The 2008 recession restored Keynes to prominence. This account elaborates the misinformation that led to his repeated resurrection and interment since his death in 1946. Keynes was more open-minded about capitalism than is commonly believed, and his nuanced views offer an alternative to the polarized rhetoric evoked by the word capitalism today.
The definitive guide to the history of economic thought, fully revised twenty years after first publication Roger Backhouse's definitive guide takes the story of economic thinking from the ancient world to the present day, with a brand-new chapter on the twenty-first century and updates throughout to reflect the latest scholarship. Covering topics including globalisation, inequality, financial crises and the environment, Backhouse brings his breadth of expertise and a contemporary lens to this original and insightful exploration of economics, revealing how we got to where we are today.
Founder of Modern Economics offers stimulating insight into a towering figure's influence on economics: a discipline and way of thinking that influences business, policy making, and everyday life.
A magisterial overview of the history of economic thought from the seventeenth century to the present day, one that emphasizes a diversity of economic argument that it sometime suppressed in more conventional textbooks, which tend to organize their histories into sequences fo schools of thought.
A History of Economics from the Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century
In some of Western culture's earliest writings, Hesiod defined the basic economic problem as one of scarce resources, a view still held by most economists. Diocletian tried to save the falling Roman Empire with wage and price fixes--a strategy that has not gone entirely out of style. And just as they did in the late nineteenth century, thinkers trained in physics renovated economic inquiry in the late twentieth century. Taking us from Homer to the frontiers of game theory, this book presents an engrossing history of economics, what Alfred Marshall called "the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life."While some regard economics as a modern invention, Roger Backhouse shows that economic ideas were influential even in antiquity--and that the origins of contemporary economic thought can be traced back to the ancients. He reveals the genesis of what we have come to think of as economic theory and shows the remarkable but seldom explored impact of economics, natural science, and philosophy on one another. Along the way, he introduces the fascinating characters who have thought about money and markets, including theologians, philosophers, politicians, lawyers, and poets as well as economists themselves. We learn how some of history's most influential concepts arose from specific times and from the Stoic notion of natural law to the mercantilism that rose with the European nation-state; from postwar development economics to the recent experimental and statistical economics made possible by affluence and powerful computers.Vividly written and unprecedented in its integration of ancient and modern economic history, this book is the best history of economics--and among the finest intellectual histories--to be published since Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers . It proves that economics has been anything but "the dismal science."