Five Modern Economists

David Hume was a Scot, who lived from 1711 to 1776. His principal contribution to economics was his criticism of mercantilist principles. Mercantilism was a body of economic thought which developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To a great extent, it was concerned with the relationship between the welath of a country, and that country's balance of international trade (Baxter, 1985). Mercantilists also tended to equate national wealth with a country's gold bullion stock (Baxter, 1985).

Hume (1752) held two principal disagreements with mercantilist ideas. First, he disagreed, at least in part, with the mercantilist view that low wages were necessary to combat indolence among the working classes. While he thought that moderate taxes might be used appropriately, he thought the excessive taxes proposed by the mercantilists would destroy initiative.

A more important disagreement Hume had with mercantilism concerned the effect of specie accumulation on domestic prices, and international trade balances (Ekelund, and Hebert, 1983). Hume's quantity of money theory linked chnages in a country's gold stock (or silver stock) to (1) prices, (2) price changes, and (3) international tra

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is single concept, ideas related to imperfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, and oligopsony, and their potential effects on value, demand, and prices were derived by Marshall, and other economists who followed him (Schumpeter, 1954). Soule (1952, pp. 102103) said of Marshall that he "exercised a dominant influence over British economic throught during his maturity and for some time after his death." With his talents, Marshall "built on tradition, wove together contribuions from various schools, and constructed an intellectual house of many mansions where a large variety of opinions might feel at home" (Soule, 1952, p. 103). Marshall exerted an enormous influence on most of the economists which followed him. His influence on John Maymard Keynes, who was one of his students, and others resulted in the building of new, or extended, economic theory on Marshall's theoretical base (Reisman, 1987). Certainly not all economists who followed Marshall, however, agreed with his theoretical concepts. REFERENCES Baxter, R. E. Economic History. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1985. Blaug, M. Labor Theory of Value. New York: McGrawHill Book Company, 1982. Ekelund, R. B. Jr., and Hebert, R. F. A
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