♪[Music]♪
Hi, this is Tyler Cowen, 
and welcome to our class on
The Great Economists.
Why study the great economists at all?
Why be interested in the history 
of economic thought?
Well, first of all, it turns out 
that they knew a lot of things
that we still don't.
Reading them is an enlightening 
experience.
Furthermore, history repeats itself.
We find for instance that during 
the great recession,
a lot of contemporary economists 
made mistakes
that their forerunners had made 
centuries ago.
By knowing more history 
of economic thought,
we can hope to avoid 
such kinds of mistakes.
Earlier thinkers for the most part 
did development economics
because back then, no nations 
were wealthy by modern standards.
If you ask what is today the hottest 
and most exciting area in economics,
well, it's development economics too, 
so let's go back
and look at where that came from.
Earlier economists also give us 
a different perspective on what we know.
It's not just that they knew 
different things
but they give us a deeper sense 
of what we think we already understand,
but maybe really don't quite.
The history of economic thought 
is also a window
for understanding history more generally.
What better way to learn history 
than to see
what did some of the smartest people 
at that time think was going on.
In our coverage, we go 
as far back as Galileo,
who's mostly known as an astronomer, 
but who also wrote on the theory of value.
We have extensive coverage of Adam Smith.
In fact, we have a video 
for every single chapter
in the wealth of nations, 
covering that book in its entirety.
That's probably the best economics book 
ever written,
but if that's too much Adam Smith for you,
well, you can pick and choose,
or just watch Alex's 
single video overview
on Adam Smith and Economic Growth.
Finally what we've done so far 
as of early 2013,
it goes up only 
to the Marginal Revolution of 1871.
So most of this class is what's called 
classical economics
and a bit also on mercantilism, 
and you can think of this as,
what did economics look like 
before modern economics got underway?
One thing we don't cover in this class 
is Karl Marx,
and Marxian economics more generally.
We do think this is very important, 
but in our view,
it actually deserves its own class and we 
hope to be supplying that in the future.
We have videos not only 
on the great thinkers themselves,
but on many of the most important 
policy debates of their time.
And that includes the debates 
over living standards
in the industrial revolution, 
numerous debates on monetary policy,
and also debates on taxes and debt.
Does that sound familiar?
Well, those are still some of the major 
debates today.
One thing great about doing
history of thought
is just how many of the original 
source materials
are available online and for free.
And we give you instructions 
for Googling to these materials
of course and to the authors 
name and title.
But, when you have a choice of sources,
we think the single best source 
on the web
for history of economic thought 
is something called,
the Online Library of Liberty, 
that's produced by Liberty Fund,
and you'll find it at this website, 
and of course,
Google will bring you there too.
With all that, lets get going 
and lets open ourselves up to
many more economic ideas.
