisher, Schumpeter, Hayek or Friedman. Attending to the political hue of economic discourse serves all the more to distinguish the early modern period from the classical school of political economy of the nineteenth century or the neoclassical school that persists to the present.

While there is no single definition of economics, most of the discourse of the early modern period centered upon a set of phenomena such as prices, trade, taxes, money and banking. In the nineteenth century, most texts foregrounded the laws that govern production and distribution and, starting in the 1870s, exchange and consumption. In the twentieth century, the best known definition is the one offered by Lionel Robbins in 1932:

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses. (Robbins 1932: 15)

Consumers maximize utility (preferences) and firms maximize profits (expected returns), and this seeps into virtually every facet of life. Given some limiting assumptions, modern welfare theory can prove that an economy in general equilibrium attains Pareto optimality, that it is the most efficient and the most just.

As with many sciences, Aristotle laid much of the groundwork for economic thought, and his legacy, with the medieval scholastics, with the early modern philosophers and last but not least with Karl Marx, was profound and far-reaching (see Meikle 1995). Aristotle’s unit of analysis was the oikos , or household, from which the word economy is derived, but he also issued important insights on money and prices, as well as property and slavery. Above all, he argued that commercial pursuits were, for the most part, unethical, because they distorted means and ends. He thus drove a wedge between material betterment and the pursuit of virtue. Economic pursuits must always be subsumed to the good life, or sustained happiness ( eudaimonia ). Usury was particularly problematic because it violated the natural order, obtaining a yield from an object, money, that was inanimate (Aristotle Politics 1258b).

Aristotle asked one of the most fundamental questions of economics: What is a price? The simple answer is a ratio of two goods, one of which might be the established currency, but he maintained that it made no difference; a price in barter is the same as a money price. However, he qualified this claim with the recognition of the evolution of money over time and the fact that many mistake it as an end in itself rather than simply a means to facilitate barter. More remarkably, Aristotle grasped that a price masks the fact that no two commodities are fully commensurable. Exchange of goods or services, he noted, is grounded in fulfilling specific human needs, and no two of those are ever the same.

Although [two] things so different cannot become commensurate in reality, they can become commensurate enough in relation to our needs … Currency, then by making things commensurate as a measure does, equalizes them. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1131b16-20)

He went further on this path and asserted what is one of the most enduring propositions in economics, namely that “everything must have a price”. (ibid.)

Aristotle identified the three functional properties of money that remain canonical: money serves as a unit of account (a measure), a medium of exchange (replacing barter), and a store of value (stockpile of wealth). Furthermore, he noted that the denomination is purely conventional and that legal authorities might alter this at whim. Money was but a yardstick to measure the exchange-value of goods but unlike those goods, lacked a use-value as the fable of Midas proved all too well. He also asserted that it made no difference what substance is used for money, but then went on to assert that the fetish for gold and silver had made metallic coins unique in human society. Moreover, precious metals offered certain advantages: they are durable, divisible, transportable, and easily stamped with the value of the coin. Finally, his analysis of monopolistic pricing displays a firm grasp of the principles of supply and demand.

Aquinas, Jean Buridan, and Nicole Oresme, among others of the late medieval period, assimilated Aristotelian economic thought to Biblical teachings and, by and large, cast commercial activities in a negative light (Jones 1989; Langholm 1998). To buy low and sell high was to engage in deception and hence to violate the Golden Rule. To practice usury contravened the Biblical dictum, to “lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). The late medieval philosophers dug more deeply into the evolving legal practices of their time, insofar as wholesale grain merchants, partnerships, and debasements had become increasingly commonplace. Aquinas and Buridan each accepted, albeit with qualifications, that money is but a unit of measure set by men, and thus decreed that the crown might alter the denomination to serve the common good (Kaye 1998; Hirschfeld 2018). Oresme’s Treatise on Money (1358) went further, acknowledging the problematic shortage of specie and thereby promoting the use of copper or “black money”, since the coins had turned this color from overuse. He positioned the currency within the commercial sphere and thus broke all the more from the Christian view that the established coins emanated from God via divine rule, and were thus the sole property of the prince (Lapidus 1997).

In the case of commercial transactions, particularly of necessities, the late scholastics recognized legitimate charges for mercantile services of transportation, storage, and risk-taking, but condemned the practices of price gouging and other types of market manipulations, particularly the forestalling, regrating and engrossing of grain supplies. As for singular purchases of land or a luxury item, Aquinas unpacked in considerable detail the question of whether or not it was ethical to sell a good for more than it is worth. Notwithstanding customary prices, he recognized numerous circumstances where this might prove not only legal but also ethical. While berating the Roman maxim of caveat emptor , he endorsed the prevailing principle of laesio enormis which stipulated that the contracted price could fall within a fifty percent range (plus or minus) of the customary price. The doctrine of the “just price”, one that covered costs but was also sensitive to local conditions of demand, was further developed in this period and is still at the core of commercial law. Aquinas also reviewed four different contexts that would permit the charging of interest. One articulated the concept of an opportunity cost, and another appealed to the arrangement of capital transfer known as a partnership still honored today by Islamic authorities. Increasingly, commercial loans saw the principal as a form of capital that had legitimate and alternative yields. In sum, the late scholastics offer many insights on commerce and trade, the status of the Crown in managing legal tender, and the inherent tensions between commerce and virtue.

As Albert O. Hirschman (1977) argued, philosophers in early modern Europe went to great lengths to position commerce, banking, and the accumulation of wealth in a positive light, and thus overturn the harsh judgments of Aristotle and Aquinas. The widespread doctrine of doux commerce cast the pursuit of pecuniary interests in an innocent light and tamed the other more untoward passions for political power or lust. The core idea was that the love of gain—relishing the ever-increasing pile of coins—eclipsed inclinations for other pleasures or more indolent pursuits. This in turn prompted industriousness, a virtue that had already been firmly established by Hobbes and Locke, among others. Furthermore, as Locke had argued, money served to reduce the affront to God in the event that plums or meat were left to rot rather than brought to market. That said, the modern era was a far cry from Locke’s vision of the American frontier. Many merchants made vast sums from importing luxuries—coffee, tea or tobacco—and some European nations imposed sumptuary laws or hefty taxes to reduce this trade. Several philosophers argued that the consumption of luxuries was unethical, Joseph Butler and Claude-Adrien Helvétius for example (see Berry 1994). Mandeville and Hume were two of the first to argue that the economic benefits of luxuries outweighed the potential deleterious effects (see Susato 2006). Hume also noted that goods that had once been luxuries, such as paper, had become not just conveniences but even necessities. Adam Smith condemned sumptuary laws as hypocritical, since the extravagant consumption by the aristocrats who set the laws tended to be far more ruinous to the well-being of the state (Smith 1776 [1976: 346]).

Money-making and material advancement also rendered human actions more predictable and transparent. The seventeenth-century maxim that “interest will not lie”, first coined by Henri de Rohan, was in wide circulation (Hirschman 1977: 36). The self-interest axiom also began to germinate in economic discourse, enhanced by appeals to other virtuous traits, prudence and foresight (see Force 2003). Self-interest did not eclipse other-regarding traits, however, nor entail selfishness. While serving their pecuniary interests, merchants maintained that they also served God and Country, by increasing crown revenues and by taming the open seas. Merchants also prompted the rise of artisanal techniques and hence the growth of towns. This in turn prompted more mild and moderate dispositions. As Montesquieu remarked in the Spirit of the Laws :

it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores. (1748: [1989: 338])

Commerce induced civility and more feminine sentiments. As Hume observed of those who

flock into cities, … both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace… it is impossible but they must feel an increase of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together. (“Of Refinement in the Arts” [1987: 271])

Smith observed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that “humanity is the virtue of a woman”, and that

among civilized nations, the virtues which are founded upon humanity, are more cultivated than those which are founded upon self-denial and the command of the passions. (1759 [1976: 190, 204–5])

Smith, however, also expressed the worry that the European upper crust suffered from excessive “flattery and falsehood”, and that the “man of fashion” lacked the more esteemed “masculine virtues” (1759 [1976: 63]). Modern commercial life, for Smith, was not unequivocally for the good.

