The Economic Mind

Every conversation about the economy (inflation, deficits, tariffs, inequality, climate policy, AI and jobs) rests on assumptions that come from a particular school of economic thought. Most speakers do not know which school. Most listeners do not either. That is the reason economics feels harder than it should.

The Economic Mind is the book that opens up the arguments.

In thirty-five short, plain-English chapters, Jordan Cole walks through the great economic thinkers from Adam Smith in 1776 to Kate Raworth in 2017, and the contemporary debates their ideas continue to shape. Each chapter presents one thinker (or one school) on its own terms, identifies the strongest objections, and shows how the framework applies to the policy questions of today.

You will meet:

• Adam Smith - the moral philosopher behind the invisible hand
• Ricardo, Malthus, and Mill - the classical economists who built the discipline
• Karl Marx - the critic working from inside the classical framework
• Jevons, Menger, and Walras - the marginalist revolution that replaced labor value with marginal utility
• John Maynard Keynes - the response to the Great Depression that still shapes macroeconomic policy
• Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman - the counter-revolution that reshaped central banking
• Ronald Coase, Elinor Ostrom, and the institutionalists - markets, firms, commons, and rules
• George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz - what asymmetric information does to markets
• Amartya Sen - development as freedom, and the capability framework
• Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler - what behavioral economics changed
• Thomas Piketty, Daron Acemoglu, Mariana Mazzucato, and Kate Raworth - the modern frontier