Kurz achieves a truly impressive attention to detail and is able to provide intellectually satisfying explanations of many economic theories, both classical and modern. He concludes with a deft summation of world economists' major concerns today and their critical relation to world events.Įconomic Thought ranges from harvest details on ancient Babylonian clay tablets to select recent developments in economic theory. Over the course of this journey, Kurz explains what Adam Smith meant by the 'invisible hand' how Karl Marx's 'law of motion' works in capitalist economies the roots of the Austrian economists' emphasis on the problems of information, incomplete knowledge, and uncertainty John Maynard Keynes's principle of effective demand and economic stabilization and the insights and challenges offered by growth theory, welfare economics, game theory, and more. With a keen eye for how economic insights are acquired, lost, and reborn, Kurz focuses on the dynamic individuals who give old ideas new life and the historical events that provoke different approaches and theories. Kurz traces the long arc of economic thought from its emergence in ancient Greece to its systematic presentation among the classical thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the influential work of scholars such as Paul Samuelson and Kenneth J. In this concise yet comprehensive history, Heinz D.

Economic Thought by Heinz D. Kurz