In his overview of early modern economics, Hirschman foregrounded what he called the Montesquieu-Steuart doctrine, namely that international trade induced global peace. Montesquieu singled out the significance of the bill of exchange as a critical starting point. This was an international bank order that much expanded European trade in the early modern period, and constituted an extensive network of trust between the major banking families in different countries. To trade over great distances requires considerable coordination and cooperation, if only because of the need to recognize different currencies or to contract deliveries at a later point in time. The bill of exchange averted the risky practice of shipping silver and gold from one port to another, and allowed paper representations to circulate and hence the expansion of credit.

Hobbes had already grasped that the interdependency of nations for basic goods, such as Swedish timber for English wool, might lessen international conflict, particularly if nations depended on one another for necessities or conveniences. Conflict stemmed from the desire for imported luxury goods; these goods tended to instill a new type of cupidity that would endanger peaceful trade, or so Hobbes believed (see Sorell 2006). He thus endorsed the imposition of sumptuary laws. Montesquieu was of a different mind. War is always more destructive and more costly than trade under peaceful terms. His argument pivoted on an appeal to the mutual gains from trade, and the ensuing division of labor. Hume issued other worries. He observed that each war of his lifetime had lasted longer, and cost more in real terms, than was rational given the initial objectives (“Of the Balance of Power” [1987: 339]). Insofar as much of the funding came from the excessive issuance of government bonds, the mounting public debt was bound to cripple the British government. The best means to avoid state bankruptcy was to overcome protectionist policies and promote unrestricted global trade, thereby enriching the world and diminishing military conquests.

However myopic these theories might sound—given the horrific treatment of African slaves and Indigenous peoples throughout the early modern period, and given the bloodbath of the twentieth century between purportedly civil trading nations—it is important to underscore that a widespread optimism for a more peaceful and prosperous world characterized early modern economic thought. Immanuel Kant’s celebrated appeal to a world of perpetual peace may be viewed as the capstone to this long line of thought (see Nakhimovsky 2011). As Hirschman noted, Adam Smith was the exception, for exposing the monopolistic and rapacious tendencies of European merchants and colonizers. Smith deplored the European treatment of African slaves and Indigenous peoples, not only for the inherent injustices of their actions, but because this tended to inculcate deplorable traits in the colonizers, such as tyranny, cowardice and inhumanity (Smith 1759 [1976: 200–211]; Rothschild 2001).

Above all, Smith reduced the pursuit of wealth to mere vanity and the desire for the approbation of others. There may be a trickle-down effect to the lower orders, or a gradual enrichment of the globe, but the inherent parasitical nature of men, particularly of landlords—“who love to reap where they never sowed”—and the oppressive actions of the merchants ensured that our world would be permanently saddled with grave injustices and inequalities (Smith 1776 [1976: 67]). Smith was still a far cry from the stronger despairing claims of later critics of capitalism, notably Marx’s appeal to widespread alienation, Durkheim’s caveats about anomie , or Keynes’s ridiculing of stock market frenzies (see Hirschman 1977: Part 3). Nevertheless, there is a clear sense in Smith that, however entrenched our practices of commerce and trade, their potential to elevate humans to a kinder and better world beyond mere material gratifications is severely limited (see Griswold 1998; Hanley 2009). Smith looms large as the voice of pessimism.

Contracts lie at the very core of economic thought. A simple purchase is a type of contract, the use of money another. Property rights are also grounded in the idea of a contract, at least since the early modern period. Aristotle had argued in favor of private property, primarily with appeals to security and superior stewardship. Aquinas reinforced these claims but also argued that in the case of a famine or siege, one might appropriate available foods to fulfil the Christian dictate of self-preservation. In the early modern period, Bodin, Grotius, and Pufendorf reflected at length on the question of property rights, prompted by the breakdown of feudal land tenure and ever-expanding overseas trade. Grotius’s De Mare Liberum (1609) addressed the possibility of unregulated naval and fishing rights. Hobbes (1651) and Locke (1689), with their respective appeals to the state of nature, motivated the formation of property rights and hence the government. Sovereign rule would alleviate penury, facilitate the spread of trade and commerce and, above all, foster population growth, or so it was widely believed.

Population growth, providing more hands as well as the demand for more corn and cloth, was viewed as the primary source of economic prosperity for about two centuries, until the alarm bell sounded by Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Whereas for Hobbes, might made right, Locke grounded property rights in consent and the virtue of industriousness; those who enclosed and cultivated the land created a right to its yield that did no harm to one’s neighbors (see Sreenivasan 1995). Because children are one’s property, this also legitimated the transfer of accumulated wealth via inheritance. Over time, inequality became salient, as some owned land while others, less fortunate, were compelled to enter into a wage contract to earn their bread and ale. Locke, however, underscored the volitional nature of these arrangements, forged on equal terms and by “tacit consent”.

While a strong advocate of traditional property laws to insure economic flourishing, Hume underscored their contingent nature, pointing to the voluminous quantity of law books that meant interpretation would never come to an end. In opposition to Locke, Hume believed that the appeal to an ancient contract forming the commonwealth was merely a myth. Ancient land rights were primarily gained by conquest and usurpation, and sustained by privilege, rather than a reward to the sweat of one’s brow. By contrast, the modern commercial era that enabled the spread of capital and hence moveable wealth, moved in step with the rise of representative government, either in the form of a republic or a constitutional monarchy such as his own (McArthur 2007; Harris 2015).

In his Treatise of Human Nature (Book Three) Hume unpacked the essential components of a contract. He identified the implicit conventions in contracts and the importance of trust.

Your corn is ripe to-day; mine will be so to-morrow. ’Tis profitable for us both, that I shou’d labour with you to-day, and that you shou’d aid me to-morrow. (Hume 1739–40 [2000: 334])

Such contractual arrangements might exist and spread among strangers as individuals came to discern their benefits. As Hume observed,

the freedom and extent of human commerce depend entirely on a fidelity with regard to promises. (1739–40 [2000: 349])

This included the use of money, which Hume recognized symbolized a chain of pledges, extending backward and forward in time. Property, money, and markets were thus bundled together, as conventions that ran no deeper than the utility of promise-keeping and one’s honor.

Hume took up the matter of forging an honorable character in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Although the sphere for exercising one’s free will to reform one’s character was very limited, Hume adhered to the gradual evolution of behavioral norms, forged by material conditions, particularly commerce and trade. Monkish virtues of the medieval period had given way to commercial virtues of the modern period, honesty, probity and industry. For Adam Smith, self-command, prudence, and courage were virtues ranked more highly than others. For these reasons, those in the middling ranks, merchants and bankers, were more likely to happen onto the road to virtue than those in the lower or upper classes. And because the nouveau riches were the ones to safeguard contractual settlements, this meant that the core institutions of property and commerce would, ceteris paribus , be sustained in the centuries ahead. The merchant or banker, not the knight, had become the paragon of honor, serving the national interests as much as themselves.

A cornerstone of monetary theory, and arguably the most robust and enduring law in economics, is the quantity theory of money that commits to a causal and positive function between the price level and the money supply, treating the latter as the independent variable, that is, \(P = f(M^s)\) (see Schabas & Wennerlind 2020: 151–172). With the influx of silver from Latin America after Columbus, the money supply in Europe had more than doubled by 1510. While entering exclusively on Spanish ships, it spread rapidly, first to the Netherlands and then across Europe. Prices rose as well, although the underlying factors were not readily understood. Most purchases were of food, whose prices fluctuated with the harvests, good and bad. Consumer durables tended to be purchased infrequently, often at seasonal fairs, which had complex systems for price negotiations, pitching and haggling. The rise of middlemen, wholesale markets and retailing, became more prevalent in the seventeenth century, although the public was suspicious that these traders who lived well off their earnings were the cause of increasing prices. Although newspapers and broadsides posted prices, starting in the late seventeenth century, urban shopping still required negotiation. It was only with the department stores of the late nineteenth century that prices were routinely posted.

Pause and reflect on how difficult it would be to discern inflation in the early modern period, or perhaps even at present, and thus how brilliant was the insight that the overall price level is a function of the money supply. In the 1520s, the Prussian Diet commissioned none other than Nicholas Copernicus to investigate the recent increase in price instability. Drawing on his skills with handling large quantities of data, Copernicus’s Monetae cudendae ratio (1526) established the proposition that the value of the currency (its purchasing power) had diminished due to its abundance. We thus have the first inkling of a principle that is, in some respects, as central to economics as the principle of inertia is in physics.

