The Philosophy Of Economics
Who will take up the mantle as the next great economic philosopher?
I’ve been reading a book called The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner and it’s one of the more profound books I’ve ever read. To most of us, economics is a dreary subject that belongs to banks and academics. It’s an endless deluge of noisy data and it’s very hard to look past that noise and understand the “so what, why should I care?”
That’s a shame because economics wasn’t always so technical and dry. At one point economics was steeped in history, wisdom, and philosophy — it was all about the why and the so what. Economists sought to understand several things:
- How a capitalist economic system worked.
- The long-term consequences of capitalism, both good and bad.
- How those consequences impacted society, a.k.a. people.
- And how to overcome the existential issues that if left untreated threatened to being down said capitalist system.
Why the focus on capitalism? It’s easy to forget thanks to how pervasive it is, but capitalism only started a few hundred years ago. Prior to that, feudalism was the dominant economic system where the aristocratic elite owned everything — including both the land and the people that lived on and…
