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[NOTE: Any responses or votes for others? One of the other major  
newspapers/magazines named Karl Marx the thinker of the  
millennium. -- RBE] 
 
The following article on the greatest economist of the millennium was 
published in the Canberra Times on January 4, 2000. It was a follow up to 
the article on the ten most important economists of the century published 
two weeks before. 
 
 
The Greatest Economist of the Millennium 
 
To choose the greatest economist of the past thousand years to some extent 
invites the question whether the study of economics has even existed over 
that span of time.  
 
Economic questions have certainly been matters of the deepest consideration 
for as long as humans have had commercial relations. Hammurabi's Code, the 
first recorded attempt at a written system of law, sought to fix prices. 
Aristotle's arguments against the charging of interest remained an obstacle 
to economic development for more than fifteen hundred years.  
 
But the actual attempt to isolate an economic system from within the 
on-going blur of events, and then make judgements about what ought to be 
done, is probably no older than the sixteenth century. It was not until 
then 
that the first pamphleteers attempted to understand the structure of the 
economies in which they lived and to persuade governments about the 
policies 
they ought to adopt. These were the ancestors of the economists of today. 
  
Who then was the greatest economist of the millennium? In my view it was 
John Stuart Mill (1806-73) whose great work, his Principles of Political 
Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, was first 
published in 1848. There were to be seven editions during Mill's life and 
it 
was used as a text, with few concerns about its antiquity, well into the 
twentieth century. 
 
The year of publication of Mill's Principles is one of the most significant 
in world history. It was the year of European revolution and in that year 
and for that reason Karl Marx (who is definitely not the runner up) 
published his Communist Manifesto. The contrasting visions of Marx and Mill 
were to reverberate down the succeeding years in a battle for the 
allegiance 
of the whole of the human race, a battle which has not ended even to this 
day.  
 
To Marx the unit of analysis was the economic class to which one belonged. 
To Mill, what mattered was the individual.  
 
The world of Marx was a world of class conflict in which the capitalist 
class, the owners of the means of production, exploited those who laboured 
but earned barely enough to keep alive.  
 
The world as seen by Mill was strangely similar to the one inhabited by 
Marx, but with a recognition that an economic system based on personal 
liberty was one in which even those ground down by the burdens of poverty 
could have their material wellbeing vastly improved and their political 
freedoms at the same time preserved.  
 
In one of the most remarkable passages ever written, listen to Mill's 
judgement on whether the world as he knew it, if it could not be made to 
change, was preferable to a system in which all property was communally 
held.  
 
"If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its 
chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and 
injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with 
it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we 
now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour ... if this or 
Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of 
Communism would be but as dust in the balance." 
 
The twentieth century has been a war of ideologies in which the rights of 
the individual have been crushed time and again by the dictates of the 
state. Both the Nazis and the Communist dictatorships ruthlessly suppressed 
human rights in the name of a higher truth.  
 
The cold war was fought over little more than the structure of the economic 
system. Massive damage was inflicted on large swaths of the world's 
political landscape due to the attempts made to turn collectivist economic 
theories into a living reality.  
 
Indeed, much of what is now called the third world continues to live in 
desperate poverty because of the introduction of central direction into 
their economies, an approach to solving the economic problem which has 
never 
yet worked in practice and whose continuation will guarantee poverty for so 
long as such attempts persist. 
 
There is, of course, much we have learned since his time that makes Mill an 
imperfect guide to the operation of the economic system, although there are 
many worse being written even now. His theory of value, to which he 
believed 
nothing need ever be added, is the most famous instance of Mill having been 
superseded by the subsequent work of a later generation of economists. 
 
Yet at the start of the new millennium, we live in the world bequeathed to 
us by Mill. The politics of On Liberty united with the basic propositions 
of 
his economics of limited government, free contract and individual 
initiative 
provide the blueprint for a future filled with hope and the promise of a 
lasting prosperity.  
 
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