Others in the second half of the sixteenth century, notably Navarrus, Luis de Molina, and Jean Bodin, arrived independently at a variant of the quantity theory of money. A century later, John Locke and William Petty added two additional variables, the velocity and the transactions level, to the core relation in the quantity theory of money. The velocity of money is something of a misnomer. It is the average rate at which a given unit of currency turns over in a given period of time. The transactions level is the rate at which payments are made, for example wages (daily or weekly) or rents (quarterly). For the capital bill, Petty estimated that five per cent of its value was manifest in liquid terms at any point of the year, a sum equivalent to the interest payment. As a remedy for the shortage of money, a problem that beset not only Petty’s Ireland but virtually every nation, the best policy was to shorten the temporal interval for the transactions level and hence increase the velocity. These four variables were cemented by Irving Fisher in 1911, with his equation that MV = PT (money supply (M) times the velocity of money (V) is equal to the price level (P) times the transactions level (T)). Fisher was also the first to measure the velocity of money. The average rate for the turnover of one dollar in New Haven was twenty times per annum.

The quantity theory of money also entails the neutrality of money. Hume broached a series of thought experiments, whereby the quantity of money in a nation doubled or halved overnight, or was reduced by an even greater amount, four-fifths (“Of Interest” [1987: 299]; “Of the Balance of Trade” [1987: 311]). He argued that this would have no lasting effect. In the case of an increase, prices would rise commensurate to the increase in money as dictated by the quantity theory. As a result, imports would surge because foreign goods were favorably priced, and the specie would flow out almost immediately and prices return to their original level, hence what came to be known as the specie-flow mechanism. Earlier contributors, such as Mun, had already argued that money would follow trade, and hence that the quantity of specie in England would reflect the balance of trade. If the balance was favorable, such that exports exceeded imports, the nation’s coffers would be augmented. Hume extrapolated from Mun’s one nation to the entire globe. Imposing the metaphor of the world’s oceans, Hume argued that it was no more possible to stockpile specie in a nation than to dam the oceans and raise them above sea-level. Each nation would see its domestic prices rise or fall in accordance with the quantity of money, and hence the strong propensity for the global supply of money to equilibrate in each nation in line with the balance of trade. It rested on a clear understanding of the distinction between the nominal and the real.

Notwithstanding his brilliant argument for the neutrality of money, Hume recognized that the specie-flow mechanism was never fully achieved; trade barriers, transaction costs, and other interferences with the money supply limited its full operation. As a result, Hume endorsed the non-neutrality of money as more veridical. He argued that, from roughly 1500 to 1750, the money supply had increased by a factor of eight but the price level had only increased by a factor of four. The simple reason was significant economic growth, a doubling of output that required the extant money to service the significant increase in transactions. The growth was stimulated by many factors, the gains from trade, the division of labor, and the accumulation of capital. Hume also acknowledged the importance of new technologies and their rapid spread once in place. Above all, he discerned that money could engender growth, even though this remained mysterious and was not “easily accounted for” (Hume “Of Money” [1987: 288).

Hume articulated the various steps by which an influx of good Spanish coins might magically stimulate economic growth. The circulation of the additional coins could induce a multiplier effect that essentially incentivized weavers and farmers to work more intensively. They did this for an interval of time, until prices and wages caught up to the additional money stock and reached a level once more. In short, the specie-flow mechanism was couched as an ideal (friction-free) process, understood as a thought experiment, whereas the injection of new money and its circulation resulted in genuine economic growth. Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize for making these arguments, but he paid specific homage to Hume for the central analysis (Schabas & Wennerlind 2020: 208, 232). Friedman also credits Hume with asking what the optimal quantity of money for a given nation would be, but in fact several before Hume had grappled with this question, Petty and Berkeley most notably. Hume’s work is best known but there were dozens at the time who articulated one or more of the three core principles of monetary theory, the quantity theory, the specie-flow mechanism, and the multiplier.

Only the first of these three could be easily verified by empirical findings. Because legal tender was issued by the royal mint, it was possible to estimate the money supply. Hume, for example, claimed that about 90 million pounds circulated in Britain circa 1750. It was much more difficult to measure changes to the price level. Consumer price indexing, a systematic method for measuring inflation that would serve to confirm the quantity theory of money, was first devised in the late nineteenth century and only undertaken by state agencies in the decades after World War One. Nevertheless, early modern economists devised clever means to measure the purchasing power of the currency, whether by examining the price of corn (grains) or looking to other benchmarks. William Fleetwood’s Chronicon Preciosum; or an Account of English Money, the Price of Corn and other Commodities for the last 600 years (1707), proved an invaluable resource. He also made estimates of purchasing power, noting that his stipend as a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge, which had been fixed at five pounds in 1450 ought to be increased to thirty pounds to command the same value. Adam Smith proposed the longterm silver price of corn as the best metric for estimating inflation. His belief was that one must take a weighted average over a longer period of time, 50 to 100 years in order to eliminate the seasonal variations in harvests or isolated discoveries of silver reserves.

The focus on corn prices also unleashed another central principle of economics, the law of demand (quantity demanded is an inverse function of price). The so-called King-Davenant law, attributed to Gregory King (see Evans 1967) and Charles Davenant (1698) of the late seventeenth century, provided a time series analysis of corn prices (see Hutchison 1988: 46–53). They argued that in the case of a severe shortage of corn, a fall by fifty per cent of the normal supply, the price could increase by forty-five per cent. They also provided data in the case of a bountiful harvest. Their chart established that the function was an inverse one and, significantly, nonlinear.

The early modern period was plagued by a shortage of coins, and of those in circulation, most were clipped or hammered. Gresham’s law, that bad coins drive out the good ones, explained this phenomenon very well. It was estimated that the average coin had only half of the metallic content that had been stipulated by the mint. This meant that countless people were filing the coins and melting the shavings into bullion for additional remuneration from the mint. It was illegal to tamper with coins, and for most countries of Western Europe, the death penalty applied, even if one was caught simply with the tools of the trade. Other commonplace illegal activities were counterfeiting paper banknotes, bribery, smuggling, and adulterating products for sale. It would be difficult to estimate the overall level of such activities, but a background assumption in the writings of most early modern economists was the understanding that criminal methods were widespread (see Wennerlind 2011). The demise of Spain had become a trope, insofar as it had been illegally drained of its American silver. As Hume noted, smugglers in the previous two centuries had taken the Spanish silver over the Pyrenees where French prices were one-tenth those in Spain (“Of the Balance of Trade” [1987: 312]). The money had saturated most where there was international trade. By the early seventeenth century, it was the Dutch East India Company that commanded the envy of European traders, and its legacy was such that Mexican silver coins continued to dominate Asian trade until the nineteenth century.

Early modern philosophers weighed in on legal monetary interventions, notably debasement, devaluation, or recoinage. For most, the preferred policy was to leave the money stock untouched, or restore its nominal metallic value given the widespread hammering and clipping of coins. In the fourteenth century, the French crown had altered the currency, mostly with debasements, more than eighty times. As Bodin recognized, this increased the money supply and hence raised prices, but it also undermined confidence in the stability of the currency. There is no greater incident of leading philosophers tampering with the money supply than when Locke and Newton famously oversaw the Great Recoinage of 1696. Locke persuaded Newton to do the opposite of a debasement, namely to restore the silver content of the shilling to the amount stipulated by Elizabeth I circa 1600 (see Appleby 1978; Vaughn 1980). Newton thus affirmed Locke’s belief in essentialism (see Caffentzis 1989). This meant that those willing to break the law benefitted from a de facto money pump, and the crown lost some two million pounds (roughly thirty million pounds in total was in circulation). This contraction of the money supply engendered an economic downturn, but for other reasons the English economy began to expand and flourish under the reign of Queen Anne.

In their analysis of the essential properties of money, a number of early modern philosophers climbed several rungs of the ladder of monetary abstraction. George Berkeley, in his short tract The Querist (1725), recognized that the substance used for money was irrelevant, and thus promoted the concept of fiat money, a counter or token that was recognized as legal tender but not redeemable for a precious metal. (Caffentzis 2000). Benjamin Franklin (1729) proposed a novel schema whereby notes were issued with the land as the underlying asset, but the practice was short-lived in colonial Pennsylvania. Hume, while secretary to the British ambassador in France in 1765, oversaw the dismantling of a fiat-currency in Québec that had commenced in 1685 and the reinstatement of British Sterling in lower Canada.

