Economic questions and history of economic thought.

Economics Economics Questions
1

Hey, adherents of The Mises Institute! And excuse my language, I’m a european and can’t understand English perfectly!

I am supposed to write a quite short article (5 pages maximum) about history of economic thought, and I know that you guys at this forum are pretty educated in everything, so I thought I might ask you about advice :slight_smile:

It’s really hard to figure out what to write about, exactly. To summarize the whole history of economic thought, with all important thinkers from Aristotle to Keynes, and their ideas seems to be pointless and I will propably not get the highest grade if I do so. But I have an interesting idea: To identify and summarize some economic topics in society today, and then identify the history of the ideas behind them. For example the idea of a “just price” (on gas, real estates and so on) witch goes all the way back to Thomas of Aquinas and Aristotle and their ideas of the immorality on making a profit (I could integrate this with the idea that productivity only has a physical aspect and therefore profits are parasitic).

But this is only one example, what more examples of current economic topics are there, wich can be identified a long way back in the history of thought? I have almost no pre-knowledge about history of economic ideas yet, so tips would really be helpful? And maybe there is some questions where I can integreate austrian economics?

Best regards!

2

I think five pages, or even three, is enough to make a general timeline of economic thought. Of course you would move through economic history without much detail and I don’t know whether that is asked of you and whether it would would get you a good grade. You could use the wikipedia page on history of economic thought to create a timeline with the most important milestones: Aristotelian thought, the physiocrats, mercantilism, the marginal revolution, Adam Smith, Keynes, etc. Always giving a short explanation of what they thought, how their views were different than what went before them.

3

May I suggest you a book The School of Salamanca by Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson. The pdf is available at mises.org. It is a small book, 150 pages. It has brief analysis of history of economic thought, especially regarding theory of value and just price, origin of money, etc.