History of Economics53 milestones · 178 ideas

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An interactive timeline of the history of economics: 53 milestones · 178 ideas, from Ancient & Medieval to Contemporary, with the connections between them.

Ancient & Medieval

Hesiod’s Works and Days (c. 700 BCE)

Hesiod’s didactic poem gives practical advice to a small farmer and is often cited as the earliest Western reflection on scarcity, work and competition. It frames the human condition as one in which livelihoods must be wrested from a reluctant world through toil.

Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (c. 4th century BCE)

A Socratic dialogue on the management of an estate, the Oeconomicus gave us the word oikonomia (“household management”). Xenophon treats efficient administration, training of staff and orderly stores as skills that increase wealth.

Aristotle on Exchange & Money (c. 350–330 BCE)

In the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle analysed exchange, money and the pursuit of gain. His distinctions between natural household provisioning and limitless money-making shaped economic ethics for two millennia.

Kautilya’s Arthashastra (c. 3rd c. BCE – 3rd c. CE)

Attributed to Kautilya (Chanakya), adviser to the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta, the Arthashastra is a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft and political economy. It sets out detailed rules for the treasury, taxation, markets, weights and measures, and state enterprises.

Discourses on Salt and Iron (81 BCE)

In 81 BCE the Han court convened a debate on the state monopolies over salt, iron and liquor created under Emperor Wu. Huan Kuan’s record of it preserves one of the earliest sustained arguments over state intervention versus private enterprise.

Scholastics & the Just Price (c. 1265–1300)

Medieval theologians asked when a price or a loan was morally just. Thomas Aquinas and his successors built on Aristotle to develop doctrines of just price and usury, while thinkers such as Peter John Olivi probed the roots of value in scarcity and utility.

Oresme’s De moneta (c. 1355–1360)

The French bishop Nicole Oresme wrote one of the first treatises devoted entirely to money. He argued that coinage belongs to the community rather than the prince and condemned debasement as a hidden tax.

Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (1377)

The Muqaddimah, the introduction to Ibn Khaldun’s universal history, analysed the rise and fall of dynasties in social and economic terms. It discusses labour as the source of value, the division of labour, prices and the effects of taxation.

School of Salamanca (c. 1530–1600)

Spanish late-scholastic theologians confronted the flood of American silver and the growth of international trade. They developed early versions of the quantity theory of money and defended market-determined prices.

Mercantilism & Thomas Mun (written c. 1630, published 1664)

Mercantilist writers treated national wealth as a positive balance of trade that brought in gold and silver. Thomas Mun, a director of the East India Company, gave the doctrine its classic English statement.

Bank of England (1694)

The Bank of England was founded as a private joint-stock company to lend £1.2 million to William III’s government for war with France. It became the model for central banking and the management of a permanent national debt.

John Law & the 1720 Bubbles (1716–1720)

The Scottish financier John Law persuaded the French regency to back a note-issuing bank and the Mississippi Company. The resulting speculative boom and its collapse in 1720, alongside Britain’s South Sea Bubble, became a lasting lesson in financial mania.

Hume’s Political Discourses (1752)

In essays such as “Of Money” and “Of the Balance of Trade” David Hume argued that trying to hoard gold is self-defeating. His price–specie flow mechanism became a cornerstone of classical international economics.

Cantillon’s Essai (written c. 1730, published 1755)

Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, circulated in manuscript before its 1755 publication, has been called the first systematic treatise on economics. It analysed markets, the entrepreneur and how new money spreads through an economy.

Physiocrats & the Tableau économique (1758–1776)

François Quesnay and his followers held that only agriculture yields a net surplus and urged free trade in grain and a single tax on land. Their Tableau économique was the first diagram of an economy’s flows between classes.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776)

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations founded classical political economy. Smith argued that the division of labour, extended by markets, is the source of rising productivity, and attacked the mercantile system of trade restrictions.

