From Adam Smith to the 2020 Crisis: A History of Economic Thought

This paper reconstructs the history of modern economic thought as a sequence of shifting central problems—from development (Smith), to value (Ricardo and Marx), to price and allocation (neoclassical theory), to coordination failures (game theory and modern microeconomics), and finally to macroeconomic crises (Keynes, rational expectations, and the 2008 and 2020 shocks). The central argument is that economic theory converges toward a common conclusion: the economy is fundamentally a problem of coordination under institutional rules. When this insight is fully developed, it leads to a unifying framework—the Economics of Belonging—which conceptualizes economic performance as dependent on the reliability of institutions and the degree to which agents belong to a stable social and economic order. The paper integrates microeconomics, macroeconomics, and growth theory into a single institutional framework, offering a novel interpretation of crises as rational responses to deteriorating institutional expectations, and of growth as contingent on institutional structures that orient investment toward frontier technologies and dynamic markets.