Economists & Economic Thought Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which British-born economist won the 1991 Nobel for two spare, argument-driven articles: one asking why firms exist at all rather than everything being bought and sold between individuals, and one on how parties can bargain their way around spillover harms if rights are clear?

Question 2

What is the name for the school, associated with Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, that treats the quantity of money as the main determinant of nominal income and the price level, and blames big swings in the economy on unstable growth of the money supply?

Question 3

Which caustic American economist of Norwegian farming stock coined the phrase conspicuous consumption in an 1899 book, arguing that the rich buy costly goods precisely to display that they can, and that others imitate them?

Question 4

What is the name, coined by the economist John Williamson in 1989, for a list of ten free-market policy reforms, fiscal discipline, tax reform, floating interest rates, trade and investment liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, that the IMF, World Bank and US Treasury urged on developing countries?

Question 5

What is the name for the influential group of economists at one American university, including Friedman, Stigler, Becker, Coase and Lucas, marked by faith in rational agents and efficient markets, deep scepticism of regulation, and a willingness to apply price theory to crime, marriage and discrimination?

Question 6

Which American economic historian shared the 1993 Nobel for reshaping the study of long-run growth around institutions, the formal rules and informal norms that lower the cost of doing business and that, once set, tend to persist and shape a country's path for centuries?

Question 7

What is the name for the tradition, running from Thorstein Veblen and John Commons to modern figures like Douglass North and Elinor Ostrom, that insists the rules of the game, laws, customs, property rights, firms, courts, matter as much as prices in shaping economic life?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

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.