Three thousand years of running a house
Curious where the rules came from, and why "economics" was once the word for running a house
"Economics" is a household word. It comes from the Greek for managing a house, and for two thousand years the books that carried it were about stores, servants, debts and the yearly reckoning. Then the word was taken for the science of nations and markets, and the household was left without a name for what it does.
This track is that history, told from the primary texts: a farmer's poem from 700 BC, a Socratic dialogue about a farm, a Roman audit manual, a bishop's rules for a widow, five centuries of printed household manuals, and the year a chemist tried to take the word back.
It is not antiquarian. The same three rules appear in every century. Know what you have. Write down what you spend. And never let trust stand in for a record, because the person on the other side of your money keeps better books than you do.
Every time someone says "the economy" they are using a household word. Economics comes from Greek. Oikos is a house or household. Nemein is to manage or share out.
Read →The oldest surviving money advice in Greek is a poem written about 700 BC by a farmer called Hesiod. It is addressed to his brother Perses, after the two had quarrelled over their father's land.
Read →The earliest surviving book with "economics" in its title is by Xenophon, an Athenian soldier and writer, and was probably written after 362 BC. Its title, Oikonomikos, means "the household manager". It is not a treatise.
Read →Aristotle opens his Politics with the household. The city, he says, is built from it.
Read →The oldest surviving work of Latin prose is a book on farming, written about 160 BC by Cato the Elder. Its preface sets the tone. The ancestors' laws, Cato says, had "the thief be mulcted double and the usurer fourfold".
Read →The oldest written rule against interest in the Western tradition already had an exception in it. The book of Deuteronomy forbids lending at interest "unto thy brother", and in the next verse permits it "unto a stranger".
Read →Shortly after 1240 Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln and one of the most learned men in England, wrote a set of rules in French for Margaret, Countess of Lincoln. She had just been widowed and now had to run her estates herself.
Read →"Thrift" did not start out meaning saving. Around 1300 it meant the fact of thriving: prosperity, getting on. The sense of frugality is recorded from the 1550s. The word moved from the result to the habit that produced it.
Read →The first English book with "political economy" in its title is Sir James Steuart's Inquiry of 1767. Its opening definition is not about the state.
Read →In September 1899 a small group met at a club in Lake Placid, New York, to found a subject. The organizer was Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemist, the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1870.
Read →The clearest surviving picture of how ordinary people pooled risk is carved in stone. In AD 136 a club in the Italian town of Lanuvium, dedicated to the goddess Diana and the deified youth Antinous, had its by-laws inscribed.
Read →The oldest surviving debt law is about limits. In the Babylonian code of Hammurabi, a man who could not pay might hand over his wife or child to work off the debt. Law 117 says they go free after three years.
Read →Read the household books of three thousand years in order and one rule appears in every century. It is not "spend less than you earn", though that is there too.
Read →Plenee Academy provides financial information and education, not personalized financial advice. Plenee Co. is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, or financial planner. Some of this material is written with AI assistance and may contain mistakes. Check anything you plan to act on. Legal Disclosures & Notices →