The Worldly Philosophers

The Worldly Philosophers is your hands-on guide to economics, how the world works overall but especially from a financial point of view, what are the social and economic systems that existed throughout history, and how certain people’s concepts got to shape the world we know today.

Regardless of the theories they produced, every economist wanted to find out how to organize a society in the best way, economically and socially speaking.

The economists’ quest for this holy grail underlies their seemingly disparate approaches and theories. Yet their shared desire has led them to develop numerous similar ideas.

We can broadly divide economic theory into two categories: microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics focuses on individual markets and how changes in prices, supply and demand affect them.

Macroeconomics focuses on aggregating these individual markets into a single economy that we can measure in terms of total output, total employment, price levels, etc.

The economists who have had the greatest impact on our lives tried their best to measure these two economic concepts and find a way to integrate them into a successful formula for our society.

The book looks at the ideas of Karl Marx, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Thorstein Veblen, Jevons, Malthus, Marshall and John Maynard Keynes. And reaches the idea that all economists sought to understand the same main idea: how humans behave in a society.

History proves once again to be the teller of our present and future. And the best metric to analyze our actions and their consequences today. Actions of the past show how rulers who enforce their visions upon citizens and interfere with the economy and deemed to fall.

The 5-year economic plans in the Soviet Union, the forced labor in Egypt, or the enforced traditions and customs in China or India over the economic systems show that states are better left outside the economic machine. People should have freedom of choice in their economic endeavors.

When states interfere, it should be only to create a legal and efficient environment for these markets to coexist in peace. No forced traditions, labor, or plans will do well in the long run, because people do not work efficiently under such rules.

To build efficient markets, states should build the right legal structures and interfere as rarely as possible. Because markets are efficient and regulate themselves. Adam Smith highly popularized this theory. However, it looks true when you look at the highly efficient markets today compared to the ones from the past century.

Many consider Adam Smith as the father of modern economics. That’s because he popularized a highly relevant piece of writing in 1776 titled “The Wealth of Nations”. This paper created a theory that provides…