CLASSICAL SCHOOL:

This is an education on economics wrapped up in the fascinating history of 20 people who have shaped nations through their philosophy, all written with an engaging but clear tone that draws in both the student and professor in economics. Tread the paths of the classical economists, thinkers who envisioned the very systems society is or could be made from. From the 17th century and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Bernard Mandeville and Richard Cantillon, to the 19th century and Friedrich Engels, William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, financial history and the philosophy behind it is explained in full. Callum Williams, a senior economics writer for The Economist, walks readers through the lives of 20 influential economists, structured through a chapter for each thinker. The reader will be transported from the life of Adam Smith (or the 'father of economics') who wrote the most famous economics book (Wealth of Nations) in 1776 and the mind of David Ricardo, who produced theories on the value of items, to the work of Dadabhai Naoroji who was born in Mumbai and looked at 'imperial economics', the impact of empires both of the colonisers and the colonised. Attempt to unravel the many meditations on population that Thomas Robert Malthus published and revised, and whose name created the unfortunate term 'Malthusian' after the financial world developed the opinion that he thought too many children would be born which would lead to overpopulation. Admire the brilliance of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the few female economists of the 19th and 20th centuries (and one of few women to obtain a doctorate) and also a member of radical-left political parties which cast a shadow over her obsessive writings on Marx, Malthus and Ricardo. Decipher the work of David Hume, described by Williams as the 'greatest philosopher to ever have written in the English language', who wrote about inflation and the concept that 'debt is bad'. If a novice in the world of economics, the reader is introduced to the dual nature of how history has presented Karl Marx: to the right wing, an inventor of communism with 'wrongheaded' ideas in the 20th century that resulted in death and misery, while to the left wing, he was the visionary who saw the contraindications of capitalism and would have deplored the horrors of communist Russia and China. For the economics-savvy, take the opportunity to acquaint oneself with Alfred Marshall, whose portrait was described as 'the stereotype of the teacher' and whose book Principles of Economics may not have put forward novel ideas but produced an 'easily digestible' summary of economic theories. 280pp.