1. Explain the common interest that bound the worldly philosophers under a single heading. 2. Contrast the family and educational backgrounds of Thorstein Veblen, David Ricardo, Joseph Schumpeter, and John Maynard Keynes. 3. Explain how economists such as Paul Samuelson and John Kenneth Galbraith can evolve economic theories that oppose […]

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Age of Enlightenment A period (roughly 1700-89) when political, economic, and social thought was dominated by an optimistic faith in reason and in the progress of the human race. The Age of Exploration and Discovery (l5th-l7th centuries) — an era which provided natural wealth from the colonies in the form […]

Read more Study Help Full Glossary for The Worldly Philosophers

A summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Harvard, Robert Louis Heilbroner (born 1919) is an influential economist and prolific writer, reviewer, consultant, and lecturer. Raised in luxury and educated at private schools, he claims to have patterned his liberal economic views after the family chauffeur, who served as […]

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Summary The concluding chapter addresses the achievement of economists as a whole. How useful have their writings been in interpreting actual events? Has prediction been the economist’s aim? Is this undertaking a worthy endeavor? Among the economists described in the book, John Stuart Mill came closest to functioning as an […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 11 – Behind the Worldly Philosophy

Summary Unlike Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx in the previous century, John Maynard Keynes looked forward to better times for capitalism in the twenty-first century. In his Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, he predicted that by the year 2030, the age-old problem of equal distribution of wealth might be solved. […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 10 – The Contradictions of Joseph Schumpeter

Summary Veblen died a few months before the “Great Crash” of 1929 — when stock values reached an all-time high before tumbling down. There were no official warnings that such a financial catastrophe could occur. In fact, quite the contrary. Prosperity was everywhere, from President Hoover down to the lowly […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 9 – The Heresies of John Maynard Keynes

Summary As the full effects of the Industrial Revolution spread from Europe to America, the free enterprise atmosphere of the United States became a far different thing from the European practice of laissez faire. The game of making money in the United States was rough and savage, devoid of sportsmanship. […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 8 – The Savage Society of Thorstein Veblen

Introduction Karl Marx’s prediction that the working class would suffer increasing misery did not come to pass during the Victorian Age (the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901), for wages climbed upward while the working day grew shorter. Even Marx and Engels were forced to admit that the English proletariat was […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 7 – The Victorian World and the Underworld of Economics

Summary In 1848, the threat of revolution was everywhere. The French endured a weak, dissolute king before fomenting riots; the Belgians likewise found no strength in royal leadership. Uprisings in Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria imitated the unrest of the French. The songs of workers and the poems of romanticists […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 6 – The Inexorable System of Karl Marx

Introduction “Gloomy” describes not only the future described by Malthus and Ricardo, but also the actual world of England in the 1820s. On the Continent, the nation had triumphed in the long struggle against Napoleon, but at home it wallowed in social evils brought on by the factory system. By […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 5 – The Visions of the Utopian Socialists