A Short Course in Intermediate Microeconomics with Calculus

Economists study the economic problem. The nature of the economic problem, however, has changed over time. For the classical school of economists (including Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1823), Karl Marx (1818-1883), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)), the economic problem was to discover the laws which governed the production of goods and the distribution of goods among the different social classes: land owners, capitalists, workers. These laws were thought to be like natural laws or physical laws, similar to Newton’s law of gravitational attraction. Forces of history, and phenomena like the industrial revolution, produce “universal constants” which govern the production of goods and the distribution of wealth.