In his Treatise , Hume broached the idea that money is analogous to language, both in its commencement in a prehistoric age, and in the sense that its primary role is to represent value, much as words represent objects (see Schabas & Wennerlind 2020: 99–101). Neither money nor language adequately refer to objects in this sense, but we tend to be duped into thinking that they do. Because of this imperfect mapping, and the fact that money embodies a pledge, a type of speech act, Hume was also inclined to appreciate paper banknotes, whether from private banks or the Exchequer. He did not share Locke’s view that nature had stamped an indelible value on gold and silver. Hume grasped that credit forms a continuum with money, and noted that there was a range of degrees of liquidity: mortgages, bonds, equities, promissory notes, bills of exchange, and so forth. Hume praised the recent innovations of Scottish bankers, to devise daily lines of credit so that merchants might monetize idle capital, and to issue ten-shilling notes denominated such that ordinary tradesmen might use them. He estimated that in 1750, over half the transactions in Britain were conducted with paper-notes, thus lubricating the wheels of trade that much the better.

Smith was more inclined to see banking and credit as precarious, and captured this sentiment with his metaphor of paper money as a “sort of wagon-way through the air”, bolstered by its “Daedalian wings” (Smith 1776 [1976: 321]). If banks were reckless with their issuance, their bills would soar in value and become over-heated, as witnessed in the serious bank failures of 1772. Smith in general was more circumspect about the benefits of merchants and overseas trade, and he argued for firm regulations to be imposed on banks and credit markets.

In the early 1670s, Shaftesbury, who had become chancellor of the Exchequer, encouraged Locke to oppose a measure that would set a legal ceiling of four percent on the interest rate. Locke revisited the debate in 1692, and in both cases, persuaded the government to keep a higher ceiling. Locke argued that in a world of perfectly competitive banking a “natural” rate of interest would override the legal one (see Vaughn 1980). Ironically, he made his arguments before the monopolistic Bank of England was formed in 1694. Jeremy Bentham’s Defence of Usury (1787), in opposition to Smith, restored Locke’s position that the interest rate ought to be unregulated and hence subject solely to market forces (see Sigot 2001). Smith’s position has remained a puzzle, since for the most part, interest rates were low and hence non-usurious, and because Smith in general embraced laissez-faire thinking (see Hollander 1999). Both Hume and Smith recognized the longterm tendency of the interest rate to fall, from ten percent under Elizabeth I to three or four percent in their day, and they arrived at the more profound understanding that this was due to capital accumulation and sophisticated commerce and trade. They did not articulate the principle of zero profits, but they understood that in a perfectly competitive world, the profit rate would equal the interest rate, the cost of borrowing capital.

The most central leitmotif of early modern economics was its appreciation for the transformative effects of money. Hobbes, drawing on William Harvey, had depicted money as the blood that courses through the body politic (see Christensen 1989; Apeldoorn 2017). Money vitalized a region, and was most effective if it was in circulation and “quickened”, that is, increased its velocity. Quesnay underscored the importance of the circulation of money, particularly bullion, and its multiplier effects, again drawing an analogy to Harvey’s great discovery. The French had initially, under the inspiration of the Scottish émigré John Law (1705), embraced private banknotes and equity swaps. But after the collapse of the Mississippi Company in 1720, for which Law was blamed, they chose to hoard silver as household plate, and banking did not recover until the end of the century. The Dutch and the British, looking to France, imposed a tax on silverware and promoted the use of chinaware as measures to reduce hoarding.

In the second of his Two Treatise of Government (1689), Locke provided an important fable as to how money came into being as a store of wealth given the existence of perishable goods. Hume, conversely, emphasized money as a medium of exchange, as the “oil” which lubricated the “wheels of trade” (“Of Money” [1987: 281]). Hume’s story looked more to the allure of luxury goods and the rise of towns and cities as prompting the thorough monetization of the countryside, such that “no hand is entirely empty of it [money]” (ibid. [1987: 294]). Once this was achieved, however, money took on a power of its own, one that no government could adequately control. As a general maxim, Hume declared that

a government has great reason to preserve with care its people and its manufactures. Its money, it may safely trust to the course of human affairs, without fear or jealousy. (“Of the Balance of Trade” [1987: 326])

Money may well be a human artifact, but as Hume and Smith, among others, argued, it operated according to laws that transcended individual human agency. “Money answers all things”, to quote the title of Jacob Vanderlint’s influential book of 1734. Money had become so complex and so deeply entrenched in the social fabric of modern commercial society that measures to retain or channel it were believed to be futile.

Newton lay down the gauntlet in his well-known Query 31 to the Opticks (1704), namely that his methods for deciphering the natural world might prove efficacious in understanding the moral sphere. Many took up his plea to advance the moral sciences. In France, one could name Voltaire, Condillac and Condorcet, and in Britain, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith. The common conviction was to identify sufficient uniformities to human nature that resulted in manifest patterns, whether in the economic or political sphere. Hume’s associationist psychology and the copy principle implied remarkable uniformity in the machinery of the human mind, while Smith treated the sympathetic regard as akin to gravitational attraction. Both believed that introspection meant that the moral sciences, including economics could become epistemically superior to the natural sciences. As both Hume and Smith pointed out, pre-modern philosophers had endorsed a geocentric universe for thousands of years and in modern times, mistakenly adhered to the system of Cartesian vortices for almost a century. Nothing compared to the occasionalism of Malebranche, that Hume deemed “a fairy land” (Hume 1748 [2000: 57]). In the moral realm, however, we could know right away if something is as fanciful as a system of vortices. Both Hume and Smith were fallibilists about all knowledge, but they each argued that we are more likely to know when we are wrong in the moral sphere than in the physical sphere. Introspection and experience of the world were important assets in this respect. But, as Hume averred, “nature will forever elude our grasp”, and even if we dig more deeply into the microphysical realm, this would simply expose the need for further investigations.

The scientific spirit that Hume and Smith brought to their economics was already present a century earlier; both Hobbes and Petty voiced the aspiration of rendering morals into a quantitative discourse. “Commercial mathematics” took hold during the first half of the seventeenth century and many of the formal methods that have become commonplace in postwar economics were first adopted in the early modern period (see Redman 1997; Sylla 2003). Blaise Pascal’s wager to believe in God (1670 [1910]) and Daniel Bernoulli’s Saint Petersburg paradox (1738 [1954]) are preliminary examples of decision theory (see Hutchison 1988). Both imposed probability measures on expected utilities and thus provided the scaffolding of what has become an important line of inquiry in mainstream economics. Pierre de Fermat (1654) [1962] and Christiaan Huygens (1657) also studied games of chance (see Klein 1997). Game theoretical modes of thinking permeated the works of Hobbes and Hume (see Hampton 1986; Kavka 1986; Hardin 2007). Hume also articulated core elements of decision theory, including the idea of time discounting (see Diaye & Lapidus 2019; Sugden 2021).

Undergirding these preliminary efforts at both decision theory and game theory was a clear appreciation for strategic behavior, more or less a given among early modern philosophers following in the wake of Machiavelli. No one was more vocal on the widespread tendency to strategize for individual gain than Mandeville. As he observed, everyone in commercial society was duplicitous, dressing to a higher station, and rationalizing their frequent breach of ethical norms. It was well known that the hand holding the scales of justice “had often dropt ‘em, brib’d with Gold” (Mandeville 1714 [1988: 8]). Smith would echo these sentiments of duplicity:

civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. (Smith 1776 [1976: 715])

It is important to see that the rise of game theory in mainstream economics since the mid-twentieth century is to some extent an unwitting revival of ascriptions of strategizing and power imbalances that were commonplace in the early modern period.

