Classical Economics

Smith-to-Mill tradition of growth, value, and trade that made economics a self-standing discipline.

Specifications & Metrics

era

1776-1870s

founders

Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill

signature

Free trade, labor theory of value, self-regulating markets (1776)

Core Principles & Analysis

• Ricardo's rent theory made distribution a formal question with the corn model.
• Mill's Principles (1848) served as the standard English text for decades.
• Its labor theory of value was inherited, then rejected, by the marginal revolution.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Classical economics