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Period: Jan 1, 1500 to
MERCANTILISM
Mercantilism is the name given to the economic literature and practice of the period
between 1500 and 1750. Although mercantilist literature was produced in all the developing
economies of Western Europe, the most significant contributions were made by the English
and the French.
They pointed out the prosperity of a nation depending on the capital it might have, and at the same time. -
Jun 17, 1571
THOMAS MUN
Thomas Mun, (baptized June 17, 1571, London, England—died c. July 21, 1641), English writer on economics who gave the first clear and vigorous statement of the theory of the balance of trade.
Mun was one of the first mercantilists. In other words, he believed that a nation’s holdings of gold are the main measure of its wealth and that governments should regulate trade to produce an excess of exports over imports in order to gain more gold for the country. -
Jun 17, 1571
MUN´S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
He broke the traditional dinerist theories and opposed to the doctrines about the wrongs that brought to England the manipulations of private agents of change.
He pointed out that the money earned on the sale of reexported East Indian goods exceeded the amount of originally exported bullion with which those goods were purchased.
Mun was affiliated with the East India Company and was appointed to the standing commission on trade in 1622. -
J. BAPTISTE COLBERT
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, (born Aug. 29, 1619, Reims, Fr.—died Sept. 6, 1683, Paris), controller general of finance (from 1665) and secretary of state for the navy (from 1668) under King Louis XIV of France. He carried out the program of economic reconstruction that helped make France the dominant power in Europe -
COLBERT´S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
For Colbert, economics and a nation’s wealth were all about serving the state. His policies, many of which were in line with the mercantilist tradition and may have even helped shape mercantilist ideas (maintaing gold reserves, keeping a favorable balance of trade, etc.) were motivated by the fact that Colbert wanted to further French colonialism, bolster French exports, and keep as much gold in silver within France as possible by limiting imports. -
PETTY´S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
Petty wrote a good number of works on economics most of which can be found compiled in C.H. Hull’s The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty
He was also involved in surveying the mortality rate in London, a project in which he collaborated with John Graunt .
Is most generally recognized as one of the first men to apply basic statistical analysis to economics.
Petty argued that taxes were without a doubt necessary to bolster the economy and pay for things that fell under the ‘public charge’. -
WILLIAM PETTY
William Petty was an english economist, one of the precursors of the classical burgeois economy, Petty´s scientific interests used to show many stages: in 1647 he invented a copy machine, in 1647 got the grade as doctor in Physics. he was a great landholder. Petty acted as an ideologist of the triumphant middle class arrived to the power after the burgeois revolution on his country. -
FRANÇOIS QUESNAY
François Quesnay was the leading figure of the Physiocrats, generally considered to be the first school of economic thinking.
The Physiocrats believed that an economy’s power derived from its agricultural sector. They wanted the government of Louis XV, who ruled France from 1715 to 1774, to reduce taxes on French agriculture so that poor France could emulate wealthier Britain, which had a relatively laissez-faire policy. Indeed, it was Quesnay who coined the term “laissez-faire, laissez-passer.” -
DAVID HUME
Though better known for his treatments of philosophy, history, and politics, the Scottish philosopher David Hume also made several essential contributions to economic thought. His empirical argument against British mercantilism formed a building block for classical economics. His essays on money and international trade published in Political Discourses strongly influenced his friend and fellow countryman Adam Smith. -
HUME´S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
Hume erroneously advanced the notion of “creeping inflation”, the idea that a gradual increase in the money supply would lead to economic growth.
Hume established that economic freedom is a necessary condition for political freedom.
Another assertion was that “you cannot deduce ought from is”, that is, value judgments cannot be made purely on the basis of facts. Economists now make the same point by distinguishing between normative (what should be) and positive (what is). -
ADAM SMITH
Scottish social philosopher and political economist. After two centuries, Adam Smith remains a towering figure in the history of economic thought. Known primarily for a single work—An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the first comprehensive system of political economy—Smith is more properly regarded as a social philosopher whose economic writings constitute only the capstone to an overarching view of political and social evolution. -
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PHYSIOCRACY
Physiocracy started in the middle of the 18th century and consists in the intervention of intermediaries in various stages of the process of production, and distribution of goods tended to reduce the total level of prosperity and production (government controls, such as monopolies, excessive taxes, and european feudalism). -
MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS OF MERCANTILISM
Possibly the most significant accomplishment of the later mercantilists was the explicit
recognition of the possibility of analyzing the economy. This development represented a
transfer to the social sciences of attitudes then prevalent in the physical scienceSs. -
THOMAS MALTUS
English economist and demographer who is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism. -
MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS OF PHYSIOCRACY
They put economics on a scientific basis by applying scientific methods.
