Economists & Economic Thought Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which American economist won the 2017 Nobel for bringing psychological realism into economic analysis, with ideas such as mental accounting, a reluctance to give up things we already own, and a lack of self-control that people themselves recognise?

Question 2

What is the name for the hydraulic computer, about two metres tall, built in 1949 by a New Zealand engineer-turned-economist, in which coloured water flowing through transparent tanks and pipes represents the circulation of money, income, saving, taxation and trade in a national economy?

Question 3

What is the name for the mainstream tradition running from Adam Smith in 1776 through Ricardo, Malthus and John Stuart Mill to about 1870, built on free markets, free trade, the labour theory of value and the belief that the economy is self-correcting?

Question 4

Which American economist shared the 2001 Nobel for showing how markets work badly when one side of a deal knows much more than the other, for instance a borrower about their own riskiness or a seller about a product's faults?

Question 5

Which Indian economist and philosopher, winner of the 1998 Nobel, showed that famines can happen with food still in the markets, because particular groups lose the means to buy it, and built an approach to development around expanding people's real freedoms and capabilities?

Question 6

Which American economist, the best-known figure of the Chicago School, insisted that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, that the money supply should grow at a slow steady rate, and that there is a natural rate of unemployment below which stimulus only raises prices?

Question 7

Which 1919 book, written in fury after its author resigned from the British delegation at the Versailles peace conference, argued that the reparations and territorial terms imposed on defeated Germany were vindictive and unpayable, and would wreck the European economy and breed a dangerous backlash?

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About Economists & Economic Thought

This quiz is about the people who built economics and the ideas they are remembered for. Eighty questions, each describing an economist, a landmark book, a school of thought or a concept tied to a named thinker, and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it.

The first pack is the front rank: Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations, Ricardo and comparative advantage, Malthus on population, Marx and Capital, Keynes and The General Theory, Hayek, Friedman, Marshall, Mill, Veblen, Schumpeter, Amartya Sen and Paul Samuelson, closing with the economics Nobel, which Alfred Nobel never actually founded.

The second pack is the schools and the wider cast: mercantilism and the physiocrats, the classical and neoclassical mainstreams, the Keynesian, monetarist, Austrian and Chicago traditions, supply-side economics, von Mises and the calculation problem, Bentham, Say, the Keynes and Hayek clash, Krugman, Stiglitz, Becker, Coase, Solow, Kuznets, Leontief, Kahneman, Thaler, Ostrom and Piketty, and the ideas of surplus value, animal spirits, the paradox of thrift, Ricardian equivalence, the Lucas critique, efficient markets, New Keynesian economics, Modern Monetary Theory, Galbraith, Walras, the Marginal Revolution and Pareto.

The third pack leans toward Indian and development economics: Kautilya's Arthashastra, Naoroji's drain theory, Ambedkar the economist, Manmohan Singh and the 1991 reforms, the Hindu rate of growth, the Mahalanobis plan, Myrdal, Arthur Lewis, the Lorenz and Kuznets curves, the water-powered MONIAC, Say's law, the commanding heights, institutional economics, Douglass North, Why Nations Fail, randomised trials, human capital, Gross National Happiness and the Washington Consensus.

It ranges from the 18th century to living Nobel laureates and, in the third pack, gives full weight to Indian and development thinkers rather than treating them as a footnote. Some ideas that also appear in Economics Fundamentals, comparative advantage, the multiplier, the Phillips curve, creative destruction, are handled there as concepts and here as the work of a named person, so the two quizzes complement rather than repeat each other.

The wrong answers are always other economists, works, schools or ideas of the same kind, so a real grasp is rewarded and a guess is quickly exposed. Where the answer is one of several books by a single thinker, that thinker's portrait appears, since it fits every option equally and cannot point to one; elsewhere a neutral photograph, a trading floor, an exchange, a banknote, coins, a ship, a central bank, sits behind the question without giving anything away. No prior study is assumed; the descriptions do the teaching. Definitions and attributions have been checked against standard reference works.