Saturday, December 12, 2020

Poor Richard Goes to London: The Economic Ideas of Benjamin Franklin


Another episode of my podcast on The Worldly Philosophers Go to Washington: From Alexander Hamilton to Janet Yellen. The ideas of early classical political economists and their influence in America are analyzed in this episode. The role of Sir William Petty’s ideas in the development of Benjamin Franklin’s early policy proposals is discussed. It is noted how Franklin had a firm grasp of the main economic theories of his time, even before some of these ideas were fully developed in Europe, by the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. In fact, some of Franklin’s original ideas influenced European political economists. The notion that the influence of economics is a recent phenomenon cannot be supported by the evidence.

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