Thomas Mun

English businessman Thomas Mun (1571–1641) represents early mercantile policy in his book England's Treasure by Foraign Trade.

According to Mun, trade was the only way to increase England's treasure (i.e., national wealth) and in pursuit of this end he suggested several courses of action. Important were frugal consumption to increase the amount of goods available for export, increased utilisation of land and other domestic natural resources to reduce import requirements, lowering of export duties on goods produced domestically from foreign materials, and the export of goods with inelastic demand because more money could be made from higher prices.

Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith, the father of modern political economy.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) is popularly seen as the father of modern political economy. that allowed more wealth to be created on a larger scale than ever before. Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher, whose first book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). He argued in it that people's ethical systems develop through personal relations with other individuals, that right and wrong are sensed through others' reactions to one's behaviour. This gained Smith more popularity than his next work, The Wealth of Nations, which the general public initially ignored.^[25] Yet Smith's political economic magnum opus was successful in circles that mattered.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-20