Wealth has been the focus of almost all economic inquiry because most economic activity aims to produce wealth, if not for private, individual use, then for public consumption or for use as capital for further production. The idea of wealth has changed over time, however. In the early preclassical and the preclassical times, the wealth of states and countries was measured differently from how it is measured today. Before the industrial revolution had taken place, agriculture was the main mode of production, and the philosopher-economists and thinkers, unsurprisingly, thought about wealth in terms of agricultural output and costs of production. Scholasticism was a movement led by priests and members of the church, who wrote and published many pamphlets and books about combining the economic activity at the time with religious guidelines as set by the Bible. Private ownership of land and the accumulation of wealth went against the natural order set down by the Bible, which means that in the scholastic …show more content…
It was started in France, by Francois Quesnay, but its influence did not spread to other European countries. It started while mercantilism was still developing across Europe, and if we look closely at the framework of the physiocratic writings, we can see how it was influenced by mercantilism. The skeletons of both the thoughts are similar but their components are different. For example, both pushed for a trade surplus through an increase in production, but while the mercantilists focused on the bullion that resulted from this, the physiocrats tried to trace it back to its origin and hence find the organic point at which wealth was created. The physiocrats talked about natural wealth, i.e., agricultural output and believed that besides agriculture, all other sectors of the economy were sterile. The surplus in the physiocratic “world” was termed net product and could only be agricultural