The conversation, 1550–today
Five centuries of big ideas on one timeline. Click a bar to see who they learned from and who they argued with.
Precursors & mercantilism 1550–1750
- Thomas Mun 1571–1641The balance of trade - a nation gets rich by selling more to foreigners than it buys, and the trade surplus is the kingdom's profit.
- William Petty 1623–1687Political arithmetic - the first serious attempt to measure a nation's income, wealth, and people in 'number, weight, and measure.'
- John Locke 1632–1704Property begins with labor - and money obeys the market's laws, not the government's wishes.
- Bernard Mandeville 1670–1733Private vices, public benefits - self-interested behavior can produce a thriving social order nobody planned.
- Richard Cantillon 1680–1734The Cantillon effect - new money enters an economy somewhere specific, and whoever gets it first wins.
Physiocrats & classical dawn 1750–1800
- François Quesnay 1694–1774The Tableau Économique - the first picture of an economy as a circular flow - and the conviction that the whole machine runs best when left alone.
- Adam Smith 1723–1790The invisible hand - self-interested trade, steered by prices, can organize a society better than any planner.
- Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot 1727–1781Diminishing returns, a theory of capital and interest a century early - and twenty months as finance minister spent trying to reform France before it broke.
Classical economics 1800–1870
- Thomas Malthus 1766–1834Population grows faster than food - so prosperity keeps getting eaten by extra mouths. Until, suddenly, it didn't.
- Jean-Baptiste Say 1767–1832Say's Law - you buy things with things: producing something people want is what gives you the power to demand.
- David Ricardo 1772–1823Comparative advantage - both countries gain from trade even when one of them is better at making everything.
- Frédéric Bastiat 1801–1850The broken window - judging every policy by what is seen AND what is not seen, and doing it with the best jokes in economics.
- John Stuart Mill 1806–1873The classical synthesis - and the claim that production follows natural laws, but how we share the proceeds is society's choice.
Marx & the socialists 1840–1895
- Robert Owen 1771–1858Proved at New Lanark that a humane factory could still turn a profit - then bet his fortune that cooperative villages could replace capitalism.
- Karl Marx 1818–1883Profit, he argued, is unpaid labor - capitalism runs on extracting surplus value from workers, and its own contradictions would bring it down.
- Friedrich Engels 1820–1895Co-author of the Communist Manifesto, first great reporter of industrial poverty, and the man who turned Marx's ideas into Marxism
Marginal revolution & neoclassical 1870–1920
- Léon Walras 1834–1910General equilibrium - every price in an economy depends on every other price, and he wrote the equations to prove it.
- William Stanley Jevons 1835–1882Marginal utility - value lives in the last unit consumed, not the first - worked out in mathematics.
- Carl Menger 1840–1921Subjective value - things are valuable because people want them, not because of the labor in them - and the Austrian school built on it.
- Alfred Marshall 1842–1924Supply and demand as two blades of a pair of scissors - plus the everyday toolkit of Econ 101: elasticity, consumer surplus, the short run and the long.
- Vilfredo Pareto 1848–1923Pareto efficiency - an arrangement you can't improve for anyone without hurting someone else - and the lopsided 80/20 shape of wealth.
- Thorstein Veblen 1857–1929Conspicuous consumption - we buy things to be seen buying them, and habit and status, not cool calculation, drive economic life.
- Irving Fisher 1867–1947Made money mathematical - MV = PT, real vs. nominal interest - and explained how debt plus deflation becomes depression.
The Keynesian era & its rivals 1920–1970
- Ludwig von Mises 1881–1973The economic calculation problem - why central planners can't do the math without market prices
- John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946Argued that economies can get stuck in slumps - and that government spending can pull them out
- Joseph Schumpeter 1883–1950Creative destruction - capitalism grows by ripping out the old to build the new.
- Friedrich Hayek 1899–1992The knowledge problem - prices carry information that no central planner can gather
- Joan Robinson 1903–1983Imperfect competition and monopsony - economics for markets where somebody has the upper hand.
- John Kenneth Galbraith 1908–2006The Affluent Society - private opulence, public squalor, and wants manufactured by advertising.
- Paul Samuelson 1915–2009Rewrote economics in equations - then taught it to the world in the best-selling textbook of all time.
Monetarism & new classical 1950–1990
- Ronald Coase 1910–2013Transaction costs - firms, contracts, and law all exist because using the market isn't free.
- Milton Friedman 1912–2006Monetarism - "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
- James Buchanan 1919–2013Public choice - 'politics without romance': politicians and bureaucrats respond to incentives just like the rest of us.
- Robert Lucas 1937–2023Rational expectations - people adapt to policy, so the historical patterns policymakers lean on break the moment they lean on them.
- Arthur Laffer 1940–presentThe Laffer curve - tax rates of 0% and 100% both raise nothing, so somewhere in between sits a revenue peak.
Behavioral & modern 1970–today
- Gary Becker 1930–2014The economics of everyday life - crime, marriage, education, and prejudice, all run through Chicago price theory.
- Amartya Sen 1933–presentFamines are about entitlements, not food shortages - and development means expanding what people can do and be.
- Elinor Ostrom 1933–2012Governing the commons - real communities manage shared resources for centuries without privatizing them or calling in the state.
- Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky 1934–2024Heuristics, biases, and prospect theory - mapping the predictable ways real people misjudge risk.
- Richard Thaler 1945–presentNudges and choice architecture - redesigning the default so Humans, not Econs, come out ahead.
- Esther Duflo & Abhijit Banerjee 1961–presentThe randomista revolution - testing anti-poverty ideas with randomized trials, one concrete question at a time.
- Thomas Piketty 1971–presentr > g - when returns on wealth outpace economic growth, inherited fortunes compound faster than anything you can earn.