Probability theory was developed in the early modern period, notably by Huygens and Abraham de Moivre (see Daston 1988). The early eighteenth-century English mathematician, John Arbuthnot, undertook calculations that resembled Neyman-Pearson testing (see Stigler 1986: 226). Hume may have copied this method, as a young admirer of Arbuthnot. Hume’s 100-page essay on population pivoted around the null hypothesis that ancient Rome was more populated than Europe in 1750, and he ably demonstrated that the likelihood that this was the case was vanishingly small. Hume may also have appreciated the insights of Thomas Bayes, who devised his theorem—now known as Bayesianism—in the 1750s, with a posthumous publication in 1764 (see Raynor 1980).

Hume appealed explicitly to the law of large numbers and invoked a number of mean-reverting tendencies, as in his commitment to uniform wages, prices and interest rates. Quantitative efforts to measure population or the money supply were undertaken with much regularity starting in the 1660s, despite a paucity of data (Endres 1985; Derringer 2018). Many, such as Graunt, understood the value of trimming outliers and seeking what Thomas Simpson (1755) coined as the arithmetic mean (see Stigler 1986; Klein 1997). Smith’s analysis of the wage spectrum was grounded in the belief that market forces had established stable and salient wages for each type of trade, and that deviations could be reduced down to his list of six key factors (Smith 1776 [1976: 82–104]).

There were some efforts at model building in the eighteenth century. Jean-François Melon (1734), whose work was widely known, constructed a model based on three similar islands with two goods in circulation (see Hont 2005: 30–32). Quesnay’s tableau économique (1758) was the most celebrated model. His disciple, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, published a treatise in 1768 that promoted physiocracy as a “new science” on equal standing with the natural sciences. Adam Smith intended to dedicate the Wealth of Nations to Quesnay, but he died too soon.

Quesnay’s model made stylized assumptions about the French nation, ascribing three distinct classes: a quarter were landowners (aristocrats), a quarter artisans, and half farmers. He showed visually that after the initial payment of rent (the annual net product) by the farmers to the landowners, the entire unfolding of the economy would reach mathematical closure by the time of the next harvest and, like a perpetual motion machine, prompt the next period of production and distribution. No sector would increase or decrease in size and each would have its just reward in accordance with its station (a stylized assumption was that landowners consumed twice as much as the others, per capita). Quesnay also, brilliantly, introduced disturbances, for example, an unduly high interest rate, a tax, or an increased demand for artisanal goods, to demonstrate the rapid disequilibration of his system (see Quesnay 1758-1759). Contemporary modelling thrives on introducing slight variations or manipulations to disclose the underlying structure and is much indebted to Quesnay (see Hausman 2003 [2021]; Morgan 2012).

As was recognized at the time, the transition from feudalism to capitalism commenced by the early sixteenth century. In his History of England , Hume argued that commerce arose in Britain under Henry VII circa 1500, drawing on the Flemish trade. Smith shared this view, and both looked to the Italian city-states of Florence and Genoa a century before as critical developments. The shift to capitalism intensified, as both Hume and Smith recognized, with the rise of the joint-stock companies, particularly the East India companies of the Dutch, French and English.

There may be no single event or even decade to mark the transition to capitalism. Aristotle’s analysis of the agora in central Athens reminds us that markets and money were commonplace in antiquity. What sets capitalism apart is the emergence and central role of markets for the three factors of production—land, labour, and capital—and it was these that took hold during the sixteenth century. By the end of that century, possibly galvanized by other major transformations, notably the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, it had become evident that prominent bankers and merchants were wealthier than many aristocrats. By the mid-1600s, half the people in the Netherlands lived in towns or cities and most were wage-earners.

Land was still the primary source of wealth, and merchants were renowned for retiring to a country estate. And there was widespread suspicion of upstarts, not to mention appeals to the longstanding adage that the newly-acquired wealth would disappear by the third generation. Moreover, there was a deeply-rooted belief in the necessity of ranks, most explicitly voiced by Millar and Smith. Despite the considerable expansion of domestic manufacturing in Western Europe, there was a pronounced predilection, at least among the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, to foreground the agrarian sector and view the aristocratic landowning class as an essential part of the economic picture. Historical studies justify this emphasis. Until the twentieth century, the majority of capital was invested in the agrarian sector, far more than in manufacturing or trade. If anything best characterizes the early modern period, it was the sustained increase in population due to improved fishing and agrarian yields.

Egalitarian ideals reach back to ancient times, but in early modern philosophy the arguments appeared to have more efficacy. Locke, Rousseau, Paine, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft are just some of the more significant philosophers who left their mark on the modern transition to a more equal society. Diderot was an important voice for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Both Hume and Smith argued that wage labor was more efficient than slavery and thus gave economic motivations for the significant end to slavery that came to pass in the nineteenth century.

The primary emphasis in the early modern period was on the rights of the “middling sorts”, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, in contrast to the landed aristocracy. Fiscal policy, as a means to address economic inequality and serve middle-class interests, spawned a large body of thought, running from Hobbes to Hume and finally to Smith, whose principles of taxation became canonical until John Stuart Mill. Hume’s essay “Of the Middle Station of Life”, in conjunction with his writings on economics, makes plain that this group would provide the impetus for future economic growth. The commercial class was far more likely to be industrious and enterprising, and serve as the backbone of modern civil society and the custodians of liberal values. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Hume portrays a hypothetical son-in-law, Cleanthes, as a paragon of virtue. He was also a lawyer and businessman and, as the father of Hume’s hypothetical grandchildren, the one most likely to insure that the family name would be sustained for at least one more generation.

The early modern philosophers reflected on the principles of international distributive justice and its implications for global peace. As Istvan Hont highlighted, the rich-country/poor-country question was vigorously debated in the eighteenth century (Hont 2005). Gershom Carmichael and Hutcheson, for example, gave voice to these concerns, but it was Hume and Smith who laid the analytic foundations. A country was wealthier than another not because of specie but because of its people and its accumulated capital in agriculture and manufacturing. Josiah Tucker (1755) gave voice to the potential for unlimited growth, noting that higher wages were correlated with more skilled labor and capital infrastructure. Both Hume and Smith advocated high wages, but feared that with time capital would be shifted to countries with lower wages until those regions were also enriched. Because of increasing demand worldwide, however, there was no reason to suppose that a nation with a healthy export sector would decline. As was widely understood, Holland was testament to the potential of long-lived wealth, having sustained its significant foothold in global trade since it reached its apogee as the most powerful economic nation in the 1620s.

Smith is recognized as the critical figure to shift attention to the working class and to advocate higher wages. He noted that merchants and manufacturers are strongly inclined to collude so as not to raise wages (Smith 1776 [1976: 267]). He noted the degradation of workers who were compelled to spend their entire lives “performing a few simple operations” (1776 [1976: 782]). With pointed words, he underscored the dehumanizing effects of unvaried work, such that a typical person

generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. (1776 [1976: 782])

Smith believed this would become widespread. In

every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. (1776 [1976: 782])

Smith advocated widespread schooling, with mechanics and gymnastics, and the fostering of theatre or dancing on the day of rest. He believed that inventions often came from the shopfloor, and that a more orderly standing army would be fostered by men who learned to develop both body and mind.

Above all, Smith exposed the emptiness of the pursuit of wealth, that it consisted primarily in “the parade of riches”, which feeds upon the envy of those without (Smith 1776 [1976: 190]). The rich garner far more pleasure from being observed riding in a carriage than from the comforts a carriage might offer. Our efforts to pursue wealth and power stem from the universal desire for admiration and approbation. There is also a deep asymmetry in Smith’s account of human sympathy, the act of fellow-feeling, in that we sympathize with the rich and shun the poor. The reason is that we imagine ourselves in their place and thus fill in the gaps of our otherwise inadequate lives. It is for this reason, Smith believes, that the state must insure that royalty indulge in opulent displays. Ranks are of great importance in the world, for motivating us to strive, driven by “the desire of bettering our condition” (Smith 1776 [1976: 341]). Smith believed that we are a restless lot, that

there is scarce perhaps a single instant in which any man is so perfectly and completely satisfied with his situation, as to be without any wish of alteration or improvement of any kind. An augmentation of fortune is the means by which the greater part of men propose and wish to better their condition. (1776 [1976: 341])

As a result, there is nothing worse than a fall from grace and ensuing loss of admiration. Smith observes that “bankruptcy is perhaps the greatest and most humiliating calamity which can befall an innocent man” and its fear has thus fostered widespread prudence in the modern commercial world (Smith 1776 [1976: 342]).

