Economics is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher, political economist, politician and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.
Thomas Robert Malthus was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography.
A law is a universal principle that describes the fundamental nature of something, the universal properties and the relationships between things, or a description that purports to explain these principles and relationships.
The iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. The theory was first named by Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid-nineteenth century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attribute the doctrine to Lassalle, the idea to Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and the terminology to Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in Das Göttliche.
Unto This Last is an essay critical of economics by John Ruskin, who published the first chapter between August and December 1860 in the monthly journal Cornhill Magazine in four articles.
John Ramsay McCulloch was a Scottish economist, author and editor, widely regarded as the leader of the Ricardian school of economists after the death of David Ricardo in 1823. He was appointed the first professor of political economy at University College London in 1828. He wrote extensively on economic policy, and was a pioneer in the collection, statistical analysis and publication of economic data.
Malthusianism is a theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline. This event, called a Malthusian catastrophe has been predicted to occur if population growth outpaces agricultural production, thereby causing famine or war. According to this theory, poverty and inequality will increase as the price of assets and scarce commodities goes up due to fierce competition for these dwindling resources. This increased level of poverty eventually causes depopulation by decreasing birth rates. If asset prices keep increasing, social unrest would occur, which would likely cause a major war, revolution, or a famine. Societal collapse is an extreme but possible outcome from this process. The theory posits that such a catastrophe would force the population to "correct" back to a lower, more easily sustainable level. Malthusianism has been linked to a variety of political and social movements, but almost always refers to advocates of population control.
A Malthusian growth model, sometimes called a simple exponential growth model, is essentially exponential growth based on the idea of the function being proportional to the speed to which the function grows. The model is named after Thomas Robert Malthus, who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), one of the earliest and most influential books on population.
The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798, but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert Malthus. The book warned of future difficulties, on an interpretation of the population increasing in geometric progression while food production increased in an arithmetic progression, which would leave a difference resulting in the want of food and famine, unless birth rates decreased.
In macroeconomics, a general glut is an excess of supply in relation to demand, specifically, when there is more production in all fields of production in comparison with what resources are available to consume (purchase) said production. This exhibits itself in a general recession or depression, with high and persistent underutilization of resources, notably unemployment and idle factories. The Great Depression is often cited as an archetypal example of a general glut.
Ester Boserup was a Danish economist. She studied economic and agricultural development, worked at the United Nations as well as other international organizations, and wrote seminal books on agrarian change and the role of women in development.
"Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" is an essay by the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. It was first published anonymously in Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country of London in December 1849, and was revised and reprinted in 1853 as a pamphlet entitled "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question". The essay was the spark of a debate between Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. It was in this essay that Carlyle first introduced the phrase "the dismal science" to characterize the field of economics.
In economics, scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good." If the conditions of scarcity did not exist and an "infinite amount of every good could be produced or human wants fully satisfied ... there would be no economic goods, i.e. goods that are relatively scarce..." Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market or by the commons. Scarcity also includes an individual's lack of resources to buy commodities. The opposite of scarcity is abundance. Scarcity plays a key role in economic theory, and it is essential for a "proper definition of economics itself".
"The best example is perhaps Walras' definition of social wealth, i.e., economic goods. 'By social wealth', says Walras, 'I mean all things, material or immaterial, that are scarce, that is to say, on the one hand, useful to us and, on the other hand, only available to us in limited quantity'."
Critique of political economy or simply the first critique of economy is a form of social critique that rejects the conventional ways of distributing resources. The critique also rejects what its advocates believe are unrealistic axioms, faulty historical assumptions, and taking conventional economic mechanisms as a given or as transhistorical. The critique asserts the conventional economy is merely one of many types of historically specific ways to distribute resources, which emerged along with modernity.
The Center for Population Economics is a research center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The work of the CPE is funded primarily by the U.S.'s National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health.
Piercy Ravenstone was a pseudonym used by a nineteenth-century political economist whose work led him to being variously described as a socialist, a tory and as an institutionalist. His contribution was noted by David Ricardo and Karl Marx and brought to wider attention via Piero Sraffa's editing of Ricardo's collected works. Sraffa suggested that Ravenstone's true identity was Richard Puller (1789–1831).
Various definitions of economics have been proposed, including attempts to define precisely "what economists do".
Shannon C. Stimson is an American political theorist and historian of ideas, whose more recent work and teaching spans the economic and political thought of the early modern period through the nineteenth century. She is the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Government department at Georgetown University. Her academic posts have included appointments at Harvard University (1984-1991), UC Berkeley (1991-2014), the Fulbright Professorship in the United Kingdom, the Christensen Fellowship of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, the John K. Castle Chair in Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale University and she has been a Distinguished Academic Visitor at Queens' College, Cambridge on two occasions. Her research has been supported through fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, as well as by several prize fellowships. Her articles have appeared in numerous edited volumes, journals of political thought, economics, the history of economic thought, and political science in America and Europe. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Political Science Review, the Adam Smith Review, and the Journal of Politics.
The concept of the struggle for existence concerns the competition or battle for resources needed to live. It can refer to human society, or to organisms in nature. The concept is ancient, and the term struggle for existence was in use by the end of the 18th century. From the 17th century onwards the concept was associated with a population exceeding resources, an issue shown starkly in Thomas Robert Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population which drew on Benjamin Franklin's Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc..
