Classical Economics

What makes nations wealthy? Who gets what-and why? How do markets coordinate millions of independent decisions without central direction? These are the questions that launched a revolution in human thought.

In Classical Economics: The Foundations of Modern Economic Thought, Robert F. Geissler traces the rise of the most influential school of economics the world has ever known-from Adam Smith's landmark Wealth of Nations in 1776 through the great debates that shaped an entire century of economic policy and political life.

Meet the architects of modern economic thought: Smith, whose invisible hand revealed how self-interest produces social order. Ricardo, who proved that free trade benefits all nations even when one is more efficient at everything. Malthus, who warned that population would always press against subsistence-and who quietly anticipated Keynes by a century. Say, whose law that supply creates its own demand would dominate economic theory until the Great Depression. And Mill, who synthesized it all while quietly questioning whether capitalism's promises could ever fully be kept.

This volume-the eighth in the ThinkTankMedia.Online Economics Education Series-examines not just what the classical economists said, but why it mattered, where they were right, and where history proved them wrong. From the labor theory of value to comparative advantage, from the iron law of wages to the concept of the stationary state, the ideas explored here remain alive in every debate about trade policy, income distribution, government spending, and economic growth happening today.

Classical economics did not simply describe the economy of the 19th century. It built the intellectual framework inside which all of us still think.

Robert F. Geissler is the author of the ThinkTankMedia.Online Economics Education Series, including works on Austrian economics, Keynesian theory, monetary policy, stagflation, and the history of economic thought.