The Three Great Thinkers who changed economics timeline

Several major changes were set in motion around 1500. Overseas trade established new networks and boosted collective learning and commercialization. Globally-traded currency created an easy way to trade goods and store wealth. Individual markets, once places to buy and sell physical goods, began to merge into the market system.

By the 1600s and 1700s, both custom and command were weakening.

When the Scotsman Adam Smith (1723–1790) was born, industrialization and a profitdriven market system were replacing custom and command-driven economic systems across Europe. Smith studied in Glasgow, Scotland, and Oxford, England. He had many jobs: professor and lecturer, private tutor to the children of European royalty, government economic adviser, and customs commissioner for Scotland. This gave him a comprehensive understanding of economics. His ideas are captured most powerfully in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, usually known as The Wealth of Nations.

These changes reflected an intellectual shift toward rationality, progress, liberty, and secularism — generally referred to as the Enlightenment.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was born in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, into a middleclass family in Prussia. He led an eventful life: He was jailed for public drunkenness as a college student. His home and personal appearance were unkempt. He spent money frivolously, causing his family to frequently live on the brink of poverty. For most of his professional life, Marx was a writer for a variety of liberal, radical, and foreign newspapers. He moved between Prussia, France, Belgium, and England because he was continually blacklisted or deported for his radical views.

Marx and his frequent co-author, Friedrich Engels, were outraged at the hardships faced by the working classes of industrial European cities. They channeled this anger into monumental written works that formed the basis of modern communism one of which included The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848

Marx and his frequent co-author, Friedrich Engels, were outraged at the hardships faced by the working classes of industrial European cities. They channeled this anger into monumental written works that formed the basis of modern communism one of which included a four-volume, 2500 page work, Das Kapital, published in 1867

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946, last name rhymes with “rains”) was born into an educated family. During his life, he worked in academia, economic publishing, private financial advising and management, currency speculation, and as an official in the British Treasury.

John Maynard Keynes, was highly influential in confronting the dilemmas of capitalism in the early twentieth century.

As a call to action, Marxism was most influential in the twentieth century, when it inspired various brands of revolutionary activity. This includes the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the rise of communist governments in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, as well as in many Eastern European and African nations. It has since fizzled out, with the U.S.S.R. collapsing in the early 1990s, China shifting toward a market-friendly economy, and smaller communist countries that depended on them adopting more market-oriented systems.