Smith was both extending and breaking with the analysis of the Physiocrats, political economists of eighteenth-century France who believed that the natural productivity of the land, set in motion by agriculture, was the origin of all wealth. For them, surplus value--the "additional" value produced between input and output in a production process--was possible only as a gift from nature. Their policy conclusion was logical if agriculture was the source of the surplus upon which the state and all society depended, then anything that hindered it (taxes, trade restrictions, etc.) was bad.

The term "neoclassical" with respect to economics was coined in 1900 by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, the same person who first discussed "conspicuous consumption".

In fact, the well-known neoclassical doctrine that "without interference" markets will function perfectly (or "clear") is also known as "demand theory".

The Jevonian revolution definitively ended the hold of "who gets what," class-based analysis in orthodox economics, and instead consecrated the individual "consumer" as the unit of analysis.

The idea that those relative prices can find a system-wide equilibrium is the heart of the neoclassical theory of value, a theory often called "Walrasian"

Keynes called this propensity to hold assets in money form "liquidity preference," "liquidity" being the ease with which an asset can be readily monetized, i.e., exchanged for money. So if "liquidity preference" is high, it suggests people feel insecure or uncertain

"Monetarism" is the name given to the influential but failed attempt on the part of the neoclassically inspired monetary authorities, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, to control money markets--and therefore the value of money--from the supply side.

if the labour market ever worked the way neoclassical theory imagines it--if wages were flexible, Say's Law held, and all willing workers found jobs in some orthodox "full employment" dream--then workers would have no fear of "the sack."

Most states issue both "government bonds" [...] and "sovereign bonds"

we will assume a "zero-coupon" bond, meaning that all the investment risk is calculated into the difference between par value ($100,000) and the discount Brazil must offer to attract investors