Economic development was a major concern of the Physiocrats. They realised the importance of agriculture which give surplus for capital formation.
The physiocrats were the first school of economists to analyse capital and capital formation.
The physiocrats realised the interdependence of different classes in the economy.
The physiocrats insisted that the government should restrict its functions. -
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CLASSICS
The main idea of the Classical school was that markets work best when they are left alone, and that there is nothing but the smallest role for government. The approach is firmly one of laissez-faire and a strong belief in the efficiency of free markets to generate economic development. Markets should be left to work because the price mechanism acts as a powerful 'invisible hand' to allocate resources to where they are best employed. -
KARL MARX
Carl Heinrich Marx Pressburg, also known as Karl Marx (Trier, Germany, May 5, 1818 - London, United Kingdom, March 14, 1883), was an intellectual and militant German Communist of Jewish origin. In his vast and influential work, he ventured into the fields of philosophy, history, sociology and economics. Together with Friedrich Engels, he is the father of scientific socialism, modern communism and Marxism. His best-known writings are the Manifesto of the Communist Party -
LEON WALRAS
Leon Walras was born into a wealthy family in the town of Évreux (France) on Christmas Day 1834, the son of an economist, Auguste Walras, the main "culprit" of the interest aroused in him by the "Science of scarcity" "
Before graduating in political economy he was a Bachelor of Arts (1851), in Sciences (1853), and even began the study of an enginn what really was his passion, economics.eering, studies that would end up leaving to train i -
ALFRED MARSHALL
Alfred Marshall was born in London, United Kingdom, on July 26, 1842 as a father, a Bank of England worker, and graduated in mathematics from St. John's College, Cambridge, and then, when he suffered mental problems, he changed to philosophy. and, within philosophy, he concentrated on ethics and these studies led him to the study of economics. -
SMITH'S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
The most important points raised by Smith are: The natural law is superior to human law. The economy is governed by a "visible hand". In which the state
should not intervene. For the economic world to develop on its own
impulse, since the development of economic institutions has been
part of the spontaneous action of millions of men. That current spontaneity of market forces is balanced by competition. The natural balance is achieved in society. Handles the theory, Value = work of man. -
MALTHUS' MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
Malthus came to prominence for his 1798 essay on population growth. In it, he argued that population multiplies geometrically and food arithmetically; therefore, whenever the food supply increases, population will rapidly grow to eliminate the abundance. -
CLASSICS' MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
Much of their work was developing theories about the way markets and market economies work. They essentially regarded the economy as able to maintain its own equilibrium through market forces, and that government intervention in the form of artificial tariffs or other barriers that disrupted the free flow of goods and services were harmful to the economy -
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NEOCLASSICS
The neo-classical school of economic thought is a wide ranging school of ideas from which modern economic theory evolved. The method is clearly scientific, with assumptions, and hypothesis and attempts to derive general rules or principles about the behaviour of firms and consumers.