Malthus on Population (1798–1820)

Thomas Robert Malthus argued that population tends to outgrow the food supply, keeping most people near subsistence. His later Principles of Political Economy questioned whether demand would always be sufficient to absorb output.

Say’s Treatise & Say’s Law (1803)

Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité d’économie politique popularised Smith on the Continent while emphasising utility and the entrepreneur. He is best known for the law of markets, which holds that production creates the means to purchase other production.

Ricardo’s Principles (1815–1817)

David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation gave classical economics its most rigorous form. He developed the theory of comparative advantage, differential rent and a labour theory of value, and opposed the Corn Laws.

Friedrich List’s National System (1841)

Friedrich List’s The National System of Political Economy argued that late-developing nations need temporary tariff protection to build industries able to compete with Britain. He drew on American experience and inspired later developmental states.

J. S. Mill’s Principles (1848)

John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy was the leading economics textbook for half a century. It synthesised Ricardian economics with a reforming liberalism open to cooperatives, inheritance taxes and the improvement of workers’ conditions.

Marx’s Capital (1867–1894)

Karl Marx’s Das Kapital offered a critique of political economy that extended the classical labour theory of value into a theory of exploitation. Volumes II and III were edited by Friedrich Engels after Marx’s death.

Marginal Revolution (1871)

In 1871 William Stanley Jevons in England and Carl Menger in Austria independently argued that value depends on marginal utility rather than labour cost. With Léon Walras they launched neoclassical economics.

Walras & General Equilibrium (1874–1906)

Léon Walras’s Elements of Pure Economics modelled the whole economy as a system of simultaneous supply and demand equations. His successor at Lausanne, Vilfredo Pareto, recast welfare analysis in terms of ordinal preferences.

Austrian School & Methodenstreit (1883–1896)

Menger’s defence of abstract theory against Gustav Schmoller’s German Historical School sparked the Methodenstreit, a bitter dispute over economic method. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk extended Austrian theory to capital and interest and attacked Marx.

Marshall’s Principles (1890)

Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics fused marginal utility with cost of production in the familiar supply-and-demand diagram. It defined the toolkit of partial-equilibrium analysis and made economics a professional academic discipline.

Veblen & Institutional Economics (1898–1899)

Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class satirised the consumption habits of the rich and founded American institutional economics. He criticised neoclassical theory for ignoring habits, institutions and evolution.

Socialist Calculation Debate (1920–1940)

Ludwig von Mises argued that without market prices for capital goods a socialist planner could not calculate rationally. Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner replied with models of market socialism, and the debate shaped later thinking on prices and information.

The Great Depression (1929–1939)

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was followed by the deepest downturn in industrial history. Bank failures, deflation and collapsing trade discredited the self-correcting view of markets and transformed economic policy.

Keynes’s General Theory (1936)

John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money argued that economies can remain stuck with mass unemployment because of insufficient aggregate demand. It founded modern macroeconomics and justified active fiscal policy.

Schumpeter & Creative Destruction (1911–1942)

Joseph Schumpeter placed the innovating entrepreneur at the heart of capitalist dynamics. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy he described capitalism as a process of “creative destruction” that renews itself by destroying old industries.

Game Theory (1944–1950)

John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior analysed strategic interaction mathematically. John Nash’s equilibrium concept made game theory the central language of microeconomics.

Hayek & the Use of Knowledge (1944–1947)

Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom warned that central planning leads toward tyranny. His 1945 essay on knowledge recast the price system as a mechanism for communicating dispersed information.

Bretton Woods System (1944–1971)

Delegates from 44 Allied nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 to design the postwar monetary order. They created the IMF and the World Bank and fixed exchange rates to a dollar convertible into gold.

Samuelson & the Neoclassical Synthesis (1947–1955)

Paul Samuelson recast economics in mathematical form and, through his best-selling textbook, combined Keynesian macroeconomics with neoclassical microeconomics. This “neoclassical synthesis” dominated the postwar profession.

