Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, economics was different from how it is today. Many famous people had thought about economics, including Adam Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and others. Economics was not a perfect science, and lots of people who thought about economics disagreed. But in the last century, economists started to agree about two things: economics should become as mathematical as it possibly could, and politicians should listen to economists. Economics at the time was not a very mathematical science, at least compared to the way it is today. Economists used to write articles with very few equations, or even without any equations at all. When did economists start to use math more? The beginnings might have been toward the end of the 180082;s, with some economists named Jevons, Menger, and Walras. But a person who was particularly important was Paul Samuelson. He comes into the story later.
In the 192082;s and 193082;s, there lived a great economist named John Maynard Keynes who came up with new ideas about economics. Many people thought that they made a lot of sense...
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