Influential Economists

William Petty Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

- Demographics

- Authored some of the first works on democracy

- Was a large scale landowner in Ireland

- Introduced quantitatve analysis of social phenomenon

- Identified the importance of surplus (money, crops, goods)

Adam Smith Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

- Free market capitalism
- Self-interest drives individual behavior/the whole economy
- Laissez faire (government stays out of the economy)
- Society rests on moral behavior and interdependence
- Division of labor: firms and individuals specialize
- society has 3 classes, workers, capitalists, landlords

Thomas Malthus Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

- Population
- Population is growing geometrically but food supply is growing arithmetically
- Believed we would run out of food as population soared
- Did not account for agricultural and technological advances
- Encouraged celibacy and believed starvation and war were natural checks on population as it grew out of control

David Ricardo Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

- Comparative advantage in trade (whoever loses less in production of a good should make that good)
- Supported free trade, against government interventions like tariffs and duties
- Spoke on the labor theory of value, a commodity's value is worth the labor needed to produce it
- Searched for an invariable standard for exchange values

John Stuart Mill Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

- Logic and Utility

- Philosophical radicalism- supported women's rights, was anti-slavery, anti racist as well as pro socialist cooperative
- if people saw their own happiness as inextricably tied to others, we would have a better world

Karl Marx Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

- Communism

- Critical of capitalism and felt workers would one day revolt
- Class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoise
- surplus value of the workers labor was being exploited by capitalist class, who concentrated capital among the few
- alienation of workers, disconnected from their production
- historical factors shape the material conditions around us

Fredrick Von Hayek Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

- Anti Centralization

- spontaneous order- no one person could control the market because it consists of millions of small, complicated transactions and decisions
- Felt that a centrally planned economy would be deeply flawed and problematic, as no one person or few people have the knowledge necessary to control a vast market
- liberty and individual economic freedom of high importance
- critic of socialism/ communist/ centrally planned economies
- prices signal scarcity or abundance to individuals
- argued extensively with Keynes
- the market is important as an instrument of diffusion of information & adjustment of individual knowledge

Alfred Marshall Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

-"neoclassicalist" economist- blended the older laws and traditions of the field with the subjectivity of marginal analysis
-marginal utility (the usefulness of one more or one less unit)
-used supply & demand to determine market price & quantity
-coined elasticity of supply/ demand (how responsive is quantity supplied or demanded to a change in price)
- popularized the term "economics" over "political economy"
-believed that technology would have huge economic impacts
-credited Mills for reaching same conclusions through math
- "advantage of small dimensions"

John Maynard Keynes Key theories, ideas, and impacts on the field

- Limited intervention

-governments should intervene in the economy to maintain employment & stability (interventionist)
-restructuring of the international monetary system to increase fairness and equity in capitalism post WWI.
-was against German reparations
-against the gold standard as a price stabilizer
-deficit spending is okay in short term crisis, focus on present