Women and economics

a study of the economic relation between women and men

Women and Economics is Gilman's most original and famous work of nonfiction. In it she examines the origins of women's subordination and its function in society. Woman, she argues, makes a living by marriage - not by the work she does - and thus man ...

Theories of surplus value

books I, II and III

Marx's Theories of Surplus Value is the fourth volume of his monumental Das Kapital (Capital) and is now available exclusively from Prometheus and Humanity Books. Divided into three parts, this lengthy work reviews classic economic analyses of labor and value (Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and ...

Principles of political economic

The standard economics textbook for more than a generation, John Stuart Mill's "Principles of Political Economy" (1848) was really as much a synthesis of his predecessors' ideas as it was an original economic treatise. Heavily influenced by the work of David Ricardo, and also ...

An essay on the principle of population

English economist and professor Thomas R. Malthus (1766-1834) caused great public controversy among the optimistic positivitists of his day when his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) showed incontrovertibly that population, when unchecked, tends to increase faster than the availability of subsistence. Therefore preventive ...

Freedom of thought

a history

Most people who live in open societies, especially in the West, take freedom of thought and the right to express that thought for granted. But through most of history, independent thinking, outside of the framework of social or religious convention, was discouraged and often actively ...

The end of Laissez Faire

the economic consecuences of the peace

In THE END OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE (1926), Keynes presents a brief historical review of laissez-faire economic policy. Though he agrees in principle that the marketplace should be free of government interference, he suggests that government can play a constructive role in protecting individuals from the worst ...

Money, credit and commerce

Extraordinary Popular Delusions

and the madness of crowds

More than a century before Alan Greenspan coined the phrase "irrational exuberance" to describe the speculative bubble inflating technology stocks, Charles Mackay was recording the history of "tulipomania," a speculative madness surrounding the value of tulips in the 18th century that was the ruin of ...

The Theory of the leisure class

Principles of economics

British economist Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) was one of the founders of the 'neoclassical' school in which economists studied both wealth and human behaviour to understand why we make the choices we do. First published in 1890, "Principles of Economics" stands as Marshall's most influential ...

The general theory of employment, interest, and money

The principles of political economy and taxation

The wealth of nations

Political economy had been studied long before Adam Smith. But Wealth of Nations (1776) established it for the first time as a separate science. Smith based his arguments on vast historical knowledge, and developed his principles with remarkable clarity. What set this work apart was ...