Smith’s portrayal of human nature is tinged with these dark thoughts, similar to the cynicism of Mandeville. We spend our entire life attempting to garner approval, grounded in the sympathetic regard, and are for the most part prone to vanity and greed. His parable about the poor man’s son, who is driven by ambition to become wealthy only to realize at the end of his life that the indignities he suffered “to serve those whom he hates” and to be “obsequious to those whom he despises” have robbed him of a “real tranquillity” that he might have achieved had he known his place and remained poor. (Smith 1759 [1976: 181]). Only at the end of his life does he grasp that “wealth and greatness are mere trinkets”, and that the loss of friendship and the “injustice of his enemies” that he has suffered as he climbed upwards has left him bereft of peace of mind (ibid.). Smith remarks that the beggar on the highway sleeps better than the king, and that the better aim in life is to achieve inner equanimity. Adam Smith, the philosopher most readily associated with the voice of capitalism, could not be more disparaging about its tendencies to reinforce the baser features of human nature. While he endorsed rising standards of living for the lower orders, his stoicism was the more dominant sentiment. Life was a lottery and one had best prepare for adversity. As Smith aptly put it, wealth might “keep off the summer shower, [but] not the winter storm” (Smith 1759 [1976: 183]). Early modern economics thus offered practical wisdom and served as a major resource for forging a wise and virtuous life.

