Economists & Economic Thought Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the concept, at the heart of Marx's economics, for the gap between the value a worker creates during the working day and the smaller value of the wages paid for that day's labour power?

Question 2

What is the name for the Keynesian idea that if everyone tries to save a larger share of their income at the same time, total spending falls, incomes fall with it, and the community may end up saving no more than before, or even less?

Question 3

Which British economist, a member of the Bloomsbury circle and a successful investor, argued in a 1936 book that an economy can settle for years at high unemployment because there is simply too little total spending, and that governments should then borrow and spend to fill the gap?

Question 4

What is the name for the award, first given in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen, that was not established by Alfred Nobel himself but endowed in 1968 by the central bank of Sweden and administered alongside the original prizes?

Question 5

Which Russian-born American economist won the 1971 Nobel and is credited with building the modern system of national income accounting, effectively turning a country's total output into a single measured statistic?

Question 6

Which tall, witty Canadian-American economist and Kennedy adviser argued in a 1958 book that rich societies pour resources into private consumer goods while starving public services, a mismatch he summed up as private opulence and public squalor?

Question 7

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?

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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.