National Wealth Still Depends on Making Some Stuff

In general, modern-day economists tend to ignore old schools of economic thought. The main reason is that economists before World War II typically used words instead of mathematics. Another reason is that old, radical ideas are often assumed to have been discredited. For example, many economists now love to poke fun at the physiocrats. This was a group of French 18th-century economists who believed that only agriculture created national wealth. Their idea, coming on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, was spectacularly ill-timed. Today, with manufacturing and services accounting for the overwhelming majority of every advanced economy, it’s clear that the physiocrats’ thesis was incorrect. -- More...