• Aquinas, “Fraud” (Qu. 77) and “The Sin of Usury” (Qu. 78) in Summa Theologiae (The Second Part of Part II, 1271-1272), in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, Paul E. Sigmund (ed. and trans.), New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988, 73-75.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Terence Irwin (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985.
• –––, Politics , C.D.C. Reeve (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998.
• Bayes, Thomas, 1764, “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London , 53: 370–418. doi:10.1098/rstl.1763.0053
• Bentham, Jeremy, 1787, Defence of Usury , London: Payne.
• –––, 1789, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , London: Payne. Reprinted New York: Haffner, 1948.
• Berkeley, George, 1725, The Querist, Containing Several Queries, Proposed to the Consideration of the Public , Dublin.
• Bernoulli, Daniel, 1738 [1954]. “Exposition of a New Theory of the Measurement of Risk”, Louise Sommer (trans.), Econometrica, 22: 23-36.
• Boisguilbert, Pierre le Pesant de, 1707, “Dissertation de la nature des richesses, de l’argent et des tributs, où l’on découvre la fausse idée qui règne dans le monde à l’égard de ces trois articles”, appended to the 1707 edition of Le Détail de la France , Rouen?, volume 2, 213–302.
• Cantillon, Richard, 1755, Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général , Londres: Fletcher Gyles. Translated as Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General , Henry Higgs (trans.), with an Introduction by Anthony Brewer, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001.
• Cary, John, 1695, An Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade, Its Poor, and Its Taxes , Bristol: W. Barry.
• Clark, Henry C., ed., 2003, Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism before Adam Smith, Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.
• Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, abbé de, 1776, Le Commerce et le gouvernement, considérés relativement l’un a l’autre , Amsterdam/Paris: Jombert & Cellot. Translated as Commerce and Government, Considered in their Mutual Relationship , Shelagh Eltis and Walter Eltis (trans), Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997.
• Copernicus, 1526, Monetae cudendae ratio , presented to the Prussian Diet.
• D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 1751, Discours préliminaire des éditeurs , to Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie des arts et des métiers , volume 1. Translated as Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot , R. N. Schwab. (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
• Davenant, Charles, 1698, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England , London.
• Defoe, Daniel, 1710, An Essay upon Publick Credit , London.
• Diderot, Denis, Political Writings , John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139168052
• Diderot, Denis and Jean le Rond D’Alembert (eds.), 1751–1780, Encyclopédie des arts et des métiers , 35 vols., Paris: Briasson. Reprint, Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1966.
• Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 1768, De l’origine et des progrès d’une science nouvelle , Paris: Desaint.
• Du Tot, Charles de Ferrère, 1738, Réflexions politiques sur les finances et le commerce , The Hague: Frèrers Vaillant and N. Prevôst.
• Ferguson, Adam, 1767, An Essay on the History of Civil Society , Edinburgh: Millar. Reprinted, Duncan Forbes (ed.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966.
• Fermat, Pierre de, 1654 [1962], “Correspondence”, M. Merrington (trans.), in Games, Gods and Gambling: The Origins and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era, Florence David (ed), London: Charles Griffin: 229-253.
• Fisher, Irving, 2011, The Purchasing Power of Money , New York: Macmillan.
• Fleetwood, William, 1707, Chronicon Preciosum; or an Account of English Money, the Price of Corn and other Commodities for the last 600 years , London: Charles Harper.
• Forbonnais, François Véron de, 1754, Élemens du commerce , second edition, 2 vols., Leiden.
• Franklin, Benjamin, 1729, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency , Philadelphia, PA: New Printing-Office near the Market. Reprinted in L.W. Larabee and W.J. Bell (eds.), The Writings of Benjamin Franklin , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Galiani, Ferdinando, 1751, Della moneta , Naples.
• Grotius, Hugo, 1609, De Mare Liberum , Leiden, Elzevier.
• –––, 1625, De iure belli ac pacis libri tres , Paris: Buon. Translated as Of the Law of War and Peace in Three Books , Frank W. Kelsey (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925.
• Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 1758, De l’esprit , Paris: Laurent Durand. Translated as De l’esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and its Several Faculties , W. Mudford (trans.), London: M. Jones, 1807.
• Hobbes, Thomas, 1651, Leviathan , London. Reprinted, Richard Tuck (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Hume, David, 1739–40 [2000], A Treatise of Human Nature , London. Reprinted, David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• –––, 1748, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding . Reprinted, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• –––, 1751, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals . Reprinted, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• –––, 1752, Political Discourses , Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson.
• 1741, “Of Civil Liberty” originally titled “Of Liberty and Despotism” [1987: 87–96]
• 1742, “The Epicurean”, the first of the “Happiness Essays” [1987: 138–145]
• 1742, “The Stoic”, the second of the “Happiness Essays”, [1987: 146–154]
• 1742, “The Platonist”, the third of the “Happiness Essays” [1987: 155–158]
• 1742, “The Sceptic”, the fourth of the “Happiness Essays” [1987: 159–180]
• 1752, “Of Refinement in the Arts” originally titled “Of Luxury” [1987: 268–380]
• 1752, “Of Money” [1987: 281–294]
• 1752, “Of Interest” [1987: 295–307]
• 1752, “Of the Balance of Trade” [1987: 308–326]
• 1752, “Of the Balance of Power” [1987: 332–341]
• 1742, “Of the Middle Station of Life”, [1987: 545–551]
• –––, 1955 [2007], David Hume: Writings on Economics , Eugene Rotwein (ed.), Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. New edition with an introduction by Margaret Schabas, New Brunswick NJ: Transaction, 2007.
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1725 [1726], An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue , London; second edition [B] 1726, London; third edition [C] 1729, London; fourth edition [D] 1738, London.
• –––, 1755, A System of Moral Philosophy , 3 vols., Glasgow.
• Huygens, Christiaan, 1657, “De Ratiociniis in Aleæ Ludo”, in Exercitionum Mathematicarum, libri quinque, Francis van Schooten (ed), Leiden: Johannis Elsevirii: 517-534.
• Justi, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von, 1766, System des Finanzwesens , Halle: Renger.
• Kant, Immanuel, 1795, Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf , Königsberg: F. Nicolovius. Translated as “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays , Ted Humphrey (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983.
• Kelly, Patrick Hyde (ed.), 1991, Locke on Money , volume 2 of The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke , John W. Yolton (gen. ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Law, John, 1705, Money and Trade Considered, with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money , Edinburgh.
• Locke, John, 1689, Two Treatises of Government , London: Awnsham Churchill. Reprinted, Peter Laslett (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• –––, 1695, Further Considerations concerning Raising the Value of Money , London.
• Malynes, Gerard de, 1622, The Maintenance of Free Trade, According to the Three Essentiall Parts of Traffique; Namely Commodities, Moneys and Exchange of Moneys, by Bills of Exchanges for other Countries. Or answer to a Treatise of Free Trade, or the meanes to make Trade floushish , London: William Shefford.
• Mandeville, Bernard, 1714 [1988], The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits , London: J. Roberts. Reprinted, F.B. Kaye (ed.), 2 volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; reprinted Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988.
• Massie, Joseph, 1760, A Representation concerning the Knowledge of Commerce as a National Concern: Pointing out the Proper Means of Promoting such Knowledge in this Kingdom , London: Payne.
• Malthus, Thomas Robert, 1798, Essay on the Principle of Population , London: J. Johnson.
• Meek, Ronald L., 1962, The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations , London: Allen and Unwin.
• Melon, Jean-François, 1734, Essai politique sur le commerce , Rouen? Translated as A Political Essay upon Commerce , David Bindon (trans.), Dublin: Philip Crampton, 1738.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1848, Principles of Political Economy , 2 volumes, London: John W. Parker.
• Millar, John, 1771, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society , London: W. and J. Richardson. The third edition in his lifetime changed the title to The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks , London: J. Murray, 1781. Reprinted, Aaron Garrett (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006.
• Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti, marquis de, 1756, L’ami des hommes, où Traité de la population , 3 vols., Avignon.
• Misselden, Edward, 1623, The Circle of Commerce, or The Balance of Trade, in Defence of Free Trade , London: Nicholas Bourne.
• Monroe, Arthur Eli (ed.), 1924, Early Economic Thought, Selected Writings from Aristotle to Hume , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Montchrétien, Antoine de, 1615, Traicté de l’économie politique , Rouen: J. Osmont.
• Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 1748 [1989], De l’esprit des lois , Geneve. Translated as The Spirit of the Laws , Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (eds., and trans), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Mun, Thomas, 1664, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade , London: T. Clark. Reprinted Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelly, 1986.
• Newton, Isaac, 1704 (1730), Opticks , I. Bernard Cohen (ed.), New York: Dover, 1979.
• Oresme, Nicholas, 1358, Treatise on Money ( Traité Monétaires ), Jacquelines Fau (ed.) Paris: Cugas, 1990.
• Pascal, Blaise, 1670 [1910], Pensées, W.F. Trotter (trans.), London: Dent.
• Pinto, Isaac de, 1771, Traité de la circulation et du crédit , Amsterdam.
• Pufendorf, Samuel, 1673, De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem . Translated as On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law , James Tully (ed.) and Michael Silverthorne (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Quesnay, François, 1756, “Fermiers”, in Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie , 6: 528–540.
• –––, 1757, “Grains”, in Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie , 7: 812-831.
• –––, 1758, “Tableau économique”, manuscript. Recast and printed in 1766 as “Analyse de la formule arithmétique du tableau économique de la distribution des dépenses annuelles d’une Nation agricole”, Journal de l’Agriculture, du Commerce et des Finances , 2(3): 11–41.
• –––, 1758-1759, “Tableau économique”, (first, second and third editions) in Meek, 1962, pp. 109-137.
• Reid, Thomas, 1764, An Inquiry in the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense , Edinburgh.
• Ricardo, David, 1817, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation , London: John Murray.
• Robbins, Lionel, 1932, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science , London: MacMillan.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1755 [2012], “Économie ou Oeconomie”, in Diderot and d’Alembert Encyclopédie , 5: 537–549. Translated as “Discourse on Political Economy”, in D. Cress (ed. and trans.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings , second edition, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
• Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1711, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times , London. Second edition, London, 1714–15. Reprinted, Lawrence E. Klein (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Simpson, Thomas, 1755, “A Letter to the Right Honourable George Earl of Macclesfield, President of the Royal Society, on the Advantage of Taking the Mean of a Number of Observations, in Practical Astronomy”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , 49(1): 82-93.
• Smith, Adam, 1759 [1976], The Theory of Moral Sentiments , London: Andrew Millar and Edinburgh: Alexander Kincaid and J. Bell. Reprinted, D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
• –––, 1776 [1976], An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , 2 volumes, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Reprinted, R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
• –––, 1795 [1980], “The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries: Illustrated by the History of Astronomy”, in his Essays on Philosophical Subjects , Dugald Stewart (ed.), London. Reprinted, W.P.D. Whightman and J.C. Bryce (eds.),Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 31–105.
• Steuart, James, 1767, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Œconomy , 2 vols., London. Reprinted, Andrew S. Skinner (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
• Tucker, Josiah, 1755, The Elements of Commerce and the Theory of Taxes, n.p. private edition of the author.
• Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 1756, “Foire”, in Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopédie , 7: 39-41.
• –––, 1766 [in manuscript; printed in 1770], Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses , Paris. Translated as Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches, William J. Ashley (trans., 1898), New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971.
• Vanderlint, Jacob, 1734, Money Answers All Things , London: T. Cox.
• Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 1733/34, Lettres philosophiques , in English, 1733 and as Lettres Ecrites de Londres sur les Anglois , in French, Basle, 1734. Translated as Philosophical Letters , Ernest Dilworth (trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961.
• –––, 1952, Voltaire’s Notebooks , two volumes continuous pagination, Theodore Besterman (ed.), Genève, Institut et musée Voltaire.