An important contribution of neo-classical economics was a focus on marginal values, such as marginal cost and marginal utility. -
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
English economist (Cambridge, 1883 - Firle, Sussex, 1946). He received an elite education in Eton and Cambridge, orienting himself towards economics on the advice of his teacher, Alfred Marshall. After a brief period working in the British administrative service for India, in 1909 he entered as a professor at King's College in Cambridge, where he taught economics until his death. -
MILTON FRIEDMAN
Milton Friedman is the best known of all the Monetarists, he was born on July 31, 1912, in Brooklyn, New York, son of Sarah Ethel Landau and Jeno Saul Friedman, poor immigrants of the Soviet Union. Friedman, a member of a family of 4 brothers, attended public school, graduating from Rahway High School in 1928. He later received a scholarship and entered Rutgers University. Initially he specialized in mathematics. -
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KEYNESIANS
Keynesian economists broadly follow the main macro-economic ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes is widely regarded as the most important economist of the 20th Century, despite falling out of favour during the 1970s and 1980s following the rise of new classical economics. In essence, Keynesian economists are skeptical that, if left alone, free markets will inevitably move towards a full employment equilibrium. -
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MARXISM
According to Marxist economics, the labor-value theory WASthe difference between the value of what the worker produces and his or her form of work is not remunerated, which is known as surplus value, with which the capitalist is conserved in a scheme of exploitation that confronts the owners of the means of production (the bourgeoisie) and the workers (proletariat) in the class struggle. -
KEYNES' MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
his decisive work was the General Theory of Occupation, Interest and Money (1936), with which he gave a definitive answer to the serious economic depression unleashed around the world from the crash of the New York Stock Exchange of 1929. Recalling forgotten intuitions of underconsumption theorists (like Malthus), Keynes indicated that the cause of the crisis was the insufficiency of demand, due to the growing marginal propensity to save developed societies -
KEYNESIAN'S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
The new proposal of Keynes was based on another equilibrium, on the balance between income and expenses, between income and aggregate demand. When aggregate demand is insufficient, Keynes said, sales decrease and jobs are lost; When aggregate demand is high and growing, the economy thrives. Based on Keynes' assertions, a powerful theory emerged that allowed explaining economic behavior. This interpretation forms the basis of contemporary macroeconomics. -
MARSHALL'S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
Among his main contributions, Alfred originated the concept of consumer surplus. He observed that the price is relatively equal for each unit of a commodity that a consumer buys or acquires, but the value to the consumer of each additional unit falls. A consumer will buy units above the point where the marginal value equals the price. Therefore, in all previous units the last, the consumer reaps an advantage by paying less than the value of the product to be. -
WALRAS' MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
The main one of its contributions was the concept of "marginal utility", that developed along with other economists like William Jevons and Carl Menger, creating, without having tried it, a new school of economic thought from that moment, the marginalism, and within of her, he was the founder of the Marginalist School of Lausanne, a witness who would end up picking up his disciple, Vilfredo Pareto. -
NEOCLASSICS' MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
Development of the subjective theory of value based on utility and scarcity, abandon the classical and Marxist conception of value (value = labor), and and found the subjective theory of value, based on the marginal utility that goods report to the consumer regardless of the amount of work necessary for its production (value = utility and scarcity).
Psychological theory of marginal utility.
Theory of price formation, based on the subjective theory of value and marginal utility. -
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MONETARISM
Is the school of economic thought that maintains that the money supply (the total amount of money in an economy, in the form of coin, currency, and bank deposits) is the chief determinant on the demand side of short-run economic activity. American economist Milton Friedman is generally regarded as monetarism’s leading exponent. Friedman and other monetarists advocate a macroeconomic theory and policy that diverge significantly from those of the formerly dominant Keynesian school. -
FRIEDMAN'S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
For Friedman his greatest contribution to economic theory is his book Theory of the Consumer Function, but the most influential was A Monetary History of the United States, written with Anna Schawartz, in which he explains the crisis of the 1930s.
Another great contribution of Friedman is the revision of Phillips curve, of Keynesian inspiration, which inversely relates levels of unemployment and inflation. -
MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS OF MONETARISM
The basic idea of the monetarist economy is to analyze together the total demand for money and the money supply. The economic authorities have the capacity and power to fix the nominal money supply (without taking into account the effects of prices) since they control the amount that is printed or minted, as well as the creation of bank money. But people make decisions about how much real cash they want to get. Let's see how the adjustment between supply and demand occurs. -
MARXISM'S MAIN IDEAS
Marxism generated the most important changes in the economic doctrines of the 20th century and polarized the political and social thought of that century, dividing the world into two fronts: capitalism and communism or state socialism, which would result in the Cold War -
MARX'S MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS
Your most important ideas can be summarized in the following: The objective of Marx's analysis was to know the social reality in order to transform it. To do this, he analyzed the historical past looking for in it the keys of the process through which some societies had given way to others. He studied and criticized capitalist society, in order to discover its contradictions, and promoted revolutionary action with the purpose of destroying bourgeois capitalism.
