Great Economists: Classical Economics and Its Forerunners (Marginal Revolution University)

Many current policy arguments are old ones in new clothes, and this course shows where they started. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok cover economic thought up to the 1870s, from forerunners such as Cantillon, Quesnay and Hume, through a video for each chapter of The Wealth of Nations, to Malthus, Ricardo, Bastiat and John Stuart Mill. Ricardo on trade and Malthus on population are worth the time before reading any modern debate on tariffs or demographic decline, because both arguments, and the standard replies to them, are already here. It pairs well with the Clark lectures: one traces the ideas, the other what actually happened to living standards.