Department of Politics and Economics, Ankara University
2025-2026 Academic Year, Spring Term Course
Lecturer & TA Information
- Altuğ Yalçıntaş
- Mail: altug.yalcintas[at]politics.ankara.edu.tr
- Personal Site
- Office Hours: Appointments only
- Suay Tosyalı
- Mail: suaytosyali[at]gmail.com
- Personal Site
- Çağıl Derköken
- Mail: derkoken_cagil[at]icloud.com
- Personal Site
This course is based on the simple claim that the newest idea in economics is not necessarily the best idea ever. Since the sixteenth century, economists have expressed many ideas that are better than the ideas that economists express today. In other words, economic ideas evolve and the evolution of economic ideas does not always give rise to the more powerful explanations of the economy.
To be able to understand the evolutionary nature of economic ideas, we will aim to answer the following questions:
- What was the significance of the Economic Revolution that took place in the sixteenth century?
- What were the unique features of the Mercantile era?
- What did the Classical Political Economists of the nineteenth century argue?
- How did the Marginal Revolution and Neo-Classical School transform the methodology of economic science in the twentieth century?
- What is the use of contemporary evolutionary thinking for the history of (economic) ideas? Doing all this, we will question the established view in the historiography of economics that the history of economic ideas is a linear assembly of a number of successive theories and abstract / mathematical models.
We will argue that economic science has been a part of the intellectual history where we should consider the philosophical background of each “worldly philosopher” in order to understand what they really said properly.
Midterm Exam: 40% of the final grade
Final Exam: 60% of the final grade
Readings
Robert L. Heilbroner. 1953 [1995]. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. New York: Touchstone.
Conversations with AI Historian. Trainer: Altuğ Yalçıntaş. Links to be provided each week.
Watchings
Robert Skidelsky. 2019. How and How Not to Do Economics. The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) Series. Freely available online at: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/videos/how-and-how-not-to-do-economics
Listentings
Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak, Gerardo Serra, and Scott Scheall. 2019. Smith and Marx Walk Into a Bar: A History of Economics Podcast. Freely available online at: https://hetpodcast.libsyn.com
| Week No | Topic Name | File Link |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Overview | Link |
| Week 2 | Thomas Malthus | Link |
| Week 3 | The Theory of Path Dependence | Link |
| Week 4 | Definition of Economics | Link |
| Week 5 | Reformation and Protestantism | Link |
| Week 6 | Physiocracy | Link |
| Week 7 | Mercantilism | Link |
| Week 8 | Adam Smith | Link |
| Week 9 | David Ricardo | Link |
| Week 10 | Karl Marx | Link |
| Week 11 | The Marginal Revolution | Link |
| Week 12 | Thorstein Veblen | Link |
| Week 13 | Turkish History of Economic Ideas | Link |