Development Economics (1943–1958)

Decolonisation made the poverty of newly independent nations a central concern. Economists such as W. Arthur Lewis, Raúl Prebisch and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan argued that deliberate policy was needed to move labour and capital into modern industry.

Arrow–Debreu General Equilibrium (1951–1959)

Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu proved that, under specific conditions, a set of prices clearing all markets exists. Their work, along with the welfare theorems, gave Walras’s vision a rigorous mathematical footing.

Solow Growth Model (1956–1957)

Robert Solow’s model of economic growth showed that capital accumulation alone cannot sustain growth in output per worker. His growth accounting attributed most of the long-run rise in US productivity to technical change.

Phillips Curve (1958–1960)

A. W. Phillips found an inverse relationship between unemployment and the rate of change of money wages in Britain. Policymakers soon read it as a menu of trade-offs between inflation and unemployment.

Friedman & Monetarism (1962–1968)

Milton Friedman led a monetarist counter-revolution against Keynesian fine-tuning. With Anna Schwartz he blamed the Great Depression on Federal Reserve policy, and he predicted the breakdown of the Phillips-curve trade-off.

Efficient-Market Hypothesis (1965–1981)

Eugene Fama’s efficient-market hypothesis held that asset prices fully reflect available information, so no one can consistently beat the market. It became the foundation of modern finance and of index investing — and a prime target after bubbles.

Nixon Shock & Floating Rates (1971–1973)

On 15 August 1971 President Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, ending the Bretton Woods system. By 1973 the major currencies were floating against each other.

Rational Expectations Revolution (1961–1982)

Building on John Muth’s idea that expectations are model-consistent, Robert Lucas, Thomas Sargent and others rebuilt macroeconomics on optimising agents. They questioned whether systematic policy could fool people into higher output.

Stagflation & the Volcker Shock (1973–1982)

The 1973 oil embargo and loose monetary policy produced simultaneous high inflation and unemployment, which the simple Phillips curve said should not happen. Paul Volcker’s Federal Reserve broke inflation with sharply higher interest rates.

Kahneman & Tversky’s Prospect Theory (1974–1979)

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky documented systematic departures from rational choice. Prospect theory, published in Econometrica in 1979, became the founding text of behavioural economics.

Thaler & Behavioral Economics (1980–2017)

Richard Thaler brought psychological findings into mainstream economics through concepts such as the endowment effect and mental accounting. His work on “nudges” influenced government policy design worldwide.

Amartya Sen on Famines & Capabilities (1981–1999)

Amartya Sen showed that famines result from collapses in people’s entitlements to food rather than simply from lack of food. His capability approach redefined development as the expansion of people’s real freedoms.

Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (1975–1992)

Hyman Minsky argued that stability breeds instability: calm periods encourage ever riskier borrowing until the financial system becomes fragile. Long neglected, his ideas were widely revisited after 2007.

Washington Consensus (1989–2002)

John Williamson’s term summarised ten policy reforms favoured by Washington institutions for Latin America: fiscal discipline, liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation. It became shorthand for market-oriented structural adjustment and a target of critics after the crises of the 1990s.

Randomised Trials & the Credibility Revolution (1994–2021)

From the 1990s economists increasingly relied on natural experiments and randomised controlled trials to identify causal effects. Field experiments on poverty, led by J-PAL, earned the 2019 Nobel prize.

Global Financial Crisis (2007–2010)

The collapse of the US housing bubble and the mortgage-backed securities built on it triggered the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Governments and central banks responded with bailouts, near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing.

Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (2013–2014)

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century used centuries of tax data to trace the distribution of income and wealth. It argued that when returns on capital exceed growth, wealth concentrates — and became an unlikely bestseller.

Modern Monetary Theory (1990s–2020)

Modern Monetary Theory holds that a government issuing its own fiat currency cannot be forced to default in that currency, so its real constraint is inflation rather than financing. Developed in the 1990s, it gained wide attention in late-2010s US policy debates.

Compiled from public sources; summaries for illustration