Thomas Carlyle mocked economics as the dismal science in 1849
Economists have argued for centuries over what their own subject actually is. Adam Smith called it an inquiry into the wealth of nations, Alfred Marshall a study of ordinary life, and Lionel Robbins the science of choosing under scarcity. The historian Thomas Carlyle simply dubbed it the dismal science.
The name comes from the Greek oikonomia, the art of running a household, which is why economy can also mean thrift. Until the late 19th century the field was called political economy, extending household management to the running of a state. Today it studies how goods and services are produced, distributed and consumed, split between microeconomics, which looks at individual people, firms and markets, and macroeconomics, which looks at whole economies.
Definitions keep shifting. Jean-Baptiste Say in 1803 called it the science of producing, distributing and consuming wealth. Marshall's 1890 textbook described it as the study of how people earn their incomes and spend them. In 1932 Robbins framed it as the study of behaviour where scarce means have competing uses, now perhaps the most widely accepted version, though Nobel laureates James Buchanan and Ronald Coase preferred definitions based on subject matter. Gary Becker pushed the discipline into crime, the family and education by applying assumptions of maximising behaviour relentlessly.
Some historians call the Greek poet Hesiod the first economist for his reflections on scarce resources. Closer ancestors are the mercantilists, tied to the rise of economic nationalism, and the physiocrats, 18th-century French thinkers who imagined income and production cycling endlessly through society and believed only farming produced a true surplus.
Adam Smith criticised the mercantilists harshly but praised the physiocrats' system, flaws and all. His Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is often described as the real birth of economics as its own discipline. It named land, labour and capital as the factors of production and argued that dividing work into specialised tasks raises productivity and makes trade profitable, between town and country or between nations.
Source: Economics