• Xenophon, Œconomicus , E.C. Merchant and O.J. Todd (trans.), in Memorabilia, Œconomicus, Symposium, Apology , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Apeldoorn, Laurens van, 2017, “‘The Nutrition of a Commonwealth:’ On Hobbes’s Economic Thought”, in History of Economic Rationalities: Economic Reasoning as Knowledge and Practice Authority , Jakob Bek-Thomsen, Christian Olaf Christiansen, Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, and Mikkel Thorup (eds.), (Ethical Economy 54), Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing, 21–30. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-52815-1_3
• Appleby, Joyce Oldham, 1978, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Arnon, Arie, 2010, Monetary Theory and Policy from Hume and Smith to Wicksell: Money, Credit, and the Economy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511921384
• Bodanis, David, 2006, Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love Affair , New York: Random House.
• Baier, Annette C., 1991, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Berry, Christopher J., 1994, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511558368
• Brewer, Anthony, 1995, “The Concept of Growth in Eighteenth-Century Economics”, History of Political Economy , 27(4): 609–638. doi:10.1215/00182702-27-4-609
• Bruni, Luigino and Pier Luigi Porta, 2003, “Economia civile and pubblica felicità in the Italian Enlightenment”, in Schabas and de Marchi 2003: 361–385.
• Caffentzis, Constantine George, 1989, Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money , Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
• –––, 2000, Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money , Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94-015-9522-3
• Cardoso, José Luís, 1990, “Economic Thought in Late Eighteenth-Century Portugal: Physiocratic and Smithian Influences”, History of Political Economy, 22(3): 429-441.
• Christensen, Paul P., 1989, “Hobbes and the Physiological Origins of Economic Science”, History of Political Economy , 21(4): 689–709. doi:10.1215/00182702-21-4-689
• Coleman, William Oliver, 1995, Rationalism and Anti-Rationalism in the Origins of Economics: The Philosophical Roots of 18th Century Economic Thought , Aldershot: Edward Elgar.
• Daston, Lorraine, 1988, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Davis, Gordon F., 2003, “Philosophical Psychology and Economic Psychology in David Hume and Adam Smith”, History of Political Economy , 35(2): 269–304. doi:10.1215/00182702-35-2-269
• De Marchi, Neil and Paul Harrison, 1994, “Trading ‘in the Wind’ and with Guile: The Troublesome Matter of the Short Selling of Shares in Seventeenth-Century Holland”, in Higgling: Transactors and Their Markets in the History of Economics , Neil de Marchi and Mary S. Morgan (eds.), supplement to History of Political Economy , 26(suppl_1): 47–65. doi:10.1215/00182702-1994-suppl_1008
• Derringer, William, 2018, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Diaye, Marc-Arthur and André Lapidus, 2019, “Decision and Time from a Humean Point of View”, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought , 26(3): 622–652. doi:10.1080/09672567.2019.1623280
• Driver, Julia, 2009 [2014], “The History of Utilitarianism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/utilitarianism-history/ >
• Endres, A.M., 1985, “The Functions of Numerical Data in the Writings of Graunt, Petty, and Davenant”, History of Political Economy , 17(2): 245–264. doi:10.1215/00182702-17-2-245
• Evans, G. Heberton Jr., 1967, “The Law of Demand – The Roles of Gregory King and Charles Davenant”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 81(3): 483–492.
• Faccarello, Gilbert, 1989 [1999], Aux origines de l’économie politique libérale , Paris: Éditions Anthropos. Translated as The Foundations of “Laissez-Faire”: The Economics of Pierre de Boisguilbert , Carolyn Shread (trans.), London: Routledge, 1999. doi:10.4324/9780203005637
• ––– (ed.), 1998, Studies in the History of French Political Economy: From Bodin to Walras , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203024850
• Fleischacker, Samuel, 2004, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2013 [2020], “Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/smith-moral-political/ >.
• Force, Pierre, 2003, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490538
• Foucault, Michel, 1966 [1970], Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences , Catherine Porter (trans.), New York: Random House, 1970.
• Gaukroger, Stephen, 2010, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199594931.001.0001
• Gill, Michael B., 2006, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics , New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511499272
• Grice-Hutchinson, Marjorie, 1978, Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177–1740 , London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Griswold, Charles L., Jr, 1998, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511608964
• Haakonssen, Knud, 1981, The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hampton, Jean, 1986, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625060
• Hanley, Ryan Patrick, 2009, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511581212
• Hardin, Russell, 2007, David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist , New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232567.001.0001
• Harris, James A., 2015, Hume: An Intellectual Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139033220
• Hausman, Daniel M., 2003 [2021], “Philosophy of Economics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/economics/ >
• Hirschfeld, Mary, 2018, Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Hirschman, Albert O., 1977, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Hollander, Samuel, 1999, “Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith on the Usury Laws: A ‘Smithian’ Reply to Bentham and a New Problem,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought , 6(4): 523-551. doi:10.1080/10427719900000042
• Hont, Istvan, 2005, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2015, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith , Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher (eds.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Hoppit, Julian, 2006, “The Contexts and Contours of British Economic Literature, 1660–1760”, The Historical Journal , 49(1): 79–110. doi:10.1017/S0018246X05005066
• Hundert, E. J., 1994, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511584749
• Hutchison, Terence, 1988, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1666–1776 , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• James, Susan, 2006, “The Passions and the Good Life”, in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy , Donald Rutherford (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198–220. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521822424.008
• Jones, Norman L., 1989, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Hirschfeld, Mary, 2018, Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kavka, Gregory S., 1986, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Kaye, Joel, 1998, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511496523
• Klein, Judy L., 1997, Statistical Visions in Time: A History of Time Series Analysis, 1662–1938 , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Koerner, Lisbet, 1999, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Langholm, Odd, 1998, The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought: Antecedents of Choice and Power , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511528491
• Lapidus, André, 1997, “Metal, Money, and the Prince: John Buridan and Nicholas Oresme after Thomas Aquinas”, History of Political Economy , 29(1): 21–53. doi:10.1215/00182702-29-1-21
• Larrère, Catherine, 1992, L’invention de l’économie au XVIIIe siècle: Du Droit naturel à la physiocratie , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Maas, Harro, 2003, “Where Mechanism Ends: Thomas Reid on the Moral and the Animal Oeconomy”, in Schabas and de Marchi 2003: 338–360.
• Magnusson, Lars, 1994, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203416488
• McArthur, Neil, 2007, David Hume’s Political Theory: Law, Commerce, and the Constitution of Government , Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• –––, 2012, “‘Thrown amongst Many’: Hobbes on Taxation and Fiscal Policy”, in Hobbes Today: Insights for the 21st Century , S. A. Lloyd (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 178–189. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139047388.011
• Meikle, Scott, 1995, Aristotle’s Economic Thought , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Mokyr, Joel, 2009, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Morgan, Mary S., 2012, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Murphy, Antoin E., 2009, The Genesis of Macroeconomics: New Ideas from Sir William Petty to Henry Thornton , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199543229.001.0001
• Nakhimovsky, Isaac, 2011, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Neal, Larry, 1990, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511665127
• Pocock, J. G. A., 1985, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511720505
• Raynor, David, 1980, “Hume’s Knowledge of Bayes’s Theorem”, Philosophical Studies , 38(1): 105–106. doi:10.1007/BF00354534
• Redman, Deborah A., 1997, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science: Methodology and the Classical Economists , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Reinert, Sophus, 2011, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2018, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Robertson, John, 2005, The Case for The Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490705
• Ross, Ian Simpson, 1995, The Life of Adam Smith, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Rothschild, Emma, 2001, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Rothschild, Emma and Amartya Sen, 2006, “Adam Smith’s Economics”, in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith , Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 319–365. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521770599.013
• Rusnock, Andrea A., 1999, “Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment”, in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe , William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (eds.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 49–68.
• Sakamoto, Tatsuya, 2016, “Hume’s Philosophical Economics”, in Oxford Handbook of Hume , Paul Russell (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 569–587.
• Schabas, Margaret, 2005, The Natural Origins of Economics , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2015, “Hume on Economic Well-Being”, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Hume , Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien (eds.), London: Bloomsbury, (ch. 18) pp. 332–348.
• Schabas, Margaret and Neil de Marchi (eds.), 2003, Œconomies in the Age of Newton , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Schabas, Margaret and Carl Wennerlind, 2020, A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Schliesser, Eric, 2017, Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190690120.001.0001
• Schumpeter, Joseph A., 1954, History of Economic Analysis , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sigot, Nathalie, 2001, Bentham et l’économie: Une histoire d’utilité , Paris: Economica.
• Skinner, Andrew, 1999, “Pufendorf, Hutcheson and Adam Smith: Some Principles of Political Economy”, in Grotius, Pufendorf and Modern Natural Law , Knud Haakonssen (ed.), Aldershot: Ashgate.
• Sonenscher, Michael, 2007, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Sorell, Tom, 2006, “Hobbes on Trade, Consumption and International Order”, The Monist , 89(2): 245–258. doi:10.5840/monist200689223
• Sreenivasan, Gopal, 1995, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Stern, Philip J. and Carl Wennerlind (eds.), 2014, Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Stigler, Stephen M., 1986, The History of Statistics , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Sugden, Robert, 2021, “Hume’s Experimental Psychology and the Idea of Erroneous Preferences”, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization , 183(3): 836–848. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2020.11.017
• Susato, Ryu, 2006, “Hume’s Nuanced Defense of Luxury”, Hume Studies , 32(1): 167–186. doi:10.1353/hms.2011.0185
• Sylla, Edith Dudley, 2003, “Business Ethics, Commercial Mathematics, and the Origins of Mathematical Probability”, in Schabas and de Marchi 2003: 309–337.
• Théré, Christine, 1998, “Economic Publishing and Authors, 1566–1789”, in Faccarello 1998: 1–56.
• Tribe, Keith, 1978, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse , London: Routledge.
• –––, 1981, Genealogies of Capitalism , London: MacMillan. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-04731-4
• Vaughn, Karen, 1980, John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Wakefield, Andre, 2009, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Wennerlind, Carl, 2011, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2013, “Money: Hartlibian Political Economy and the New Culture of Credit”, in Stern and Wennerlind 2014: 74–93. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199988532.003.0003
• Westfall, Richard S., 1981, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107340664
• Winch, Donald, 1996, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wolloch, Nathaniel, 2011, “The Civilizing Process, Nature, and Stadial Theory”, Eighteenth-Century Studies , 44(2): 245–259.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Works on Economics , at the Online Library of Liberty.
• Early Modern Texts
• The History Of Economic Thought
• 80 Economic Bestsellers before 1850 , at the academic blog Developing Economics: A Critical Perspective On Development Economics,
• History of Economics Society
• European Society for the History of Economic Thought
• International Adam Smith Society
• The Hume Society
• Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society
• Centre International d’étude du XVIII e siècle

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de | consequentialism | economics: philosophy of | economics [normative] and economic justice | Enlightenment | Hobbes, Thomas | Hume, David | Locke, John | markets | money and finance, philosophy of | Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de | moral psychology: empirical approaches | property and ownership | School of Salamanca | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Smith, Adam: moral and political philosophy | utilitarianism: history of

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak for his feedback, and Zoe Zhiyu Luo and Joan Pauls for their sure-footed editing.

Copyright © 2022 by Margaret Schabas < margaret . schabas @ ubc . ca >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054