IM|Sciences.net

Economic issues have occupied people’s minds throughout theages. Aristotle and Plato in ancient Greece wrote about problems of wealth,property, and trade. Both were prejudiced against ommerce, feeling that to live by trade was undesirable. The Romans borrowed their economic ideas from the Greeks and showed the same contempt for trade. During the middle Ages the economic ideas of the Roman Catholic Church were expressed in the canon law, which condemned usury (the taking of interest for money loaned) and regarded commerce as inferior to agriculture.

Economics as a subject of modern study, distinguishable from moral philosophy and politics, dates from the work, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), by the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith. Mercantilism and physiocracy were precursors of the classical economics of Smith and his 19th-century successors.