Week5.1--weekly blog--LI LINLIN

1)Summary: The beginning of the article uses an interactive questioning method to introduce stories from the book "Colony" and points out the importance of economy in building a successful and prosperous community.

Economy refers to the way people use the environment to meet their material needs. As long as someone has been making and distributing goods or services, there will be some kind of economy. The ancient economy was primarily based on subsistence agriculture. In the Middle Ages, the economy was at subsistence level.

The first true economist was the Scotsman Adam Smith, who defined the elements of a national economy: Products are supplied at natural prices that exploit competition and the division of labor.

The origins of modern markets can be traced back to the Roman Empire and the Islamic Golden Age and the Muslim Agricultural Revolution, with the first market economies and the earliest forms of commercial capitalism taking shape in the 8th-12th centuries.

The economic system adopted between the 16th and 18th centuries is often described as commercialism. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the emergence of large industrial trusts triggered legislation in the United States to reduce the monopolistic tendencies of the period.

2)Interesting point: While some scholars view commercialism as the earliest stage of modern capitalism, others believe that modern capitalism did not emerge until later. For example, Karl Polanyi noted that “commercialism, with all its commercializing tendencies, has never attacked the safeguards that protect the two fundamental elements of production – labor and land – from becoming elements of commerce.”

3)Q:Are there any particularly important economic events where you live or that you have experienced?