Malthus, Poor Laws, and the Labor Market Debate

At the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution, a new academic field emerged: Economics. (Well, something called “Political Economy” anyway.)  But centuries of economic thought had to be supplanted first.In this Chapter, we review some of the ideas that permeated Europe leading up to the Industrial Revolutions. We’ll discuss the works of Plato and Aristotle, the Scholastics, the Mercantilists, Quesnay and the Physiocrats, Galiani, Beccaria, Verri, and of course, Thomas Robert Malthus.