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Economic Thinkers and the Terms Named After Their Ideas
General awareness papers treat economics partly as a who-said-what subject. A question gives a book, a phrase or a model and asks for the thinker, or it gives a word such as stagflation and asks what it means. Neither needs graphs or calculation, only clean pairings.
The pairings fall into three groups. First, the classical and modern thinkers: Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and Amartya Sen. Second, the Indian contributors whose ideas shaped planning: Dadabhai Naoroji, M. Visvesvaraya and P. C. Mahalanobis. Third, a set of terms that describe the state of an economy, such as recession, depression, deflation and disinflation, plus two named ideas, the Laffer curve and Gresham's law.
Most errors come from mixing up neighbours: Smith with Ricardo, Visvesvaraya with Mahalanobis, deflation with disinflation. This short separates each pair with one sharp marker.
1. The idea of the 'invisible hand' of the market is associated with:
2. Who wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)?
3. Who wrote the book Planned Economy for India (1934)?
4. Disinflation refers to:
5. Stagflation is a situation of:
6. Gresham's law states that:
7. The Laffer curve shows the relationship between:
8. The capability approach, which judges development by what people are actually able to do and be, is associated with: